Differences between revisions 164 and 165
Revision 164 as of 2009-10-04 22:25:19
Size: 34512
Editor: Waxhead
Comment: Added debian installer from windows as a installation method
Revision 165 as of 2009-10-20 16:14:37
Size: 34512
Comment: Updated the link to the latest netinst ISO
Deletions are marked like this. Additions are marked like this.
Line 18: Line 18:
Get the latest daily build of Lenny (stable) image: [[http://ftp.debian.org/debian/dists/lenny/main/installer-i386/current/images/hd-media/boot.img.gz|drive image]] and the latest [[http://ftp.de.debian.org/debian-cd/current/i386/iso-cd/debian-500-i386-netinst.iso|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. Get the latest daily build of Lenny (stable) image: [[http://ftp.debian.org/debian/dists/lenny/main/installer-i386/current/images/hd-media/boot.img.gz|drive image]] and the latest [[http://ftp.de.debian.org/debian-cd/current/i386/iso-cd/debian-503-i386-netinst.iso|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.

Translation(s): it ru pt_BR

(!) /Discussion


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 two versions of the Acer Aspire One — While the original (9 inch screen, models A110, A150) models' hardware is natively well supported, the second generation (10 inch, models A250, any others?) includes a wired Ethernet adapter which is not natively supported — So you will need to install using the wireless card, and if needed, compile the wired network module later on.

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 currently 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 install guide. If using another method, make sure the installer's kernel is 2.6.25 or greater to ensure that you have support for the Ethernet adapter (if needed during the install process).

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 but it 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 (press Alt-F2 to bring up a shell on the Acer One). Note that using the wrong node will destroy data on that node. Assuming your flash drive is /dev/sdz, execute this command as root:

# zcat /path/to/boot.img.gz > /dev/sdz

Afterwards, mount the flash drive and copy over the net-install ISO file.

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: Unless a USB device is plugged in at boot, the "Boot from USB" option may not appear in the F12 menu.

Formatting your drive with additional software for booting

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

Reboot your Aspire One with the USB stick in one of its USB sockets. When you see the BIOS screen, hit F12 to select the USB stick as the boot device. This will cause the Aspire One to boot the Debian installer from the USB stick.

When presented with the boot menu, you may need to pass "noacpi" to the kernel to get the Ethernet card to work. (May not be needed as of 2009-01-26 with Lenny, if Lenny won't pick up a DHCP lease, try booting with pci=noacpi)

After this, installation should proceed as normal; the installer will load the net-install ISO image's installer components and will continue the net-install procedure. Note that you will need a wired connection, as WiFi will not work in the installer.

Alternative Installation Methods

  1. A USB (eSATA etc.) hard drive should work in-place of a USB flash drive, follow the procedure above
  2. A "netboot" install works correctly for Lenny
  3. For those who purchased a windows Aspire one because it's larger harddrive http://goodbye-microsoft.com/ provides a Debain installer that runs from windows

Setup

Almost everything should work out of the box once installation finishes. However, the wireless card needs extra attention; it is based on a AR5007 chipset, which will not work with the drivers which currently ship with the kernel packages in either Etch or Lenny.

kernel.org / mac80211 driver

The ath5k driver from the kernel.org tree works correctly as of 2.6.28 (possibly 2.6.27 as well) (n.b. you may need to load the rfkill module as well to have the radio enabled). You can either use a newer kernel, such as one of the ones from DebianKernel, or you can use a back-port of the latest mac80211 drivers to an older kernel from http://wireless.kernel.org/en/users/Download.

On T.Mondary's site you can find the latest stable kernel compiled for AAO, in distribution-independant format, but suitable for Debian. This minimal kernel comes with ath5k wifi led patches, a coretemp patch, acerhdf and a clean KMS framebuffer. It can now use ext2 or ext4 (mounting ext4 without a journal is supported since 2.6.29) for the root filesystem, and doesn't require an initrd. Observe however that Mondary's kernel does not support usual journaling filesystems appart ext4, which might be desired by owners of HDD versions of the One such as the ZG5 model.

madwifi non-free driver

Introductory note (06/2009): My Acer Aspire one D150 came with a Broadcom BCM4312 rev 01 wifi controller (lcpci -v). Although I could build and load the madwifi module perfectly, it did not provide a single wireless interface. Then I tried the ndiswrapper approach for that controller, but obtained the very same result: no interface. Then I browsed the web some more, only to find that Broadcom has released a seemingly decent driver for this series of wifi controllers - see, e.g., this post. And guess what, the module compiled nicely (one warning though) and worked right away.

The status of support for the AR5007 chipset is tracked at http://madwifi-project.org/ticket/1192. The out-of-tree driver can be obtained from the madwifi-source package in Lenny or directly from ?MadWiFi svn.

A little note about WiFi and network-manager: It has been observed that network-manager does not work properly with the updated ?MadWiFi driver (incompatible hal, perhaps). You may need to configure the WLAN (e.g. ESSID, WEP/WPA) manually. Alternatively, wicd is performing beautifully for me. First remove network-manager, then install wicd (to install wicd on Lenny, see WiFi/HowToUse#wicd).

Note: I had to create /etc/modprobe.d/local.conf with the following contents

options acer_wmi wireless=1
  • before WiFi would work for me (Lenny, December 2008) - Keith Edmunds

madwifi via Module Assistant

Make sure you have a non-free and a contrib stanza in /etc/apt/sources.list - this is because madwifi is not considered free software according to debian. Then as root:

# apt-get update
# apt-get install module-assistant
# m-a prepare
# m-a auto-install madwifi

madWiFi from Source

Make sure to have build-essential and the relevant kernel headers installed, and follow the instructions at http://madwifi-project.org/wiki/UserDocs/FirstTimeHowTo, with reference to the information in http://madwifi-project.org/ticket/1192.

WiFi LED

If you've compiled ?MadWifi from the latest sources, you can enable the WIFI led by adding

dev.wifi0.ledpin=3
dev.wifi0.softled=1

to the end of /etc/sysctl.conf (or /etc/sysctl.d/madwifi.conf). It will activate at next reboot. These settings can be applied immediately by executing sysctl -p (or sysctl -p /etc/sysctl.d/madwifi.conf).

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 should be enabled on the default install.

Screen resolution

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.

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.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.

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:

##add hash,exclamation point before next line(page wont display it)
/bin/sh

. "${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

  • 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".

Troubleshooting

Since these instructions involve using the latest available net-install ISO image and the latest USB installer image, you may encounter some difficulties.

One such difficulty the author experienced was that 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.

The Aspire One has a RealTek RTL8101E Fast Ethernet controller, which uses the r8169 driver in kernels after 2.6.23. Earlier kernels (i.e. 2.6.18) will detect the card and you will see an eth0 device, but it will not be usable. The author used the driver that shipped with Debian's 2.6.25-2-486 kernel image without any problems after passing "noacpi" to the kernel at boot time. (Note, I haven't needed "noacpi" on my Acer One at all, so it is probably not necessary). With the kernel version that will likely appear in Lenny (2.6.26-1), no special options needed to be passed - the network card got detected and worked just fine.

This is likely a bug in the Aspire One's hardware/firmware, but at the time of this writing 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 above.)

Kernel versions lower than 2.6.25 cause modprobe to stall on boot, and the boot process will seem to hang. Waiting and pressing Ctrl-C a few times will allow the machine to boot. Once it's running you should update the kernel.

Also note, that on some stages (e.g., hardware detection) the system may seem to be hanging: try detaching eth cable from ?AcerOne. Note that with 2.6.26 no lockups have been observed.

Tips and Tricks

Reducing Disk Access

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 /var/cache, /var/lock, /var/log, /var/run, /var/mail, /var/spool, /var/lock, /var/tmp, and /tmp on one or more ramdisks. Here are the steps to do this:

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

none /tmp tmpfs defaults 0 0
  1. Make directory /var/volatile
  2. Mount /var/volatile as a tmpfs volume (the command is "mount -t tmpfs none /var/volatile")
  3. Move /var/cache/apt to /var/apt. This way, /var/apt will not take up RAM (because it can become large when installing software).
  4. Move the cache, lock, log, run, mail, spool, and lock directories to /var/volatile.
  5. 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.
  6. 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
  1. 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 folder(if not present)/etc/adobe ,and put a file with the contents(or add to/edit current file):

OverrideGPUValidation = 1

named mms.cfg in that folder.Good to go.

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

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/
  • 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

  • openSUSE

  • Gentoo

  • 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

USB install alternate method

USB install working from ONLY this box and a thumbdrive.

--This will remove windows, to keep windows see resizing the windows partition-- http://gparted.sourceforge.net/liveusb.php --i may add a simple tut for that later--

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 at will.

I had issues with the network card not detecting from the netinst iso and the drive name confusion. both were solved with this method.