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This is a wiki dedicated to getting Debian to work optimally on the Acer Aspire One

http://www.tommasovitale.it/images/AcerAspireOne.jpg

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.

Note that there are several versions of the Acer Aspire One:

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).

# 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

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. --?ViktorHorvath

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
# dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdz bs=1 seek=446 count=64
# echo -e ',0\n,0\n,0\n,,C,*' | sfdisk /dev/sdz
# mkdosfs /dev/sdz4

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

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:

Problems with older Debian releases

If you are installing an old (pre-lenny) version of Debian you are more likely to find problems:

Other

Alternative Installation Methods

See the install guide for other ways to start the installation. In particular:

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

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

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:

  1. Add this line to your /etc/fstab:

    none /tmp tmpfs defaults 0 0
  2. Make directory /var/volatile
  3. Mount /var/volatile as a tmpfs volume (the command is "mount -t tmpfs none /var/volatile")
  4. Move /var/cache/apt to /var/apt. This way, /var/apt will not take up RAM (because it can become large when installing software).
  5. Move the cache, lock, log, run, mail, and spool directories to /var/volatile.
  6. 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.
  7. 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
  8. 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

Kernel module acerhdf

 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:

 chmod a+x acerfand
 sudo cp acer_ec.pl acerfand /usr/local/bin/

 sudo acerfand

 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:

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 )

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