Unfortunately I have not the time anymore to actively support this driver, I even don't own an Acer laptop anymore. If anyone is interested to take over the job of maintaining this driver, please contact me.
You can still mail me, I will try to help you, but it will take some time and I am not always able to give help.
I bought myself an Acer Travelmate 613 TXV notebook and installed Linux without any major troubles. Then I tried to make use of those special keys (P1, Mail, ...) and found, that they are not real keys but handled differently.
So I looked at windows and what it does to make use of those keys. This is the result of my "research":
rpm -ivh kwizart-release*.rpm
yum --enablerepo=kwizart install kmod-acerhk
This driver supports the following notebooks (some models are only partially supported):
| Acer Travelmate |
Acer Aspire |
Other |
|---|---|---|
|
C100 C110 C300 200 210 220/260 230/280 240 250 260 290 350 360 370 380 420 430 520 530 540 610 620 630 650 660 800 2410 3200 2300/4000/4500 2350/4050 4100/4600 4150/4650 (force_series needed) 8000 |
1300 1310 1350 1360 1400 1410 1450 1500 1600 1680 1690 1700 1800 2000 2010 2020 3020 5020 5610 (force_series=2020) 9500 |
Acer Extensa 3000 Acer Extensa 4100 (force_series=4100) Acer Ferrari 3000 (which is an Aspire 1450 in fact) AOpen Fujitsu Siemens Amilo D Fujitsu Siemens Amilo M (7400) Fujitsu Siemens Amilo 7820 Fujitsu Siemens Amilo Pro (V2000) Medion MD 2900 (no autodetection, use force_series=2900) Medion MD 9783 Medion MD 40100 - more info Medion MD 41300 Medion MD 42200 Medion MD 49400 Medion MD 95400 Medion MD 96500 Medion MD 97000 Compal CL 56 (or similar) Prestigio Nobile 151 Prestigio Nobile 156 Prestigio Nobile 157 |
The newer Travelmate series (starting with 290, 530, 650, 800) aren't supported very well, since Acer uses different hardware. It is the same as found in some HP Omnibook notebooks, look at the related project omke. You can find a script there with which you can test if you get the special keys enabled. Enabling the extra buttons should work with acerhk for all models, but on some I do not know how to activate wireless hardware.
Since I don't have the required hardware to test my driver on, support for the newer series will advance very slowly - if at all.
If somebody could tell me how to access the keyboard controller more safely without copying all of i8042.c from the kernel sources (2.6), I will be thankful.
A complete port of the driver to 64 bit is quite unlikely. Some people started porting it to 64 bit, but so far I do not know of a success.
If you have a model of a notebook series where all of acerhk's functionality is provided by the embedded controller (acerhk type dritek, no calling of bios routines), then you are lucky. You won't even need acerhk, just use the EC registers the way acerhk does it.
If you have a model of non-dritek or mixed type (acerhk needs to call bios routines for the desired functionality), then you have a problem. Porting the bios call routines of acerhk to 64 bit is not difficult and was already done by Benjamin Larsson: "... I fixed the assembler so it compiled but the kernel crashed coz the bios code isn't 64bit safe ...". If anyone knows how to solve this problem, please contact me. One could start to analyze and rewrite the bios routines, but that would perhaps be model specific and need to be done for every supported series, not really an option I think.