I will list the important things first and explain them later. It will save you the time of reading the whole article if you need only a small amount of information.

-Install with the system rescue cd, make sure to boot rescue64 (especially if you’re chrooting into a partly installed os).
-Disable the RF subsystem in the kernel.
-The wired network needs the Atheros L1E Gigabit Ethernet driver (module: atl1e).
-The wireless network needs the Intel Wirelss Wifi 5000AGN driver.
-Use k8 as “-march” value for installation.
-Install the iwlwifi-5000 package & ucode firmware.
-Use wpa_supplicant for wireless.
-Use wicd as network manager, it’s the only network manager that made the wireless work without too much effort.
-X works perfectly after X -configure.

I recently received my Aspire 6935. As with all my machines I put gentoo on it at least once. I came across a few issues already. Issue number one is the keyboard. It has a bit of a cheap feel and I have one key that sticks down regularly. Unfortunately, it’s the TAB key. Secondly, I would have liked a num pad in stead of the touch movie controls. A third issue is the mouse buttons of the touchpad, they don’t behave in a consistent way. I mean that sometimes you think you’re clicking when in fact, you’re not pressing hard enough and other times a light touch on the button does click.

Then again, you can’t argue with the great value. I had a few things in mind while I was choosing a laptop and the 6935 was the only one that had all the features I wanted. For the record, I wanted E-SATA (I tend to connect a lot of external disks), a graphics card with dedicated memory and enough power, a Core 2 Duo of at least 2 ghz and a 7200 rpm hard drive. The Blue Ray drive, HDMI out and DVB-T were nice extra’s.

Now to get it all to work.

aspire-6935 linux # lspci
00:00.0 Host bridge: Intel Corporation Device 2a40 (rev 07)
00:01.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation Device 2a41 (rev 07)
00:1a.0 USB Controller: Intel Corporation USB UHCI Controller #4 (rev 03)
00:1a.1 USB Controller: Intel Corporation USB UHCI Controller #5 (rev 03)
00:1a.7 USB Controller: Intel Corporation USB2 EHCI Controller #2 (rev 03)
00:1b.0 Audio device: Intel Corporation HD Audio Controller (rev 03)
00:1c.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation PCI Express Port 1 (rev 03)
00:1c.1 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation PCI Express Port 2 (rev 03)
00:1c.3 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation PCI Express Port 4 (rev 03)
00:1c.4 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation PCI Express Port 5 (rev 03)
00:1d.0 USB Controller: Intel Corporation USB UHCI Controller #1 (rev 03)
00:1d.1 USB Controller: Intel Corporation USB UHCI Controller #2 (rev 03)
00:1d.2 USB Controller: Intel Corporation USB UHCI Controller #3 (rev 03)
00:1d.3 USB Controller: Intel Corporation USB UHCI Controller #6 (rev 03)
00:1d.7 USB Controller: Intel Corporation USB2 EHCI Controller #1 (rev 03)
00:1e.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801 Mobile PCI Bridge (rev 93)
00:1f.0 ISA bridge: Intel Corporation Device 2919 (rev 03)
00:1f.2 SATA controller: Intel Corporation Mobile SATA AHCI Controller (rev 03)
00:1f.3 SMBus: Intel Corporation SMBus Controller (rev 03)
00:1f.6 Signal processing controller: Intel Corporation Thermal Subsystem (rev 03)
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: nVidia Corporation Device 0649 (rev a1)
02:00.0 Ethernet controller: Attansic Technology Corp. Device 1026 (rev b0)
05:00.0 Network controller: Intel Corporation Device 4232

I had a 2008.0 amd64 install cd lying around so I immediately started installing. To my surprise, the wired network card didn’t work. I started the install without a working network connection. Manually downloading packages and copying them to the new laptop wasn’t an workable option so I needed to fix the networking. A quick search on the gentoo forums lead me to the system rescue cd. After booting “rescue64″ (boot the 32-bit version and your chroot won’t work!) and copying the resolv.conf file, I was back on track. The driver you need is in recent kernels, it’s the Atheros L1E Gigabit Ethernet (module: atl1e). Building a few packages made me realise my CFLAGS caused issues. I switched to k8 for the install and will look at it later.

I noticed the keyboard did some strange things in the console. It was adding characters that weren’t defined. This caused “?” characters in several config files & commands, obviously leading to issues. Once I got X running, I changed to the “Acer portable” keyboard variant and this strange phenomenon was gone. I might look at it sometime when I’m bored.

A bit of troubleshooting on the wireless network issues I encountered made me disable the RF subsystem in the kernel (thanks ArchLinux forums) and install the needed firmware. After this was done, I could finally scan for networks. Connecting to the various networks I use (home, work, friends & others) just isn’t convenient with command line commands. For example: you would need to know the exact encryption used for every AP. It’s not that hard to find that out (an iwlist scan will do the trick) but clicking a “connect” button is a whole lot easier. After a few options that didn’t work out (networkmanager & wifi-radar) I found out about wicd. This little gem saved my day.

To do/test:

-Audio: Intel HDA, ALC889 codec. Doesn’t work at the moment. Card is recognised when the driver is built-in in the kernel (2.6.27-gentoo-r7) but it’s not recognised if I try it as a module. Might be solved when I try this.
-Video: getting an error message on mkv’s, mplayer needs to be compiled with libdca support. Need to check that out.
-Keyboard: € and $ sign don’t work. (2 extra keys)
-Movie Touchpad: might as well use it…
-HDMI out
-TV in
-Blue Ray
-E-Sata
-Bluetooth