Installing Slackware 64 Linux 13.37 on Acer Aspire A4551-4315

Last updated: 20 Oct 2011
NOTE: Page No Longer Maintained, Gave Laptop Away

For OpenSuSE on this laptop, click here.
General Hardware Specifications of Acer Aspire A4551-4315:

Hardware Components	Status under Linux	Notes
AMD Turion II X2 P520 (2.3GHz, 2MB L2 cache)	Works
14.0" HD Acer CineCrystal LED LCD	Works (resolution 1366x768)
ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4250	Works	Proprietary ATI drivers work good; see below
3 GB Memory	Works
Western Digital 750 GB HDD	Works	(Upgraded from stock 320GB)
Multi Card Reader (SD/MMC)	Works
DVD Super Multi DL Drive	Works	Have not tested Dual Layer yet.
Internal Acer Nplify 802.1b/g/n	Works
1.3 MP Webcam	Works
USB ports (3)	Works
6 cell Lithium Ion Battery	Works	Gives longer life with proprietary ATI drivers
HDA ATI Sound Board w/ HDMI and Realtek ALC272	Works
Silken touchpad mouse	Works	Scroll region doesn't totally work but I don't use it

This laptop is operating under Kernel version 2.6.39.4.

Basic Installation of Slackware / Slackware64 Linux 13.37:

I use Slackware Linux because it makes no promises yet lives up to all of my expectations and needs. I tried Mandriva 2010.1 Spring on this machine and faced the same problems with the screen power settings, so it's not like some other "easier to use" distribution is going to fix all of my problems, or yours. Slackware Linux is ultra-stable, very customizeable, works, and it's also what I feel most comfortable using.
Installing Slackware Linux was relatively easy. On this computer you will have to resize a Windows partition (the user data one, not the backup ones) to have room for Slackware Linux. After that, just add partitions and install. See the Slackware Handbook page for installation help. I encrypt my swap partition and /home partition using (partially) the instructions contained in README_CRYPT.TXT found on the install media. More details below.
See here for configuration I do that is not related specifically to this laptop, and here for security-related tweaks.

Setting up additional features for Slackware Linux 13.37:

Note that this laptop does not have PCMCIA, Firewire, ISA bus, parallel or serial ports. I would recommend that if you compile a kernel you leave these out. Having them enabled does not cause issues, but leaving them out it can save you some kernel image size and possibly some future unknown security vulnerability (very rare but might happen). For the most part I stick with the kernel family tree that comes with whatever version of Slackware that I'm using (in this case 2.6.37.x). I have included a kernel config that works well with this laptop with Slackware 13.37 (see below) but I start off with the generic-smp kernel config as my guide.
This laptop's internal hard drive's defaults to Advanced Power Management (APM) at 128. I prefer either max power savings or max performance depending on if the laptop is plugged in or not, so I add this to /etc/rc.d/rc.local. (Note: you can also install laptop-mode-tools and it can do a lot of this automatically.)

if on_ac_power; then

# We're plugged in so why spin down?

   /sbin/hdparm -B 254 /dev/sda &

      else

# We're not plugged in so spin down
      asap!

   /sbin/hdparm -B 1 /dev/sda 

      fi

I encrypt /home and swap only so that I can hibernate, but I don't encrypt the entire system (should help save some battery life). So I put swap and /home in the same LVM inside the same LUKS container and use an initrd. The command sequence below is an example of how I do this. I make an initrd with the -h /dev/cryptvg/swap option, which tells it where my hibernate partition is.

cryptsetup -y luksFormat /dev/sda6 slackluks

      cryptsetup luksOpen /dev/sda6 slackluks

      pvcreate /dev/mapper/slackluks

      vgcreate cryptvg /dev/mapper/slackluks

      lvcreate -L 4G -n swap cryptvg

      lvcreate -l 100%FREE -n home cryptvg

      vgscan --mknodes

      vgchange -ay

      mkswap /dev/cryptvg/swap

      #mkinitrd -c -k 2.6.37.4-smp -f ext4 -h /dev/cryptvg/swap -m ext4
      -o /boot/initrd.gz -r /dev/sda5 -C /dev/sda6 -L

I install additional software using the repositories of Robby Workman and Eric Hameleers but I also have my own repository thanks to SlackBuild.org.
Suspend and hibernate work in Slackware 13.37 (they didn't work with 13.1 and previous). I've found that the wireless is off when I resume from suspend or hibernate. I just press Fn+F3 (the wireless icon on the keyboard) and it comes right back up. NOTE: if you update the kernel to 2.6.39.4, wireless will automatically be reinitialized, so this won't be necessary.
The free / open source ATI drivers for Xorg and in the Linux kernel work fine in my experience. I decided to try the ATI proprietary drivers and found that they work good, and that battery life is better using them. What I do is build my custom kernel (see config file below) and after rebooting into that kernel, I go compile the drivers. The installer does all the configuration. I then rebuild my initrd (I noticed that not doing so before rebooting makes the kernel unhappy for some reason), re-run LILO, reboot, and it works. My custom kernel config does not include ATI framebuffer support (I think it conflicts with the ATI proprietary drivers).

Unresolved issues

The scroll region marked on the touchpad doesn't totally work, but I haven't bothered trying to configure it yet, so I don't know yet.
This laptop has a buggy BIOS. It seems that this is related to the ATI graphics card. Let me offer a few suggestions that have helped me (so far) improve the stability of this laptop. First: use the stock ATI drivers (not the ATI proprietary drivers). Second, you need to disable KMS switching by adding "radeon.dynpm=1" to your LILO append statement. Third, you need to tell the stock kernel DRI module that you don't want it linking up to the i2c (SMB) bus because of a conflict with the memory locations it tries to use (it conflicts with your SATA controller). You need to add i2c_piix4 to your /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf and put "options radeon hw_i2c=0" so that it knows not to try to use this feature. These options have given me (as of writing this) two days worth of stability on this laptop, and once I am confident that this is a known fix, I will move this from the "unresolved issues" to the "setting up additional features" section. Also, a lot of this seems to be a hardware issue due to my laptop, not due to this model so much. You may want to try going to/from a virtual terminal if the screen grays out (control+alt+F3, then control+alt+F7). Kernel 2.6.39.4 seems to have fewer issues in general.
In Slackware 13.37 pressing both left and right mouse buttons at the same time does not result in a "middle click" command like in Slackware 13.1. I don't know why. I will do some research on this later.

Configuration Files:

Kernel 2.6.39.4config.

Performance:

Resume from Hibernate: 48 seconds.
Cold boot: 63 seconds (stock)
Cold boot (init 4): 48 seconds (changing all sleep commands in /etc/rc.d/* to "sleep 1")
I/O Performance:

Internal Western Digital 5400rpm 750GB Hard Drive: 86.99 MB/sec buffered read.
Seagate Barracuda 80GB 7200 rpm desktop hard drive, USB-SATA adapter: 30.61 MB/sec buffered read.
USB Iomega eGo 500GB External Hard Drive: 23.17 MB/sec buffered read.
4GB USB stick: 22.19 MB/sec buffered read.

4GB SD card, internal SD card reader: 12.50 MB/sec.
Internal CD drive: 3.30 MB/sec (note: this is per hdparm -T. In real life I have seen copy speeds from 5.0 to 7.6 MB/sec, and this is probably due to differences in rotational speeds at the point on the optical media the drive is reading the information).

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