FreeBSD on Acer Aspire 1641WLMI


This page summarizes my experiences with FreeBSD 6.0 on an Acer Aspire 1641 WLMI laptop.
This probably applies to any laptop from the Acer Aspire 1640 series (1641, 1642, 1643).

X-Window

The stock i810 driver in 6.0-RELEASE does not handle the 915GM chipset in this machine, although newer versions do. Furthermore, you need to use 915resolution to handle the 1280x800 screen size.
You can do both modifications in one step by downloading the i810_drv.so file from this page and adding Option "ForceBIOS" "1024x768=1280x800" to the Device section of the X.org config file.
Download my xorg.conf.

ACPI

I used to get these errors on the console :
ACPI-0438: *** Error: Looking up [Z00A] in namespace, AE_NOT_FOUND
ACPI-1304: *** Error: Method execution failed [\\_SB_.BAT1._BST] (Node 0xc199f640), AE_NOT_FOUND

I corrected the ACPI code as explained in this message.
You can download my fixed ACPI DSDT table from here.

Sound

The sound controller is an Intel 82801 HDA (High-Definition Audio), aka Azalia.
This chipset is finally supported by FreeBSD ! Yay ! See this post by Ariff Abdullah.

WLAN

The embedded WLAN controller is handled by the iwi driver. Just follow the instructions here.

More hardware info

Current dmesg,  output of pciconf -lv.

More information ?

I can be reached at :
 email address