Acer Travelmate 4202WLMi (Intel Core Duo, oh yes)

[jaxett]

I have this laptop..used DVD Install CD...Ethernet isnt working...fails the IOFamilyNetworking.kext on boot...Everything is great expect for known Wifi problems...What do you suggest?

[djtrix]

I have this laptop..used DVD Install CD...Ethernet isnt working...fails the IOFamilyNetworking.kext on boot...Everything is great expect for known Wifi problems...What do you suggest?

 

Very stange indeed, cause i recently purchased this laptop aswell, and the Ethernet works. Infact, the only thing i can confirm doesn't work is the wifi. And according to Egodeath the usb mass storage and pc card (pcmcia) bus doesn't work.

 

Speaking of which, does anyone know the chipset of the pcmcia/pc card that is used in this laptop? i was thinking it might be possible to work on a freebsd driver port if somone could figure out which chipset to use.

[jaxett]

Very stange indeed, cause i recently purchased this laptop aswell, and the Ethernet works. Infact, the only thing i can confirm doesn't work is the wifi. And according to Egodeath the usb mass storage and pc card (pcmcia) bus doesn't work.

 

Speaking of which, does anyone know the chipset of the pcmcia/pc card that is used in this laptop? i was thinking it might be possible to work on a freebsd driver port if somone could figure out which chipset to use.

How did you install from the 10.4.4 DVD Install....one made with the We Stole It Script.....?

[djtrix]

on the other note, i tried a usb bluetooth dongle today and it worked flawlessy (after a restart- its weird how nothing is hot-swappable anymore..)

 

Did u do anything special to get usb working? cause i got a DWL G122 usb wifi adapter, which many claim works perfectly, and i've tried pretty much everything now, but nothing works.... hoping maybe you could shed some insight on the situation!

 

Thanks

Dre

[lit]

i just bought the same D-link and downloaded the driver from Ralink.com

but it did not work too.

i tried connecting it and then turning it on and see if it would find it and nothing

yes, i have the Acer 4202

[djtrix]

{censored} buzz dood, hopefully we can get it working soon

I've also noticed that im a complete idiot, and my post earlier in this thread are WRONG

the Intel Pro Wireless 3945 ABG IS DEFINITELY a mini pci express wifi card.... see here:

http://www.3dnews.ru/documents/10659/napa1.gif

They have an image of what it looks like.... currently the only alternative card i've heard of is the atheros AR5006EX ........... BUT you can't actually buy that card anywhere, so i guess we're {censored} out of luck for now, until one pops up on ebay.

 

--Dre

[thrunner]

Speaking of which, does anyone know the chipset of the pcmcia/pc card that is used in this laptop? i was thinking it might be possible to work on a freebsd driver port if somone could figure out which chipset to use.

You can find out easily by using the Mac terminal and type 'ioreg -l'; alternatively, under Windows, run freeware Everesthome220.exe (Google will find the download) and do a system html report. You can attach it to your post.

[djtrix]

i just bought the same D-link and downloaded the driver from Ralink.com

but it did not work too.

i tried connecting it and then turning it on and see if it would find it and nothing

yes, i have the Acer 4202

Great! hope you can help us beta test some pcmcia drivers soon. Also, have you tried the 10.4.3 IOUSBFamily.Kext file? i heard that it might be the solution to our usb devices not being detected.... im gonna try later tonight and post again...

 

You can find out easily by using the Mac terminal and type 'ioreg -l'; alternatively, under Windows, run freeware Everesthome220.exe (Google will find the download) and do a system html report. You can attach it to your post.

thanks for the tips, greatly appreciated

[djtrix]

How did you install from the 10.4.4 DVD Install....one made with the We Stole It Script.....?

 

Yup, 10.4.4 + 10.4.5 patch -myzer iso..... which im starting to think isn't the best option... apparently 10.4.3 is more compatible with some hardware. Strangely enough my ethernet STOPPED working a while back. and i tried a bunch of the recomended fixes on this forum and it started working again, i forget which one fixed it tho.. I tried the tulip driver, and i tried changing the en0 to en1 in the Networkpreferances.plist. Both of these solutions are more heavily detailed elsewhere in these forums so i wont get into them...

 

Does your usb work at all??? im not having much luck with this usb wifi stick... the lights dont even come on, so im guessing my usb bus isn't even working... Bout ready to try 10.4.3...i think thats what Egodeath is running.

 

--Dre

[markchu]

Excute Me~

 

I done the way that you supported, and then I have the OutPut selection and can choose,but it still no sound, can you tell me way~, please

 

my hardware is

 

OS: Mac OSx 10.4.4

VAIO-FE15TP

CPU: Intel Centrino Core Duo 1.66 GHZ (MMX SEE123 support on CPU-Z)

Ram: 2 * 1G DDR 2 533

MotherBoard: Inter 945PM Express Chipset

Graphic: NVIDIA GEFORCE GO 7400 256M Dedicated

HD: 5400 RPM 80G SATA

[EgoDeath]

nope, im running 10.4.5, i know my usb works because my usb bluetooth dongle works fine (only sees it after a reboot though, so plug it in, and reboot and it should pop into life heh)

 

oh and i found out today this laptop DOES have 4 ram slots, only 2 are easily accesible - not sure where the other two are, but i know they are there somewhere lol, probly under the keyboard..

[djtrix]

Excute Me~

 

I done the way that you supported, and then I have the OutPut selection and can choose,but it still no sound, can you tell me way~, please

 

my hardware is

 

OS: Mac OSx 10.4.4

VAIO-FE15TP

CPU: Intel Centrino Core Duo 1.66 GHZ (MMX SEE123 support on CPU-Z)

Ram: 2 * 1G DDR 2 533

MotherBoard: Inter 945PM Express Chipset

Graphic: NVIDIA GEFORCE GO 7400 256M Dedicated

HD: 5400 RPM 80G SATA

 

Call me crazy but try this for me please....

Boot into windows, install your sound card drivers (if you haven't done so allready). reboot (dont power off though) and boot into osx. does the sound work now? That fixes it for me !!!

My theory, when windows loads the sound drivers, it activates some irq connecting to the card.. and when you reboot, the irq doesn't get reset, so this patched driver doesn't actually work properly, cause its not activating the irq when you do a fresh load of osx (Power off + Power on)

For this same reason, people often have a hard time getting linux sound drivers to work on a dual boot system, when they reboot from windows into linux, cause the irqs dont get reset.... its all very strange... but i guess you could say we are lucky and benifiting from this bug in the windows sound drivers.

 

What im thinking is maybe theres some way of porting this irq activation portion of the driver over to osx, the only problem is that the drivers are closed source, so we'de essentially have to reverse engineer it by writing a kernel call catcher and monitor what the driver does in windows... or perhaps decompile it to assembly and work through the code that way, either way, its a pretty brutal process which i dont have time for untill at least may 2nd (last school exam on may 1st)

 

 

ALSO:

Egodeath, i think the first line of code in your explaination is missing some capitols no? i guess it doesn't matter if the system is not case sensitive, but the cp -r should at least be cp -R....

-Dre

[djtrix]

nope, im running 10.4.5, i know my usb works because my usb bluetooth dongle works fine (only sees it after a reboot though, so plug it in, and reboot and it should pop into life heh)

 

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHH!!! I envy your working Universal Serial Bus!!!

I just dont understand why usb wont work for me, i tried other things like mice and such, no go. Then i took a closer look at dmesg, and i get all these hideous EHCI / USB errors on bootup... do you get those? perhaps you could attach a copy of your dmesg to your next post? prety please

[EgoDeath]

um ok, how would i go about doing that? hehe forgive a newbie

 

Edit: never mind, i figured it out hehe

 

here is what i think you want;

dmesg.rtf

[djtrix]

USBF:   11. 80  EHCI controller unable to take control from BIOS
USBF:   11. 81  AppleUSBEHCI[0x1845000]: unable to obtain ownership: 0xe00002be
USBF:   11. 83  AppleUSBEHCI[0x1845000]::UIMInitialize - Error occurred (0xe00002be)
USBF:   11. 88  AppleUSBEHCI: unable to initialize UIM

 

Heh, thats funny, you get those errors too, but you say your usb is working? so i guess im totally off track, i thought my usb not working had something to do with that AppleUSBEHCI UIM errors in USBFamily.Kext loading... le sigh.... well thanks for the dmesg post And please let me know if you ever get some working wifi on this laptop, cause i've yet to succeed.

[EgoDeath]

any idea what apple.hpet is? - never seen that before

iv heard of ipods, but hpets? c'mon hehe

[djtrix]

any idea what apple.hpet is? - never seen that before

iv heard of ipods, but hpets? c'mon hehe

 

Yeah, i looked into that one, theres not much we can do about it. HPET is special power management functionality of the duo core centrinos. Part of Maxxuss's hack was to strip HPET support out of the osx86 install dvd, so that it would work on other processors that dont have HPET. So, i think almost everyone gets that error... its kinda like a "just ignore it" error... lol. I guess technically speaking... WE could fix it, if we used a kernel that wasn't patched to not have HPET, but i tried that, and it ended up in my re-installing a fresh copy of OSX cause i would just get kernel panics on boot.

 

-Dre

[EgoDeath]

DAMN

 

Today I 'borrowed' the D-LINK usb wifi dongle (DWL-G122 Revision: B1 Firmware: v1.0) from my shop.

 

Basicly I have came to the conclusion that im not going to get wifi working in this latop,

 

Now all would be fine with this usb adapter, if I could get my osx to hotswap usb - thats it. I have read the tips and hints on unplugging/re-plugging the usb stick - but this NEEDS to be done whilst everything is up and running, the only way I can get my usb devices to be seen is by plugging them in and then rebooting - which isnt enough to spring the wifi dongle into life...

 

So, basicly I need an airport card.. Anyone have one spare?

 

BTW, thankyou Dre for clearing that up

[understated]

I'm after a laptop and my need is getting rather urgent.

 

Having researched the spec needed to get a commodity PC reasonably OSX & Vista ready, I came to the conclusion that the Acer 4202 gave most bang for ones buck.

 

So I shouldn't have been quite so surprised when so many others of you reached the same conclusion and started this thread. It's yielded plenty of rather useful insights, however, the lack of Wi-Fi support is enough to make me wait as see how the MacBooks [not Pro] are priced.

 

My question is this; has anybody got on board Wi-Fi support working on any commodity laptop?

[zakharm]

Wireless is holding me back from buying this laptop too.

 

My question is this; has anybody got on board Wi-Fi support working on any commodity laptop?

 

I've read on the forums that some of the Dell wireless cards have worked for people. I believe they are models 1370,1390 & 1450 (maybe more!) and at least one of these uses the broadcom chipset. 1450 seems to work out of the box.

http://forum.osx86project.org/index.php?sh...ell%201370&st=0

 

Can the wireless card be removed from the Acer and replaced?

 

Can anyone who owns this Acer 4202WLMi post their results on the HCL 10.4.5/ Portable wiki page?

[djtrix]

Wireless is holding me back from buying this laptop too.

I've read on the forums that some of the Dell wireless cards have worked for people. I believe they are models 1370,1390 & 1450 (maybe more!) and at least one of these uses the broadcom chipset. 1450 seems to work out of the box.

http://forum.osx86project.org/index.php?sh...ell%201370&st=0

 

Can the wireless card be removed from the Acer and replaced?

 

Can anyone who owns this Acer 4202WLMi post their results on the HCL 10.4.5/ Portable wiki page?

 

Hey man, uhhhh as far as im aware, the wifi card in this laptop (which im typing on right now) is mini pciEXPRESS not just mini pci. AND as far as im aware, there only exists 2 wifi cards that are mini pci express.

one is the Intel Pro Wireless 3945 (which is what the lappy comes with)

and the other is made by a company called pcdglobal. This card uses an atheros chipset, and its the AR5006EX. Apparently most atheros cards work in osx, so i ordered this card from pcdglobal. I'm awaiting the arrival anxiously atm!!! as soon as i get the card, i'll let you know how it goes....

 

Also, the Dlink G122 doesn't seem to work cause usb devices only load on boot with this laptop, and that device needs to be plugged in after boot to make the drivers work

 

Also, acording to Egodeath the cardbus slot doesn't work, and i belive him, cause most cardbus slots dont work in OSX, and also because i get an error on bootup.

 

So i've yet to get a working wireless solution, perhaps a usb stick that has a broadcom or atheros chipset would do the trick, or perhaps fixing my non-hotplugable usb device problem. or hopefully my new pciexpress card from pcdglobal will work!

 

Who knows, i guess its a matter of time...

[XNT]

Hops in the fun here,

 

I have a Travelmate 4101 with the same pci-express Intel Wireless Card problem, everything works just fine under 10.4.6 but no PCCARD(PMCIA) and Build in Wifi.

Maybe just like the Radeon hack worked out it might work as well for this to get it started?

 

http://forum.osx86project.org/index.php?sh...ron%206000&st=0

[understated]

...I have a Travelmate 4101 with the same pci-express Intel Wireless Card, everything works just fine under 10.4.6...

 

http://forum.osx86project.org/index.php?sh...ron%206000&st=0

 

sorry, just to clarify, do you mean the Intel PRO Wireless card works under 10.4.6? out of the box?

[osado]

sorry, just to clarify, do you mean the Intel PRO Wireless card works under 10.4.6? out of the box?

 

I guess not as XNT describes in his signature that wireless is not working. BUT his ethernet is working!!! And that sounds interesting to me! I have an Acer Aspire 5652 with the same network card (I think) so how did XNT got that working?

[djtrix]

I guess not as XNT describes in his signature that wireless is not working. BUT his ethernet is working!!! And that sounds interesting to me! I have an Acer Aspire 5652 with the same network card (I think) so how did XNT got that working?

 

Well i finally got wireless internet working with this laptop. I ended up using the Atheros AR5006EX(S). The card took a bit of work to get it going, but it works now and thats all that matters.

If you want one of these cards, they're pricy, about $70 CAD. You can read all the details about it in my thread about the AR5006EXS.

 

Alternatively you can go with the Dell Wireless 1390 card, but I cannont confirm this one will be compatible with the acer 4202. Theretically the card should work 100% and dell users have confirmed it works in these forums. This is because the dell card uses the exact same Broadcom chipset as the ones in MBP/MacMini. The one advantage of the Dell card is that its much cheaper... i think i saw it for $30 USD on dell.com....cant exactly remember.