Installing Redhat Linux 9.0 on an Acer TravelMate 800LCi
This article describes setting up an Acer TravelMate 800LCi to dualboot RedHat 9.0 and Windows XP.
[ This article describes my own experience, your experience may differ and I cannot be held liable for any problems encountered due to following these instructions. Use at your own risk!]

I bought the Travelmate with no consideration to its compatibility to Linux (it was an afterthought). An initial search of the net showed Centrino was not supported! More searching showed it was. Not being a Linux heavy user, I dreaded the install (installing RH6.0 on my previous laptop, a Sony VAIO, ended up taking 2 days). This time it went smoothly and took only 4 hours!

Prepare.
In windows record all your system info; network adapter, mouse, keyboard, sound card, VIDEO card, partition tables, etc.

Start -> System Information

I tried to print but it didn't come out right so ended up cutting and pasting the info to Wordpad.

If you have installed software or made other modifications to Windows, you should probably do a backup.

Prepare to boot from CD:

Start -> notebook manager -> Boot options

Set the CD-ROM first in boot sequence. I had the Redhat boxed set. If you downloaded RH, you can burn an install CD. There is no floppy drive so you do need to be able to boot from the CDROM.

Partitions.
It turns out the TravelMate has an unused 10 GB partition just the right size for installing Linux. It is Acerdata (D:) . This is good news as it means you wont have to reinstall Windows. If you have been using Windows for a while and now have data there ... even better! If you want your linux partition bigger than 10GB, you'll need to cut into the main Windows partition.

Install.
Go through the documentation disk to get familiar with the install process.

Insert the RH install disk and reboot. The installation program should start. It is standard stuff until you get to partitions. Choose Manual Partition.

You should see a setup like this:

Select /dev/hda2 which is the acerdata partition and delete it so it can be repartitioned for Linux. It should now show as "free space". Select it and choose"New" to make a new partition as described in the RH documentation on using Disk Druid. I made the three minimum partitions needed; / (8503MB), /boot (100MB), and /swap (1400MB). I made /boot a primary partition but this is probably not necessary. The swap partition could probably have been smaller. When finished the partition table looked like this:

I couldn't get The last 8 MB of free space to add to the root (/) so just left it free. Dont know what the /dev/hda3 does or why it is there but left it alone on the assumption it does something.

There are all kinds of warnings that /boot needs to be in the first 1024 cylinders as some BIOS can't go past that but it is no problem on the TravelMate.

For boot loader I left the default of GRUB installed in the MBR. I did not "force LBA32". For the rest of the install, RH was able to identify the hardware. For display I chose "generic laptop display panel 1400x1050". I was not able to find any info on the scan rates so despite warnings that improper values could fry your display, I left the Horizontal and Vertical sync as the default (H 31.5-90, V 59-75).

For software installation I chose "Workstation" configuration with custom selection of packages (good thing I did as Apache is not installed by default.)

Now the big test .... REBOOT

Yes, Windows boots and the sleep mode still works. Reboot again, selecting Linux, and success! comes up perfectly, even X86 which gave me such a headache last time. Other items (still being updated):