I got a few new toys delivered to me last week. On Thursday I got a Fuji F10 6.3 MP digital camera which is a really great camera - take a look here for more details. It was recognised as a USB mass storage device without any trouble in Gentoo and I have been doing everyone’s head in taking pictures of everything. It is a replacement for my old Sony Cybershot which met its ultimate end on the last night of my stag week in Tenerife… I got a 1 GB xD memory card and a spare battery for it too! The biggest new toy arrived on Friday though, which is my new Acer Ferrari 4005WLMi laptop, specs are here. This is a great laptop, and I read loads of reviews before purchasing it. As soon as I got it on Friday morning I repartitiioned and starting installing Gentoo on it of course The initial install went fairly well, and I got it to boot without too many problems. Unfortunately it comes with a broken ACPI DSDT so the battery readout was broken - I wish manufacturers would try getting stuff like this right. Fortunately those before me had already fixed this. I am afraid that laptops don’t seem to have gotten much easier to get working… I installed straight from 2005.1 amd64 stages, and built a multilib system. During my research I found a few useful pages scattered across the web with installation details. An Acer 5021NWLCi installation of Gentoo, as well as a user on the Gentoo wiki who installed it on the same model I have here which has been useful in providing quite a few pointers and fixes. I installed using gentoo-sources-2.6.13 and upgraded to -r1 over the weekend. I had to apply one patch to the kernel - to load the updated DSDT file from an initrd during boot. I am using ndiswrapper to use my broadcom wireless network card, and I have finally managed to get WEP encryption working. I got the Windows XP 64 bit driver from <ahref=“ftp://ftp.support.acer-euro.com/notebook/ferrari_4000/driver/winxp64bit">Acer FTP. Unfortunately I have not been able to get wpa_supplicant working so far - any tips greatfully received I also got a new Linksys WRT54GC wireless router to power my new wireless network too. The integrated memory card reader doesn’t work, and it doesn’t look like there is much chance of getting it working which is a shame as that functionality would be nice to have. I am getting APIC errors on the CPU which is a little worrying too, but doesn’t seem to be causing issues. The touchpad is working great, but I still can’t get the bluetooth mouse working reliably either - I think I am missing something here but I need to get back to some real work! Productivity has been terrible on my PhD work, Gentoo and consultancy stuff whilst getting this laptop working! Hopefully now I will get back to being even more productive.
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