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 # cp /mnt/loopback/* /mnt/usb/debian_installer  # cp -r /mnt/loopback/* /mnt/usb/debian_installer

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 a fair amount of documentation for getting Debian installed on an Atom processor, this page is devoted however solely to the Acer Aspire One. You can boot and install the debian-installer from lenny and the snapshot images without needing anything from the DebianEeePC project.

About this page

This page is designed to help with installation of Debian GNU/Linux on the Acer Aspire One Netbook.

Download

There are many ways to install debian. One way to install Debian on the Acer Aspire One is to use a USB stick. You will need a USB stick that is 256 megabytes or larger, preferably larger. As the Installation Howto[1] says; "The easiest way to prepare your USB memory stick is to download hd-media/boot.img.gz, and use gunzip to extract the 256 MB image from that file."

Get the latest boot.img.gz[2] file from testing and the latest net-install ISO image. It is CRITICAL that the kernel version in the boot.img.gz file and the net-install ISO are the same! Downloading the latest Lenny net-install ISO should be adequate.

The hd media and net install daily images can be found at: http://people.debian.org/~joeyh/d-i/images/daily/hd-media/ and http://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/daily-builds/daily/arch-latest/i386/iso-cd/ respectively.

1. http://d-i.alioth.debian.org/manual/en.i386/apas02.html#howto-getting-images-usb

2. http://people.debian.org/~joeyh/d-i/images/daily/hd-media/

The easy way to make the usb disk

This method will make your flash drive a 256MB drive. To make the drive the actual size and still have the installer on it, follow the more lengthy directions below. Execute this command as root:

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

where /dev/sdz is your USB stick device node (this is usually /dev/sda on computers with IDE drives, and /dev/sdb on computers with SATA/SCSI drives). BE SURE YOU USE THE CORRECT DEVICE NODE! Afterwards, mount the USB stick and copy over the net-install ISO file.

The more involved way to make the drive the right size

If you want to fully utilize your usb drive and also have a debian net-installer on it, you can loop mount the boot.img.gz and copy over the files and then run syslinux on your usb drive.

If your usb drive is already partitioned properly so it can boot, skip this next step. The next step will format your usb drive to make it bootable (USB-ZIP compatibleish). You need the mkdiskimage script included in syslinux. Below table was borrowed from [http://www.knoppix.net/forum/viewtopic.php?p=111677 this forum post].

size

command

< 1GB

mkdiskimage -4 /dev/sdz 0 64 32

1GB to 2GB

mkdiskimage -4 /dev/sdz 0 128 32

2GB to 8GB

mkdiskimage -F -4 /dev/sdz 0 255 63

8GB <

mkdiskimage -F -4 /dev/sdz 1 255 63?BRdd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdz bs=1 seek=446 count=64?BRecho -e ',0\n,0\n,0\n,,C,*' | sfdisk /dev/sdz?BRmkdosfs /dev/sdz4

Next, lets copy over the content of the boot.img.gz in a subfolder on your newly formatted 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 sub directory we copied the contents of boot.img to:

 # syslinux -d debian_installer /dev/sdz4

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.

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--wifi will not work with the installer!

Setup

Most everything should work out of the box once installation finishes. The wireless card, however, is an exception. The Acer Aspire One ships with an Atheros card with the AR5007 chipset, which must use the ?MadWifi kernel module, which can be installed either from the source files available directly from the Mad Wifi Project SVN servers or via ModuleAssistant if you are running Lenny.

Wifi via Module Assistant

  1. Make sure you have a non-free stanza in /etc/apt/sources.list
  2. As root:

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

Wifi From Source

Make sure to install the build-essential package and the kernel headers (and kernel source?) package.

Once you have downloaded the source, a simple "make && make install" should build you the latest madwifi toolset and drivers. Try "modprobe ath_pci" as root once installation finishes to see if the driver works.

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.).

Frequency scaling is supported via the acpi-cpufreq module. Loading this module will allow you to scale between 800Mhz and 1.6Ghz.

The highest video mode available from the video bios is 800x600x32. To get a decent-ish framebuffer for your virtual terminals pass vga=8 to the kernel. This will give you a framebuffer of 800x600x16.

The card reader is hidden for some reason, so you have to add "setpci -d 197b:2381 AE=47" to your rc.local script to unhide it on boot. A script to poll the card reader for card and 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.

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. At the time of this writing, there are still some known bugs with this driver. 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, probably not nessarcy)

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 throw up 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.

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" and "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.

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

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, spool, and lock 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:

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!

Faster Compiz

Using the below option in the Device section improves compiz performance about X2.

        Option "AccelMethod" "xaa"

Quiet Fan

[http://wiki.aspireone.net/index.php/How_to_hack_the_noisy_fan Here] is a Howto guide to setting up primitive daemon script that will turn on/off your fan.

Other distributions

* [http://en.opensuse.org/OpenSUSE_on_the_Aspire_One openSUSE] * [http://gentoo-wiki.com/Acer_Aspire_One_A110L Gentoo]

Where to buy

AOA110-1295 - http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16834115489