Acer Aspire 8943G

Introduction
This article is about making Acer Aspire 8943G work on Gentoo, based on my experience with ACER Aspire 8943G-728G1.28TWn. It will be work in progress, I will update it when I find some time to do it.

Product Page
General technical information you can see at Product page at Acer website.

CPU
cat /proc/cpuinfo

PCI
lspci -nn

USB
lsusb

Video Card
The card is ATI Mobility Radeon HD 5850:

lspci -s 01:00.0 -v

Choose a graphics driver from those available for your card and follow the linked guide.

Ethernet Network Card
The card uses atl1c driver:

lspci -s 02:00.0 -v

Wireless Network Card
The card uses ath9k driver:

lspci -s 09:00.0 -v

Synaptics Touchpad
Touchpad works fine with latest kernel (I am using at this moment). With older versions you might get issue that your touchpad is not detected correctly. In such a case, update to newer kernel. The media functionality of the touchpad is not supported.

dmesg

Here is example how you can set up your touchpad if you are using Xorg server 1.8+ (which uses udev to configure devices):

Audio Devices
Both audio devices use snd-hda-intel driver. You have two options here. You can either use in-kernel driver (in case you use latest kernel) or you can use latest driver from git repository (in case you use older kernel or have some issues with the in-kernel driver).

aplay -l

lspci -s 00:1b.0 -v

lspci -s 01:00.1 -v

Using Kernel Driver
You have to configure the driver in kernel:

Using Latest Alsa Driver
First, edit following file:

Then emerge. Make sure you have sound support in kernel enabled but ALSA support disabled before emerging the driver.

Web Camera
The web camera works with USB Video Class (UVC) driver. You can see how to configure the driver at Webcam Wiki page. There are also more details on how to use your webcam.

Memory Card Reader
Memory card reader uses kernel SDHCI support. More information about cofiguration can be found at Gentoo Forum in O2 micro card reader thread. On Ubuntu and other distributions you may proceed according to this guide (add "options sdhci debug_quirks=0x40" into /etc/modprobe.d/sdcardread.conf) - remember, you have to run "sudo update-initramfs -u -k all" in order to make the changes take effect after every boot.

Unsupported/Not Working/Not Tested Devices
Here is list of devices that are either not supported or do not work or were not tested by me. If you know have experience with these devices and was able to make them work, feel free to extend this page with your information.


 * Touchpad: the media functionality of the touchpad is not supported
 * HDMI video works fine, but I was not able to make HDMI audio work
 * FireWire (IEEE 1394): I did not test this one, but I suppose it should work
 * Lite-On Technology Corp.: I was not able to make this work
 * LighTuning Technology Inc.: as far as I know, this is not supported