The build your own laptop kit.

[pentium]

It finally arrived!
I got an ACER laptop with bluetooth, wi-fi, maxed ram and a bunch of goodies and no warranty (for reasons you will see below).
Now comes the fun part. Putting it all together!
Gee, I wonder where that bag of screws went? I hope they made it into the shipping box.

[i4004]

Re: The build your own laptop kit.

the cost?

[willawake]

Re: The build your own laptop kit.

looks nice, good luck with that
how come its all in bits

[Topcat]

Re: The build your own laptop kit.

looks nice, good luck with that
how come its all in bits

Probably because someone took it apart and couldnt figure out how it goes back together.... I had to change a motherboard in a Dell Inspiron 5100 I had, and that was a pain in the ass..... It took over an hour just to put it back together.

[acstech]

Re: The build your own laptop kit.

I clicked on this thread expecting to read about a C90S or something.

Looks good though, hope it includes all the little screws and stuff you'll need.

Off Topic: Hey, another National Geographic reader! I read that while eating lunch.

[pentium]

Re: The build your own laptop kit.

Well my friend had this laptop suddenly act up on him and since he didn't know how to fix it he decided to take it apart.
I don't know what he is up to but he somehow wants to hook the LCD screen and the trackpad up to a spare t-shirt and make some crazy shirt and he insists it will work when I know that it obviously won't.
So all it cost me was a spare DVD drive and a USB to IDE adapter.
Also, it turns out he left the screws at his house.

[willawake]

Re: The build your own laptop kit.

Well my friend had this laptop suddenly act up on him

symptoms?

[pentium]

Re: The build your own laptop kit.

symptoms?

His linux kernel was always panicking as soon as the system warmed up.
Something is loose.

[kc8adu]

Re: The build your own laptop kit.

His linux kernel was always panicking as soon as the system warmed up.
Something is loose.

or the heatsink is packed up with crap like a dryer's lint trap.
had 5 toshiba's i bought cheap.
all from the same family and likely the same longhaired cat clogged all of them.
the way they are built you have to tear it down completely to clean it.

[pentium]

Re: The build your own laptop kit.

The fan was fine.
I'm going to get clearance to format the hard drive and then see if a fresh install of Solaris 10 goes trouble-free. His installed XP works but as soon as you see the desktop the mouse stops working (and so does most of the keyboard) and with Linux you can only go half way through a boot before it panics (the system is pretty warm by then).

[zandrax]

Re: The build your own laptop kit.

This is an Acer Travelmate based on so-called Folio platform: it was first Acer attempt in doing less thick notebooks, it lasted form early 2005 to late 2007 until Gemstone arrived. It's worth saying most Folio-based NBs suffer from overheat; moreover your seems emploing a Sis chipset and no discrete graphic chip, so it's a budget one: just tell me its cpu is a Turion, so I can tell you it is doomed ...
Anyway, you can find its service manual somewhere with a bit of googling; if you can't find it, then look for the Aspire 5670 one: this one is [unfortunately] my portable, a "relative" of yours, and I'm quite experienced because I opened it three times following instructions in its manual.
Before reassembling it, check the termal compound between cpu and heatsink: if it's a low quality one or (worse) a pad, clean it and put some silver oxide paste; then check its ram with memtest86+. If both cpu and ram aren't defective, then chances are the board is defective or [more likely] an onboard integrate is going mad due to overheating: you can try colding a component for a few minutes unless you find the culprit. You can cold with an instant ice medical package or a reusable one (usually filled with a blue gel): put a plastic bag on the chip to avoid condensation or short circuits.

Zandrax

[pentium]

Re: The build your own laptop kit.

Too late.
I had the thing reassembled within half an hour of getting the screws.
I'm planning on loading Windows 2000 onto a 10GB partition and leave the other 30GB on the drive for Ubuntu. I tried Solaris 10 this morning and it didn't like the trackpad and I was forced to use a USB mouse.

[zandrax]

Re: The build your own laptop kit.

Too late.
I had the thing reassembled within half an hour of getting the screws.
I'm planning on loading Windows 2000 onto a 10GB partition and leave the other 30GB on the drive for Ubuntu.

Only because I didn't check this forum that day ...
Anyway, 10 GB for 2K is enough to me, 30 for Ubuntu can be splitted in 12-15 GB for / and 15-18 for /home (so if you get into some troubles when updating your distro, you won't lose your data).

I tried Solaris 10 this morning and it didn't like the trackpad and I was forced to use a USB mouse.

Strange: the touchpad should be detected as a ps2 pointing device.

Zandrax

[pentium]

Re: The build your own laptop kit.

Well the install of win2K went fine (I didn't even have a driver issue) and talk about a difference, Compared to XP there is still plenty of resources free. It is also rock solid on the system.

As for ubuntu, well... :|
So far I have not even managed to get one of the cd's to install properly yet.
My 7.10 cd panics while booting and the 6.06 and 6.10 cd's load fine but then crash during the install.
I'll keep on working at it but it was running on the thing before and I have no idea why it would not now.

[zandrax]

Re: The build your own laptop kit.

So far I have not even managed to get one of the cd's to install properly yet.
My 7.10 cd panics while booting and the 6.06 and 6.10 cd's load fine but then crash during the install.
I'll keep on working at it but it was running on the thing before and I have no idea why it would not now.

I don't know if Sis chipsets are well supported under linux: this and the graphic driver may be the greatest issues you can encounter. Try booting with noacpi and noapic flags enabled (see Boot Options page): this should workaround buggy bioses.
If Ubuntu still fails, you can look for specific info about your model / chipset or try the latest Knoppix: usually its hardware detection is better than other distros.

Zandrax

[pentium]

Re: The build your own laptop kit.

You got to the issue before me.
The ACPI is the cause of the problem (it was also causing a stop error during the install of Windows 2000).
I'll try again with noacpi

EDIT: How do you disable acpi again?

I pressed f6 at the boot screen and entered "noacpi" followed by the enter hey and I still got a kernel panic on boot.

[zandrax]

Re: The build your own laptop kit.

EDIT: How do you disable acpi again?

I pressed f6 at the boot screen and entered "noacpi" followed by the enter hey and I still got a kernel panic on boot.

I think you should pass this parameter to kernel at boot: grub should do it for you.
On ubuntu you can't logon as root (#1 reason I don't like Ubuntu and its sudo implementation), so open a console, type sudo bash, open /boot/grub/menu.list and edit the kernel parameters by uncommenting the relevant kopt= options. E.g. turn the # kopt=root=/dev/sda3 ro into kopt=root=/dev/sda3 ro noacpi. You can use any editor available: Ubuntu reccomends nano, but you can use vi as well. Then save it and run update-grub: next time you boot grub will pass all parameters to kernel.

Zandrax

[pentium]

Re: The build your own laptop kit.

Um, with the 7.10 cd I can't even go that far.
I get about halfway through booting from the cd before the kernel panics.
I gotta shut acpi up before it even starts to boot.

[zandrax]

Re: The build your own laptop kit.

Ok: press F6 and you should see a screen like this one:


Replace vga=771 with pci=noacpi and press Enter. Sorry, most distro require only noacpi while Ubuntu differs

Zandrax

[pentium]

Re: The build your own laptop kit.

Well that was a whole step back.
Not only was the boot process slower than the last time but after the system gave me a no driver error for the built in wifi the boot stopped and all I could do was switch the laptop off.

On the plus side, it didn't panic on me.