My first experiences were running it with Debian (woody and sarge) on the Travelmate 210TEV, see below. Afterwards I tried several Ubuntu Versions. If you (still) have such a notebook and want to install Linux this page might help you.
There seem to be different configurations for that notebook, mine is as follows:
Ubuntu Dapper Drake (6.06) started only after using the "irqpoll" command on the kernel-command line. Apart from ACPI and the modem (did not try anyway) everything worked fine on the 210TEV.
The following releases shipped with kernels that did not work well. The laptop took ages to start and was very slow (tried several kernel options). So I still chose the old kernel for booting. This changed in Gutsy Gibbon (7.10). Using "irqpoll" its kernel seems to work fine. Even hibernating works somtimes (maybe it would work always if my RAM would not be slightly damaged). Supending does not work, but this does not work in XP either. Although there seems to be some ACPI-implementation in the BIOS, it seems to be heavily broken. The Laptop was shipped by Acer with Windows ME and used APM....
I am used to Debian Linux Systems, so the first time I took Debian woody. One needs at least XFree 4.03 for the integrated graphics. Debian etch without major problems.
Worked fine (until it broke). I have a RTL-3139 fast ethernet, a Realtak GBit, and a Netgear WG 511T wlan-card, which worked fine. There is a built-in network port which is covered since there is probably no network-chip on the motherboard.
The Integrated Chipset Ali/Trident i1 is supported in XFree 4.03 and above. I have a flickering screen in 32 bit at 1024x786, in 16 bit it works fine. Acceleration is available from Xfree 4.2 on. Thus DVD-playback (with VLC Xine and mplayer) works but the systems still seems a little bit slow. Playback of AVIs is fine. I have small blue lines at the top and bottom of the accelerated video. Maybe a new Version of Xfree will fix this.
Bad news! Although battery and AC-power-status works, suspending and sleeping does not work. It seems that the notebook wakes up without any interrupts. This still holds true for the kernel-2.6.X-Versions and ACPI. If you found out something new, please feel free to mail me.
The build-in Ali/Trident Wave Sound Chip works fine, althougt I have found no way to enable the power-save-support which is available under Windows. However there it gives clicks when waking up and supending, thus I disabled it.
The Synaptics touchpad is PS/2 compatible. Works fine.
Although there is a driver for Lucent Winmodems availiable as source it does definitly NOT work with the built-in Lucent AMR Winmodem. I got mails that suggested a PCTel driver or a driver from smlink. Neither one worked. The latter one seems to work for Lucent AMR modems that are listed by lspci. However, my modem is not listed by lspci although it uses the same Windows driver like the one, which is found by lspci. Strange, but who needs a modem anyway these days....
This page might also help you: Linux on an acer travelmate 210 series notebook
This report is listed at TuxMobil - Linux compatibility guides for laptops, notebooks, PDAs, mobile phones and GPS devices.
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