Linux On An Acer 3000 Portable

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Hi,

I have an older Acer 3000 portable (specs AMD 3000/1.8GHz, 1Gb RAM, 100Gb HD, 17″ W/Screen) and following an XP installation which went wrong (OK, it worked OK but then got a problem later resulting in [Ctrl/Alt/Del] lockups … if I ever have a serious problem with a PC, it’s an AMD … don’t ask me why) I decided to install Linux on it and access any XP specific stuff via RDP/virtualisation.

So anyway I tried an OpenSUSE off a Linux Format magazine (I think it may have been r10.x as I believe r11.x KDE has KickStart and this one didn’t) and the latest incarnations of PCLinuxOS, Fedora, Kubuntu & Mint and, with the exception of Mint which wouldn’t install at all, none were able to pick up an IP via DHCP (from a Windows 2008 server) and none of them recognised the wireless NIC at all.

Not being at all familiar with Linux networking (I can type ifconfig but not much more) I wonder if I’m fighting a losing battle here.

Any ideas?

Kyu

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What is the specific chipset for your WiFi interface? There are various chipsets out there, and unfortunately, some do not work easily (if at all) in the Linux world.

For the distributions that you did get to run, do they connect via ethernet cabling?

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For the distributions that you did get to run, do they connect via ethernet cabling?

Eventually I did (all that installed OK) … turns out it was my 2008 server that was at fault. For some reason (and still not sure why) the DHCP simply stopped serving IP addresses & configuration. I tried everything I could to resolve this and failed … my ultimate solution was to create a virtual 2003 server and THAT now handles DHCP and works a treat.

Thanks for the reply

Kyu

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I also have an Acer 3000 Series laptop, and Linux Mint 7 recognized my BroadCom 4.3 Internal WiFi without a hitch.

But, when I removed Mint 7, and installed Mint 8, I had the same problem as you did. So, I used Mint 8’s built-in NdisWrapper and found the XP driver on my XP partition for BroadCom and Mint 8 is now “humming”. Now, if I could only remember the exact method I used!

TIP: Try Mint 7 FIRST, it is the easiest way.

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For Linux Mint and Ubuntu instead of trying to mess around with NdisWrapper you can install the BCM43xx which is the Broad Com WIFI driver. You will need to have your Ethernet cable plugged in first since it pulls it from the internet. Here is the Wiki from Ubuntu to setup your Broad Com WIFI driver this will also work in Mint too. Click Here

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