Problems with a Acer Aspire

[Conrad J. Sabatier]

On Tue, 21 Dec 2004 09:06:24 +0100, Sergio Mangialardi
<sergio at softshark.org> wrote:

> I've recently acquired a new laptop (Acer Aspire 1524) with Athlon 64
> cpu in it, so I try to install FreeBSD for AMD64 (the 5.3 version) on
> it.
> The booting process stops when the screen for boot options, i.e. Boot
> FreeBSD, Boot FreeBSD with ACPI disabled, etc... appears. 
> Whatever boot option I choose the system freezes immediately (only a
> slash in bottom left corner appears and nothing else) and I have to
> reboot it.
> Any idea?
> 
> TIA
> 
> Sergio.
> 
> P.S.
> I've read some threads about a similar problem, and even if my problem
> is different, I've tried to apply a patch found in them, but nothing
> changes.

Try choosing option 6 at the beastie menu, and then do:

set hw.apic.mixed_mode=1
boot

I believe the GENERIC kernel is built with mixed mode off by default,
which does cause problems on some systems (including my own).  I
suggested a while back that it would be safer to build GENERIC without
the NO_MIXED_MODE option, but nothing ever came of it.

Let us know if this helps or not.

-- 
Conrad J. Sabatier <conrads at cox.net> -- "In Unix veritas"