Tuesday, May 17, 2011

Acer Laptop and Linux

My old Averatec laptop started producing read errors on the hard drive - not good! I didn't lose anything important thanks to backups. PATA drives seem to be pretty much unavailable these days, so I ended up getting a new Acer 5253-BZ602 laptop. The first part of the fun with any new laptop is getting Linux installed and getting the peripherals working. Had to go with the latest Debian unstable distribution in order to get a working LAN driver. Most of the pieces are working now (graphics, wireless, ethernet, camera, etc). A web page with current status and driver info is at
http://www.sensicomm.com/main/linux/acer_5253/index.shtml .

4 comments:

goldspy said...

hi, you seem to be knowledgeable so i thought maybe you might have an idea whats going on here. got a hp dm1z that also has e350 and the 6510 with the same realtek card reader:

Bus 002 Device 003: ID 0bda:0138 Realtek Semiconductor Corp.

tried your instruct's to no avail, im now building the 2.6.38 kernel, but ive been trying to get it working on the 2.6.35.28 and .29

# sudo insmod usb_storage
insmod: can't read 'usb_storage': No such file or directory

modprobe completes with no errors, so it has me a bit stumped, dmesg after rmmod shows its been unloaded, did you ever have luck getting it going under .38?

Joe Rothweiler said...

Goldspy:
That was a mistake in my writeup, which I just corrected on the web page.
What I actually did was
"modprobe usb_storage"
after inserting the memory card.
It can be done with insmod, but the loadable module has to be specified explicitly. On my system it's:
insmod /lib/modules/2.6.38-2-amd64/kernel/drivers/usb/storage/usb-storage.ko

Thanks for posting.
Joe R.

goldspy said...

Hey,
Thanks for the quick response. Just wanted to let you know it worked, and I posted a link to you on the Mint forums: http://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?f=49&t=73844&p=430266#p430266

glad to have found you :D

Joe Rothweiler said...

Glad it worked. FYI I just updated the page: It may not be necessary to unload and reload the usb_storage driver. Just forcing a reread of the partition table (using "hdparm -z /dev/sdb") may be enough to make an SD/MMC card readable.