Acer Aspire One

This page is about installing and configuring Fedora on the Acer Aspire One netbook. Please contribute if you can.

What doesn't yet work

• Everything working after waking from suspend
• Suspend, Hibernate in general on F10 Beta.
• Dual Head Monitors, F10 goes into a loop trying to set resolution.

Installation

You can install Fedora by using an external USB CD/DVD reader, a USB dongle, or via PXE netboot.

Live CD/USB

If you boot a Fedora 9 live you'll encounter some non-fatal errors:

• You'll see the ethernet driver fail to load and print a backtrace.
• The boot will hang while loading the HD audio module. Just wait a minute and the boot will continue.

You can continue the installation and upgrade later. These two problems are solved in the current Fedora. To update the distribution so that the ethernet and audio works you have to either connect to the internet using a USB WiFi Dongle or by manually downloading a newer kernel rpm. If you choose the former you should delete or disable the "rt8169" and "snd_hda_intel" modules so that they doesn't mess-up the kernel during boot and make the network configuration impossible.

A good place to start, is using the latest fedora live cd. Then allmost everything on the Acer Aspire One A-110l works out of the box.

Installation DVD

"TODO"

Miscellaneous setup

SD Card Reader

The card reader sometimes doesn't work out of the box. To make it work do:

echo "modprobe pciehp" >> /etc/rc.d/rc.local
echo "modprobe sdhci" >> /etc/rc.d/rc.local
echo "setpci -d 197b:2381 AE=47" >> /etc/rc.d/rc.local
echo "blacklist jmb38x_ms" > /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist-msreader

Both card readers will work. The "special" one on the left for adding storage is seen just another plain card reader. Use LVM if you want to extend the internal SSD. Note that with the reader on the right won't work with Memory Sticks. No one uses them so it's not a big problem. Don't try to suspend while using the card reader on the left: with ext2/ext3 partitions the memory could be completely formatted!

Wireless Activity LED

To enable the wireless status LEDs install the madwifi drivers from the RPM-Fusion repositories

~# yum install madwifi

and add the following lines to /etc/sysctl.conf:

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

then restart. This works in F9 and F10.

Built-in Camera

Pretty simple actually, just had to figure it out:

yum install ucview unicap

Once installed, ucview program is in 'Multimedia' (KDE)

Notes on performance

If you have the 8 GB SSD/512MB RAM version, the flash performance may not be so good. Linux tries to swap often, and the SSD write speed is too slow (~ 4MB to 7.8MB/sec) to do much swapping. Use a lighter desktop like XFCE or add more RAM (which is not easy; you have to fully disassemble the Aspire One losing the warranty).

If you have upgraded the RAM (1.5GB Max) or you haven't an heavy load, it may help to disable swap, as well as to move /tmp, /var/tmp, and /var/log off of the flash and onto tmpfs ramdisk. It may also help to use a journal-less ext2 VS ext3, and to include the "noatime,nodiratime" mount options in /etc/fstab to limit unnecessary writes.

/dev/sdXX    /           ext2     defaults,noatime,nodiratime        1 1
tmpfs        /tmp        tmpfs    defaults                           0 0
tmpfs        /var/tmp    tmpfs    defaults                           0 0
tmpfs        /var/log    tmpfs    defaults                           0 0

Just a note, when I installed Fedora 10, I set the partitions to ext2, and the system made ext3 partitions...

If you really want to increase performance use a fast SSD memory (15 Mb/sec) on the left reader and mount on it at least /home, /var and /usr.

Misc:

• On SSD it is also tremendously helpful to disable your browsers' disk cache, or to relocate it to tmpfs.
• Disabling selinux can buy you a small (7%) amount of performance, if security isn't a concern.
• Disabling unnecessary services can almost cut the bootup time in half.

Some tricks

Add this to /etc/sysctl.conf:

# Economize the SSD
# Strongly discourage swapping (default 60)
vm.swappiness = 1

# Don't shrink the inode cache aggressively (default 100)
vm.vfs_cache_pressure = 50

# (default 499)
vm.dirty_writeback_centisecs = 1500

# (default 10)
vm.dirty_ratio = 20

# (default 5)
vm.dirty_background_ratio = 10

# (default 0)
vm.laptop_mode = 5

Add this to /etc/rc.d/rc.local

# As in the rc.last.ctrl of Linpus
echo ondemand > /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq/scaling_governor
echo ondemand > /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu1/cpufreq/scaling_governor
cat /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq/ondemand/sampling_rate_max > /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq/ondemand/sampling_rate

echo 1 > /sys/devices/system/cpu/sched_smt_power_savings
echo 10 > /sys/module/snd_hda_intel/parameters/power_save
 
#Decrease power usage of USB while idle
[ -w /sys/bus/usb/devices/1-5/power/level ] && echo auto > /sys/bus/usb/devices/1-5/power/level
[ -w /sys/bus/usb/devices/5-5/power/level ] && echo auto > /sys/bus/usb/devices/5-5/power/level

Edit the file /boot/grub/grub.conf and add elevator=noop to the kernel-line

kernel /vmlinuz-2.6.27.9-159.fc10.i686 ro root=/dev/sda2 rhgb quiet elevator=noop

xorg.conf

A sample xorg.conf that provides a larger virtual screen - also configures my 19" VGA screen when connected...adjust the Screen and Display sections for whatever display you have connected to your VGA port

Section "ServerLayout"
        Identifier     "X.org Configured"
        Screen      0  "Screen0" 0 0
        Screen      0  "Screen1" 0 0 
        InputDevice    "Mouse0" "CorePointer"
        InputDevice    "Keyboard0" "CoreKeyboard"
EndSection                                                                                                                                                  
                                                                                                                                                            
Section "Files"
        ModulePath   "/usr/lib/xorg/modules"
        FontPath     "catalogue:/etc/X11/fontpath.d"
        FontPath     "built-ins"
EndSection                                                                                                                                                  

Section "Module"
        Load  "dbe"
        Load  "extmod"
        Load  "dri"   
        Load  "dri2"  
        Load  "record"
        Load  "glx"   
EndSection            

Section "InputDevice"
        Identifier  "Keyboard0"
        Driver      "kbd"      
        Option      "XkbModel" "pc105+inet"
        Option      "XkbLayout" "us"       
EndSection                                 

Section "InputDevice"
        Identifier  "Mouse0"
        Driver      "mouse" 
        Option      "Protocol" "auto"
        Option      "Device" "/dev/input/mice"
        Option      "ZAxisMapping" "4 5 6 7"  
EndSection                                    

Section "Monitor"
        Identifier   "LVDS1"
        ModelName    "LCD Panel 1024x768"
        Option       "Panning" "1280x1024"
        Modeline     "1024×600" 48.96 1024 1064 1168 1312 600 601 604 622 -HSync +VSync
EndSection                                                                             

Section "Monitor"
        Identifier   "VGA1"
        Modeline     "1280x1024" 108.00  1280 1328 1440 1688  1024 1025 1028 1066 +HSync +VSync
        ModelName    "LCD Panel 1280x1024"                                                     
EndSection                                                                                     

Section "Device"
        ### Available Driver options are:-
        ### Values: <i>: integer, <f>: float, <bool>: "True"/"False",
        ### <string>: "String", <freq>: "<f> Hz/kHz/MHz"
        ### [arg]: arg optional
        #Option     "NoAccel"                   # [<bool>]
        #Option     "SWcursor"                  # [<bool>]
        #Option     "ColorKey"                  # <i>
        #Option     "CacheLines"                # <i>
        #Option     "Dac6Bit"                   # [<bool>]
        #Option     "DRI"                       # [<bool>]
        #Option     "NoDDC"                     # [<bool>]
        #Option     "ShowCache"                 # [<bool>]
        #Option     "XvMCSurfaces"              # <i>
        #Option     "PageFlip"                  # [<bool>]
        Identifier  "Card0"
        Driver      "intel"
        VendorName  "Intel Corporation"
        BoardName   "Mobile 945GME Express Integrated Graphics Controller"
        BusID       "PCI:0:2:0"
EndSection

Section "Screen"
        Identifier "Screen0"
        Device     "Card0"
        Monitor    "LVDS1"
        SubSection "Display"
                Viewport   0 0
                Modes     "1280x1024" "1024x768" "1024x600"
                Depth     24
                Virtual   1280 1024
        EndSubSection
EndSection

Section "Screen"
        Identifier "Screen1"
        Device     "Card0"
        Monitor    "VGA1"
        SubSection "Display"
                Viewport   0 0
                Modes     "1280x1024"
                Depth     24
                Virtual   1280 1024
        EndSubSection
EndSection