Acer Spin 5

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Hardware
PCI/USB ID
Working?
GPU
8086:5917
Yes
Wi-Fi
168c:003e
Yes
Bluetooth
04ca:3016
Yes
Audio
8086:9d71
Yes
Touchpad
PS/2
Yes
TouchScreen
04f3:2560
Yes
Camera
04f2:b5f7
Yes
Fingerprint scanner
04f3:0c03
Yes
General info about the
Acer Spin 5 SP513-52N
laptop.
Installation
To disable
Secure Boot
, set the
supervisor password
in the UEFI settings. Then you should be able to disable Secure Boot and boot Arch.
Even with Secure Boot disabled, if the
Windows Boot Manager
is not the *first* EFI entry, it then becomes impossible to access the UEFI settings and the only known method that works for regaining such access is temporarily placing the
Windows Boot Manager
as the first option again. The cause for this behavior is unknown and it is therefore strongly recommended that you select your preferred settings prior to installing Arch, especially enabling the
F12
Boot Menu in order to allow booting from external devices.
If the
F12
Boot Menu is not enabled and you need to boot from an external device, your only option will be opening the chassis and temporarily removing the SSD to prevent it from being used as the boot device. Also note that the Spin 5 comes with a battery protection measure which causes battery power to be supplied only when the case is completely closed with all screws, as explained in an
Acer community answer
. Any loose screw may prevent the computer from turning on except when the power cord is plugged in, or else cause unexpected shutdowns while on battery power, as reported in
Acer forums
.
Another quirk is that apparently the UEFI "function keys" setting will either enable special keys such as sleep and Wi-Fi as default (thus making the
Fn
prefix necessary for using
F1
through
F12
), OR it will enable the opposite behavior but completely disabling the
AltGr
key as a side effect. This is not specific to Linux and there is no known solution to this problem.
Touchscreen and active stylus
The touchscreen should work perfectly out of the box, including pinching gestures - except for applications which do not implement such support (for example,
viewnior
).
When in tablet mode, the keyboard and touchpad are disabled, but the screen does not rotate automatically. For manual or automatic screen rotation, see
Tablet PC#Rotation
and
Tablet PC#Automatic rotation
.
The Acer Spin 5 has MPP (Microsoft Pen Protocol) support. To improve the functionality of an active stylus in Arch Linux, follow the instructions on
Microsoft Surface Pro 3#Tuning the Pen
. This
post
might also have useful information on the subject.
Touchpad
The touchpad works perfectly with
libinput
. Some commonly reviewed settings are Tapping (tap-to-click) and Natural Scrolling. The default middle button emulation may also present undesired behavior due to the fact that the button pressing area is divided in three equal parts, which causes frequent accidental middle clicks: for example, when trying to select a web browser tab, if the default region for the middle button is pressed down, the tab will be closed instead of selected.
To disable middle button emulation and enable Tapping and Natural Scrolling, create/edit the following configuration file:
/etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/40-libinput.conf
Section "InputClass"
        Identifier "touchpad"
        Driver "libinput"
        MatchIsTouchpad "on"
        Option "Tapping" "on"
        Option "NaturalScrolling" "on"
        Option "ButtonMapping" "1 1 3 4 5 6 7"
EndSection
For more details refer to
libinput#Tapping button re-mapping
.
To use touch gestures such as pinching in a window manager or desktop environment that does not implement it,
fusuma
is recommended.
Temperature management
The laptop has been observed to overheat while the power cord is connected. This can be fixed by simply installing
thermald
and
starting/enabling
the respective service. For more information, see
CPU frequency scaling
.
See also
SP513-52N