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This is a wiki dedicated to getting Debian to work optimally on the Acer Aspire One |
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The DebianEeePC project also has documentation describing the installation of Debian on an Atom processor, the page you are reading however is devoted solely to the Acer Aspire One. You can boot and install using the debian-installer from Lenny (Debian stable, version 5.0) and the snapshot images without needing anything from the DebianEeePC project.
Contents
Note that there are several versions of the Acer Aspire One:
- the original 9 inch screen models (numbered A110, A150) are well supported;
- the second generation 10 inch screen models (A250) include unsupported wired Ethernet adapters (is this still true, or which is not natively supported) — you will need to install using the wireless card, and if needed, compile the wired network module later on;
- the 11 inch screen models (AO751h) are partially supported in lenny: the wired driver works and can be used for the installation; although the installation will give you a working laptop, however many changes will be needed to get all hardware working (including the maximum 1366 x 768 resolution which is not supported by the lenny x.org). (it is likely this will improve in later Debian releases)
About this page
This page is designed to help with installation of Debian GNU/Linux on the Acer Aspire One Netbook. There is additional information on installation of necessary drivers and other optimizations.
Prerequisites
There are many ways to install Debian. One way to install Debian on the Acer Aspire One is to use a flash USB drive. This might be your first choice since the Acer One does not ship with a CD-ROM drive. You will need a flash USB drive that is 256MB or larger. The below method outlines how to modify a flash drive putting the Debian installer on it. For other methods of installation please refer to the section Alternative Installation Methods or see the install guide.
Preparing the USB flash drive
Get the latest daily build of Lenny (stable) image: drive image and the latest netinst ISO image. It is critical that the kernel version in the boot.img.gz image and the net-install ISO are the same! If they are not identical, the installer will not be able to detect your hardware and the installation will fail.
Creating a USB flash boot drive
As the Installation Manual states: "The easiest way to prepare your USB memory stick is to download hd-media/boot.img.gz, and use "gunzip" to extract the 256 MiB image from that file."
This method temporarily limits your memory stick to 256 MiB and destroys all data on it, but is simple to get working. You can chose to re-partition your memory stick once you are done installing Debian with it. To keep the memory stick, (hereafter called a flash drive) in its current size and still have the installer on it, follow the Formatting your drive with additional software for booting directions below.
Before you put the boot image (boot.img) and the netinstall image on your flash drive, make sure you have a recent backup of your data, both on your flash drive and on your Acer One. First find the device node of your flash drive on the command line. Note that using the wrong node will destroy data on that node (note also that using the correct node will destroy anything on the flash drive as well). Assuming your flash drive is /dev/sdz, execute this command as root (or, if possible, a user with write access to /dev/sdz):
# zcat /path/to/boot.img.gz > /dev/sdz
Afterwards, mount the flash drive and copy over the net-install ISO file.
# mount /dev/sdz /mnt # certain desktops such as gnome will do this stage for you # cp /path/to/netinst.iso /mnt # umount /mnt
Now go to the Install section.
If you are preparing the drive from a very old debian system, the following notes may be of interest Note: I tried doing this on Debian 4.0 (Etch), and it refused to mount the flash drive after having zcat'ed boot.img.gz to it. However, no problems mounting it on a Lenny system. My advice, should encounter the same problem with your flash drive, is to try copying the netinst ISO file from Lenny or another system. --?OddHenriksen
Note2: With Debian Etch i've been doing this this => http://manurevah.com/blah/en/linux/debian-usb-boot.php
Note3: To install Debian Squeeze, I had to follow these instructions: http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=604560#19 Worked for me, but as the description is a bit dense, here's what I did in more detail. With fdisk, created one partition taking up all the space and that is bootable ("a" in fdisk). Finally, to save yourself from trouble, take a USB key with a sector size of 512 bytes. Couldn't get syslinux to boot on one that had a size of 2048 bytes.# cat /usr/lib/syslinux/mbr.bin > /dev/sdz
# zcat /home/vh/tmp/boot.img.gz > /dev/sdz1
# mkdir /tmp/usb
# mount /dev/sdz1 /tmp/usb
# cp debian-6.0.0-i386-netinst.iso /tmp/usb/
# umount /tmp/usb
Formatting your drive with additional software for booting
This section is for more advanced users, anyone who followed the instructions in the immediately preceding section can ignore all of this.
If you want to fully utilize your flash drive with the Debian net-installer, you can loop mount the boot.img.gz first, copy over the files, and then run SYSLINUX (a bootloader) on your flash drive. If your USB flash drive is already partitioned properly for booting, you can skip this next step.
You can format your flash drive to make it bootable (USB-ZIP compatible). This requires the mkdiskimage script included in the syslinux package. The following table shows commands to create the correctly sized partitions for booting from your USB flash drive, found at this forum post.
Size of drive |
mkdiskimage command |
1GB or less |
# mkdiskimage -4 /dev/sdz 0 64 32 |
1GB < drive <= 2GB |
# mkdiskimage -4 /dev/sdz 0 128 32 |
2GB < drive <= 8GB |
# mkdiskimage -F -4 /dev/sdz 0 255 63 |
greater than 8GB |
# mkdiskimage -F -4 /dev/sdz 1 255 63 |
Next copy over the contents of the boot.img.gz into a directory on your newly formatted USB flash drive;
# gunzip boot.img.gz; mkdir /mnt/loopback; mount -o loop boot.img /mnt/loopback; # mkdir /mnt/usb; mount /dev/sdz4 /mnt/usb; mkdir /mnt/usb/debian_installer; # cp -r /mnt/loopback/* /mnt/usb/debian_installer # cp debian-XXX-netinstall.iso /mnt/usb # umount /mnt/usb; umount /mnt/loopback
Install SYSLINUX on the partition and subdirectory that contain the contents of boot.img:
# syslinux -d debian_installer /dev/sdz4
If you rename/move/modify this debian_installer directory you will need to run "syslinux" again afterwards or it will not boot.
Note: I tried doing this from Debian 4.0 (Etch). The syslinux package in Etch is rather outdated and doesn't support the -d parameter, and consequently the above instructions didn't work. Therefore, make sure you run an up-to-date version of syslinux. --?OddHenriksen
Install
To get the Aspire One to boot from a USB stick you must enable USB booting from the BIOS. To do this, press F2 as the laptop boots and ensure booting from a USB is enabled in the BIOS, and that the F12 boot menu is also enabled. (nb: with the later laptops you get a very short time to press F2, so be quick!)
Reboot your Aspire One with the USB stick in one of its USB sockets. When you see the BIOS screen, hit F12 to bring up a menu and select the USB stick as the boot device (again you must be quick to press F12 or the laptop will continue booting).
This will cause the Aspire One to boot the Debian installer from the USB stick. Now follow the instructions in the installer.
Troubleshooting
Problems booting the installer
- If nothing happens when you press F12 it may be that the boot menu is disabled in the BIOS (see above).
- If there is no entry for the USB disk, turn off the laptop, plug in the USB disk and try again.
If you get a message such as no operating system then your USB disk likely has a problem with its MBR - see the install guide for help fixing this.
Problems with the installer itself
In theory the installation of Debian lenny or later should proceed without issue. In practice you might find a problem such as:
- Depending on the model number of your laptop, either the wired or wireless networking may be unsupported. (On recent models, wired networking should work without issue)
- SD cards may not be detected - this is likely a bug in the Aspire One's hardware/firmware, but at the time of this writing (when was this written? does it still apply?) it does not detect an SD card insertion in either of the card slots. However, rebooting the computer with the card inserted will cause it to be detected (as /dev/mmcblk0). (The hardware requires a script to poll it; see below.)
Problems with older Debian releases
If you are installing an old (pre-lenny) version of Debian you are more likely to find problems:
- If the USB stick image did not have the nls_utf8 kernel module available, preventing the installer from mounting the ISO image. The "fix" was to grab the nls_utf8 kernel module from a working Debian system with the same kernel version, put it on the USB stick, execute a shell from the installer, and insert the nls_utf8 module manually before continuing
- If installer cannot configure the network (eg DHCP fails), try passing "noacpi" or "pci=noacpi" to the installer.
- If the boot process hangs: modprobe may be stalling. Waiting and pressing Ctrl-C a few times will allow the machine to boot. Once it's running you should update the kernel to the version in lenny (or above).
- Also note, that on some stages (e.g., hardware detection) the system may seem to be hanging: try detaching eth cable from the device. Note that with lenny and above, this problem has not been observed.
Other
- If your laptop came preinstalled with Windows, and you want to keep it ("dual-booting") you can resize the Windows partition from within the installer - see the installation guide for more information; it should work without issue.
- See the debian-installer documentation for more info.
If you are trying the Debian Testing, you may experience the system freezing, and that is related to Linux 3.1.0. An easy fix is to install the linux-image-2.6, or wait for a better solution.
Alternative Installation Methods
See the install guide for other ways to start the installation. In particular:
- a USB (eSATA etc.) hard drive should work in-place of a USB flash drive, follow the procedure above.
- a "netboot" install works correctly for Lenny.
for those who purchased an Acer One with Windows preinstalled (sadly this probably now your only option), win32-loader provides a Debian installer that runs from Windows.
The following text headed USB install working from ONLY this box and a thumbdrive. was added to an earlier version of this page. Perhaps it is still useful for someone.
USB install working from ONLY this box and a thumbdrive. --This will remove Windows, to keep Windows see "Resizing the Windows partition"-- download unetbootin --start with empty thumbdrive just in case, also no need to format-- run next to distribution select debian and stable_netinstall select your thumbdrive at the bottom of the window next to type click OK let the software do its thing. If prompted about overwrites Yes to All Reboot when prompted follow normal installation procedure until grub installation question near the end select No do not install on MBR enter /dev/sdb as installation location reboot again removing the thumbdrive when greeted by the grub bootloader edit the first option(press e) change all instances in all lines containing sdb* to sda* (leave the number portion the same) you should now boot into a working debian install, but the edit we did was only temporary so now to make the edit permanent- accessories->terminal su - enter root password visudo remove the # in from of %sudoers at the end of file (i del) :q if you make a mistake just :qa! and try again usermod -G sudoers "your username here no quotes" cat /etc/group | grep sudo you should see your username listed exit sudo gedit /boot/grub/menu.lst search -> replace search for sdb replace with sda replace all close save file -> quit you should now be able to boot debian. I had issues with the network card not detecting from the netinst iso and the drive name confusion. both were solved with this method.
Setup
The installation will produce a usable Debian installation. However, some configuration is needed to get everything working.
Wireless LAN
Depending on the model, the system's wireless LAN device is based on the Atheros AR5007 or Broadcom BCM43xx chipsets.
For Atheros devices, the Linux kernel's ath5k driver works correctly as of Linux 2.6.28 (n.b. you may need to load the rfkill module as well to have the radio enabled).
For Broadcom devices, one of the bcm43xx Linux kernel drivers can be used, requiring installation of either firmware-b43-installer from contrib or broadcom-sta-dkms from non-free.
Webcam
Another piece of hardware that may not work after installation is the webcam. For this, you will need the uvcvideo driver. Simply checkout the latest revision of uvcvideo from svn://svn.berlios.de/linux-uvc/linux-uvc/trunk, and build it from source. (Note, again, the source package included in testing works.).
As of 11092008, the 2.6.26 kernel in testing includes the uvcvideo as a module. And it works very well.
Frequency scaling
Frequency scaling is supported via the acpi-cpufreq module. Loading this module will allow you to scale between 800 MHz and 1.6 GHz.
This module is enabled by the installer so no configuration is needed.
Screen resolution: 11 inch model
The 11 inch Acer One supports a 1366 x 768 resolution, but with lenny only 1024x600 will be detected. To run at the full resolution follow these steps:
1. Get the 1366 x 768 resolution.
Create the file "/etc/grub.d/01_915resolution":
echo insmod 915resolution echo 915resolution 58 1366 768 32
Execute:
chmod +x /etc/grub.d/01_915resolution
Add the following into the file "/etc/default/grub":
GRUB_GFXMODE=1366x768x32 GRUB_GFXPAYLOAD_LINUX=1366x768x32
And execute as root:
update-grub
2. Install the fbdev driver.
Note: This driver will NOT get 3D working, but it works really nice on the 2D desktop.
Execute as root:
apt-get install v86d
Add this line to "/etc/modules":
uvesafb vbemode=0x011b nocrtc mtrr=2
Create or modify "/etc/X11/xorg.conf":
Section "Screen" Identifier "Default Screen" DefaultDepth 24 EndSection Section "Module" Load "dri" Load "GLcore" EndSection Section "Device" Identifier "Default Device" Driver "fbdev" EndSection
Screen resolution: 9 and 10 inch models
For the earlier Acer models, the highest video mode available from the video bios is 800x600x32. To get a fairly reasonable framebuffer for your virtual terminals pass "vga=8" to the kernel. This will give you a framebuffer of 800x600x16.
When running under X, the native/optimum resolution is 1024x600 (standard widescreen ratio). The default X11 configuration will give you fonts that are too large for this resolution - You can add the following line to the "Monitor" section of your "/etc/X11/xorg.conf" file:
DisplaySize 195 113
And add the line:
Option "NoDDC"
to the "Device" section.
That sets the resolution to the correct 96 DPI.
If you're using KDM and find that the DPI settings do not take effect, open /etc/kde3/kdm/kdmrc
find the line that reads ServerArgsLocal=-nolisten tcp and change it to ServerArgsLocal=-nolisten tcp -dpi 96
Card reader
Follow the relevant section depending on your BIOS version. To check your BIOS version, reboot your Aspire One and enter the BIOS before the OS boots to display the version string. (Press the F2 key right after boot to enter the BIOS.)
Pre-BIOS v.3309
The card reader is a J-Micron device. The left hand port (marked as storage expansion) exists as PCI ID 197b:2382, and the multi-reader on the right occupies PCI IDs 197b:2381, :2383 and :2384.
The card reader is hidden on power up and cold reset. There is no way to unhide the device without inserting a card into it (despite any claims elsewhere). The device appears to the host system when a card is inserted into either of the slots, at which point both left hand and right hand slots appear.
Many guides suggest using "setpci -d 197b:2381 AE=47" to unhide the device. This will ordinarily not work, because if the device does not appear to the host system, then the command will fail.
A script to poll the card reader for power events (AC unplugged, etc.) is included on the recovery DVD shipped with the machine within the "hdc1._.tar.bz2" archive as /usr/sbin/jmb38x_d3e.sh. This script runs once every 5 minutes and adjusts the power level depending on the system power state.
The simplest way to activate both card slots is to create a file /etc/modprobe.d/aspire-fix-sd-slots.conf with the following contents:
options pciehp pciehp_force=1 pciehp_slot_with_bus=1 install sdhci for i in 2381 2382 2383 2384; do /usr/bin/setpci -d 197b:$i AE=47; done; /sbin/modprobe --ignore-install sdhci
Then add the following line to /etc/modules:
pciehp
The 'pciehp' module will allow the card slots to appear as hotplug devices. Once a card is inserted, the 'install' line in the modprobe configuration will set the controller up to behave appropriately, and then load the sdhci driver. hal should spot the cards being inserted, and either GNOME or KDE should automatically mount the cards when inserted.
BIOS v.3309 and later
(This text may apply to earlier BIOS versions - as I recall, this was working in this fashion in BIOS v.3308, possibly earlier revisions. Ensure you are running the latest BIOS Acer have provided.)
This Aspire One BIOS no longer requires the above hacks to reprogram the SD controller's register 0xAE to 0x47, nor does it require the pciehp module to hotplug the controller when a card is inserted. In fact, they reveal the controller during system startup and set the register to support SDHCI mode during the system boot process.
As such, if you're running this BIOS version or newer, you can go ahead and ignore everything above and even back out the changes you made if you're already using Debian on your Aspire One.
Memory stick disabling
The current testing and unstable kernels have trouble with memstick modules causing a soft lockup (related to the memory stick part of the multi-reader). It is advised that the modules for this are blocked. Debian bug 500058 has been raised for this issue.
This issue will cause your system to lock up during udev startup if you have an SD card in the slot.
http://www.nabble.com/Debian-netbook-aspire-one-td19141623.html gives a solution to repair the situation. Modifying the path so that it does not cause configuration file conflicts with module-init-tools, create a file /etc/modprobe.d/aspire-blacklist-memstick.conf with the following contents:
blacklist jmb38x_ms blacklist memstick
There is no need to adjust the udev configuration, contrary to the instructions at nabble.com.
Audio
Audio should work correctly in stable. (Not on latest models?)
Ensure the follow line is in place to make sure the model is autodetected and DMA position fix workaround is enabled:
options snd-hda-intel model=auto position_fix=1
or
options snd-hda-intel model=acer-aspire position_fix=1
if the model isnt auto detected correctly.
The snd-hda-intel module included in kernels 2.6.25+ will work just fine without installing any alsa packages. However in kernels 2.6.26+ a new snd module was added " snd-pcsp". This module if loaded before snd-hda-intel will casue a conflict and bad sound quality. If you have this problem, blacklist snd-pcsp or if you do like annoying beeping sounds add
options snd-pcsp index=2
to /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base.conf to load the module correctly.
Also the mic might not function until a jack is sensed and/or removed at least once from the line-in / mic jack. With the D250 and PulseAudio, you may have to disconnect the two channel (left/right) of the MIC with parvucontrol. See post 16 and 18 http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1313137&page=2
The alsa driver goes into suspend when the system does,but when it returns,it will resume once any open apps using alsa are restarted(i.e.suspend while playing a music file,then resume,music player may continue to 'play' the track,but no sound plays).Closing and restarting the player should fix this.If You would like to have audio return without having to restart apps,You can create a blank/empty audio file,and run aplay '/path/to/blank/wav',and alsa should resume properly.Add that to a script in /usr/lib/pm-utils/sleep.d for example:
. "${PM_FUNCTIONS}" resume_alsa() { aplay path/to/blank.wav } case "$1" in thaw|resume) resume_alsa ;; *) exit $NA ;; esac
,if You're using pm-suspend to suspend.
Touchpad
The Acer One has a 2 button touchpad ('middle click' can be emulated by clicking both buttons at once, and running your finger down the rightmost or bottom-most edges acts as a mouse wheel). On a lenny installation on a 13 inch Acer One, the touchpad was correctly configured by the installer and no cutomisation was needed (and the xorg.conf section is almost empty - nothing like the complications below).
If you have an earlier Acer One, or the touchpad is not detected, you could try the following
- Install gsynaptics package
- Modify /etc/X11/xorg.conf
Section "InputDevice" Identifier "Synaptics Touchpad" Driver "synaptics" Option "SendCoreEvents" "true" Option "Device" "/dev/psaux" Option "Protocol" "auto-dev" Option "HorizEdgeScroll" "0" # This is for gsynaptics to control the touchpad Option "SHMConfig" "1" EndSection Section "ServerLayout" Identifier "Default Server Layout" Screen "Default Screen" InputDevice "Generic Keyboard" "Core Keyboard" InputDevice "Synaptics Touchpad" "Core Pointer" EndSection
- Configure touchpad via gnome-control-center
- you might need to press Fn+F1 (or Fn+F9) buttons to activate the touchpad.
As of May 8 2009, the braves who would try to upgrade xserver-xorg and its related packages would have the "tapping" feature of the touchpad disabled everytime X is reinitialized, so you'd better stick with the Lenny version of Xorg until this bug is fixed.
Here is an example of an working xorg.config working with an 2.6.30 linux kernel and xserver-xorg 7.3+18. During a previous upgrade, the synaptic device changed from event8 to event6. You may have to check /proc/bus/input/devices or your kern.log to confirm this yourself.
Section "InputDevice" Identifier "Mouse0" Driver "synaptics" Option "Device" "/dev/input/event6" Option "Protocol" "auto-dev" Option "ClickFinger1" "1" Option "ClickFinger2" "0" Option "ClickFinger3" "0" Option "HorizScrollDelta" "100" Option "PressureMotionMinZ" "10" Option "FingerPress" "256" Option "PalmDetect" "0" Option "PalmMinWidth" "10" Option "PalmMinZ" "200" Option "MaxTapMove" "220" Option "MaxTapTime" "180" Option "MaxDoubleTapTime" "200" Option "TapButton1" "1" Option "TapButton2" "0" Option "TapButton3" "0" Option "RTCornerButton" "2" Option "RBCornerButton" "3" Option "LTCornerButton" "0" Option "LBCornerButton" "0" Option "VertEdgeScroll" "1" Option "HorizEdgeScroll" "1" EndSection
To see more info about possible options, see "man 4 synaptics".
A visit of our generic SynapticsTouchpad page is highly recommended, too.
Tips and Tricks
Reducing Disk Access for laptops with SSDs
Some versions of the Aspire come with SSD, although newer versions have a normal hard disk.
If you have a laptop with a SSD, you might try the following.
The SSD on the Aspire is somewhat slow (the author recorded a peak 28.8 MB/s read time with O_DIRECT and 7.0 MB/s write time). Consequently, you may want take extra measures to minimize disk I/O.
If you are using ext3 as your filesystem, you may want to add "noatime" (which also implies "nodiratime") to the options section of /etc/fstab. This will turn off timestamps on your files, but it will noticeably decrease the number of I/O ops. If some app needs the timestamps you can try the option "relatime" instead which keeps the timestamps more or less accurate with only a slight increase of I/O compared to "noatime".
Another trick is to mount some folders on one or more ramdisks. The folders list is: /var/cache, /var/lock, /var/log, /var/run, /var/mail, /var/spool, /var/tmp, /tmp and the browser cache directory (in Firefox the exact path of the cache directory can be found on the "about:cache" page). Here are the steps to do this:
Add this line to your /etc/fstab:
none /tmp tmpfs defaults 0 0
- Make directory /var/volatile
- Mount /var/volatile as a tmpfs volume (the command is "mount -t tmpfs none /var/volatile")
- Move /var/cache/apt to /var/apt. This way, /var/apt will not take up RAM (because it can become large when installing software).
- Move the cache, lock, log, run, mail, and spool directories to /var/volatile.
- Symlink those directories in /var/volatile to their counterparts in /var. Now any I/O ops to files in these directories will happen on the ramdisk mounted on /var/volatile transparently.
Optional: Put this script in /etc/rcS.d/S36setup-volatile.sh:
#!/bin/sh error() { echo $1; exit 1 } echo "Setting up /var/volatile..." mount -t tmpfs none /var/volatile || error "Could not mount /var/volatile!!!" for i in cache local lock log mail run spool; do mkdir -p /var/volatile/$i done ln -s /var/apt /var/volatile/cache/apt exit 0
- Enjoy a faster system!
WARNING: Using this method prevented me from installing some software. dpkg would give me segmentation faults when trying to install some packages that interact with /var/*, notably cups. This method will also kill your memory if you use pbuilder in the default /var/cache/pbuilder location. I would recommend being careful about this: --Daniel Moerner (dmoerner)
As an alternative and less complicated change, you can move /var/run and /var/lock to a RAM filing system simply by editing /etc/default/rcS and changing the following two lines:
RAMRUN=no RAMLOCK=no
to:
RAMRUN=yes RAMLOCK=yes
It is possible to have big improvements in disk writing speed by adding a 8 Gb SD card in the left slot and configuring a Raid 0 with the internal one; the whole space is available, we just lose some reliability; backup data frequently ! It is necessary to re-install debian, create two identical partitions, one in internal and one in external card, and create a raid 0 device with them. Make two 7.8 Gb (or less) partitions, with the remaining space you can create a boot and a swap partition. Do not forget to blacklist the memstick and jmb38_ms modules on the /dev/md0 filesystem, as desribed on "Memory stick disabling" BEFORE ending the installation process, otherwise the system will not reboot; in this case you should reboot the Acer from usb and choose a rescue mode.
Stop Firefox from Loading Pages in the Background
Firefox downloads webpages from links it thinks you may click. This may make the experience seem faster but really it just bogs down Firefox and your netbook. Type ' about:config ' in the address bar, then set ' network.prefetch-next ' to ' false '
Enable Hardware Acceleration in Adobe Flash Plugin
Adobe Flash has a check for incompatible/buggy hardware that looks for SGI in the client glx vendor string see this link. Create the directory /etc/adobe (if not present), and put a file with the contents (or add to/edit current file):
OverrideGPUValidation = 1
named mms.cfg in that directory.
Faster Graphics Rendering
Using the below option in the Device section improves compiz performance about x2.
Driver "intel" Option "AccelMethod" "exa" Option "MigrationHeuristic" "greedy"
and this in your /etc/profile
export INTEL_BATCH=1
NOTE:There was a typo in the kernel source(I am not sure when it surfaced)that caused the following to have no effect,but the stable/lenny (2.6.26-15) kernel doesnt even have 'CONFIG_MTRR_SANITIZER=y' configured,which is required for the option below to work (actually,looking at the source for lenny's kernel,I found no reference at all? I dont know if the 2.6.26 kernel supported this, as I believe it was added in 2.6.28).
The option was changed to mtrr-cleanup in the resulting patch. A workaround is to install the kernel/headers from sid,and required dependencies (kbuild,etc.), although You will have to manually update these Yourself in the future.The correct kernel option for the sid kernel (2.6.29-2) is enable_mtrr_cleanup
Also The sid kernel doesnt have 'CONFIG_ACPI_PROC_EVENT' set, so You also need to install acpid, acpi-support, and acpi-support-base from sid, or the acpi scripts that rely on /proc/events wont run (such as the lid.sh script for suspend to ram in this wiki).
Also, due to a bug in the Aspire One BIOS, all of the available mtrrs are setup prior to the system booting. This means that Xorg cannot allocate any to speed up graphics rendering.
It is unlikely that Acer will repair this, since Windows uses PAT for graphics, and Xorg's intel driver has yet to get this feature.
You can add the following (Will not work with the stable/lenny (2.6.26-15) kernel, however) to your kernel command line to clean up the mtrrs on system boot:
enable_mtrr_cleanup
The kernel will then assign mtrrs to contiguous regions, and Xorg will be able to use mtrrs to improve performance.
Quiet Fan
acerhdf
- Create an /etc/modprobe.d/acerhdf.conf file with the following content:
options acerhdf kernelmode=1 interval=10 fanon=65000 fanoff=60000
Then reboot your AspireONE to enable acerhdf module.
acerfand
IMPORTANT: acerfand has been tested on BIOS up to version 3309
ALSO IMPORTANT: Be warned that use of acerfand is not advised. Read 501137 for details, and look out for a more graceful solution in future!
Aspire One by default commonly doesn't manage Fan speed correctly, resulting in a very noisy AA0. Solution:
There is an unsupported, unofficial Apt repository that holds this software, flawed the approach this takes as it is (yes, look at the above mentioned bug report please) - The easiest way out is to add this to your /etc/apt/sources.list:
deb http://www.iiec.unam.mx/apt/ lenny acer
And just aptitude install acerfand will get you there.
In case you want to do the setup by yourself:
Goto http://home.strangenoises.org/~rachel/aspireone/acerfand/ and download all the scripts acerfand and acer_ec.pl files, make them executable:
chmod a+x acerfand sudo cp acer_ec.pl acerfand /usr/local/bin/
- To run it straight away:
sudo acerfand
- To run it at boot:
sudo gedit /etc/rc.local
Insert the following line above the exit 0 at the bottom:
/usr/local/bin/acerfand
The fan is not completely disabled. When the default temperature is reached (60ºC), fan works again. According to Intel, the Atom chip could work until 99ºC.
Optional: Above instructions will work fine, but if you want to define another temperature:
- Create an /etc/acerfand.conf file. The file is just a shell script that sets up to three values. eg:
INTERVAL=5 FANOFF=60 FANAUTO=70
Those are the default values, if the /etc/acerfand.conf file isn't found.
INTERVAL is the polling interval in seconds
FANOFF is the temperature (in Celsius Degrees) at or below which to turn the fan off, if it's currently on auto
FANAUTO is the temperature (in Celsius Degrees) at or above which to turn the fan to auto, if it's currently off
Suspend to RAM
Suspend on lid closure
If you want your Aspire One to suspend when you close the lid, install the packages acpid and acpi-support (or acpi-support-base to save a bit of space on disk) and then edit (or create if not present) the file /etc/acpi/lid.sh to just contain:
#!/bin/sh grep -q open /proc/acpi/button/lid/LID0/state && exit 0 /usr/sbin/pm-suspend
then edit (or create if not present) the file /etc/acpi/events/lid (unless you have /etc/acpi/events/lidbtn which serves the same purpose and is part of acpi-support package) to just contain:
event=button[ /]lid action=/etc/acpi/lid.sh
Suspend without root password
The program pm-suspend only works with root permissions so you will have to type the root password every time before suspending. You can avoid that by putting the line
USERNAME ALL=NOPASSWD: /usr/sbin/pm-suspend
in the file /etc/sudoers. In this line replace USERNAME with your username. The file /etc/sudoers has to be edited with the "visudo" command as root.
(see also: http://cryptojedi.org/misc/aa1.shtml )
Other distributions
ArchLinux (Good information here relevant to both Arch and debian.)
Ubuntu (Some more tips and tweaks which also work in Debian)
Where to buy
AOA110-1295 - http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16834115489
13 inch screen version - http://www.amazon.co.uk
External Links