Using this Guide

This guide was written with Ubuntu in mind. Generally everything works the same with the other Ubuntu variants of (e.g., Kubuntu, Xubuntu). This guide assumes you will use use gedit as your text editor. You may also substitute the text editor of your choice (e.g., kate for Kubuntu, mousepad for Xubuntu or just use vim/emacs/nano).

Note: The default font size used by Xubuntu is in many cases unsuitable for the small screen. Already during the installation windows can be bigger than the screen and the OK button is invisible. The font size can be changed at Applications --> Settings --> Settings Manager --> Font. Size 7 solved most problems. The change can be done already when running the LiveCD before the installation in order to be able to see the installation windows correctly. It needs to be repeated once after the installation to become permanent.

There is another way to get to the "OK" button, that might help if changing the font size alone won't: Most window managers can be set up in a way that holding the ALT button enables moving windows by moving any part of them instead of the title bar.

Installs old (8.04 and 8.10) and new (9.10)

• 9.10

• 8.10 (install and upgrade from 8.0.4)

• 8.04

Notes on Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty Jackalope) desktop and UNR (Netbook Remix)

Status: (based on a clean install from a Live boot)

• Install (once all the info had been supplied) to a HDD took 17 minutes using a Optiarc AD-5540A USB DVD drive for desktop and 11 minutes using a 2GB integral USB memory stick (or 7-10 with a 4GB memory stick) for UNR.
• UNR boot time (from grub load to Internet connected) on a HDD can be from 40 to 50 seconds.

• Sound, touchpad and suspend/resume still work.

• pciehp module still missing. All USB ports are hot-pluggable, RH SD works if card is present on boot. LH SD slot has been reported to be hot-pluggable but on some AaO's it is not. As workaround add "pciehp.pciehp_force=1" to defoptions in /boot/grub/menu.lst or to GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT in /etc/default/grub if you are already using grub2.

• The ath5k WiFi driver works. No need to "modprobe -r ath5k acer_wmi; modprobe ath5k".

  • Notes for Acer Aspire One 7G5:
    • Mine has an Atheros AR5006EG 802.11 b/g chipset.
    • This works with Jaunty UNR on a default install, but the wireless chipset is turned off.

    • Open a console and edit /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf using a text editor (like vi).

    • Add one line blacklist acer_wmi

    • Save and exit that.

    • Aside: Make sure that you do not enable the mad wi-fi drivers in the system settings. If you have, go there and disable them.

    • Reboot.
    • Use the network applet (top right icon next to battery) to enter your wireless details.

  • REPORT BACK - Sept 2009

    • I am not really happy, the wireless signal is too weak and does not stay connected (when you are at a distance) like the default settings under Linpus lite (whatever those were).
      • Suspend-resume - the wifi network does connect. Good.
      • Connection - the wifi stays connected for hours and hours, even under heavy load (like streaming a video over ssh). Good.
      • Distance from AP - take the netbook to another room and the signal drops like a stone. You get disconnects and stuff goes wrong. BAD.

• On Aspire One 751h, the default driver works. Enabling the ath5k driver under 'System --> Administration --> Hardware Drivers' breaks it. Be sure to keep it disabled.

• On Aspire One 751h, it looses wifi connection at an undefined time and wont reconnect. Seems to be only affected by encrypted networks. So far the only solution is a reboot. (this is talked about on the discussion page it maybe overheating due to blocked vents sitting on soft surfaces such as carpet)(I have 4 Aspire One's that sits on a hard table, so it either overheating by itself or its another cause)

• I have a AOA 150 and had to add blacklist acer_wmi to /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist for my wifi to work

  Load linux-backports-modules-jaunty to get the LED to work.

• 3G dongle works (Orange- Option 225)

• Front microphone works out-of-the-box. If it fails, check System->Preferences->Sound->Sound Capture is set to "HDA Intel ALC268 Analog(ALSA)" not "ALSA". Note that the mic might stop working if you changed the values of Capture in alsamixer or gnome's volume applet. The reason is you need to have the capture volumes unlinked at all times, and the first channel's volume set to what you want, with the 2nd volume bar set to 0.

• Comment - BodhiZazen - Hats off the the UNR team, but be warned, the UNR remix is slow an almost usable on an AspireOne 751h (11.6"). Better to perform a standard install on this hardware.

• You can adjust the brightness level of the screen as soon as the machine is switched on (using Fn+<left_arrow> or Fn+<right_arrow>), however, if you do this, by the time the login box appears, you will find that the keyboard will not respond to input. Unfortunately, the only solution appears to be to power the machine off and on again (This issue may only apply to the D250?)

• If the acerhdf module is loaded the gnome sensor applet can be used to show the CPU temperature. To make it work the multiplicator for the thermal zone temp1 is set to 1000 in the properties of this program, though: For some reasons libsensors seems to think that the temperature is returned in kilo-degrees.

Closing lid causes 100% CPU use and eventual crash

When the laptop lid is closed, it causes two processes, "kapcid" and "kacpi_notify", to continuously respond to a "lid closed" signal. This leads to laggieness and an eventual crash after 15-45 minutes with the lid closed, and also burdens the processor even when the lid is open.

This is a BIOS bug that also affects Windows. It was fixed in 2009, so newer models shouldn't be affected. A manufacturer fix for this is already available. Go to http://support.acer.com/drivers_download.aspx to download your latest BIOS. Unzip the file, and run the executable in Windows to fix the problem. (WARNING: Just like Acer says on their website, this might brick your computer if you're not careful.)

Thread with step-by-step instructions for Windows: http://ubuntuforums.org/showpost.php?p=8631692&postcount=3. That download should also include the necessary files to patch the BIOS from Linux. --eneekmot

The bios update makes the left card reader hot plugable and the right one hot plugable with an option passed to the kernel on boot, the only downside is a loss of the lower brightness settings (removed due to flickering) there are a couple aspire one clones which have compatible bios images with the fixes and the lowest brightness settings of course it will say gateway or something on boot and changes the hot key to enter the bios. You might even get suspend and hibernate working too, its worth updating the bios.

After the patch, Hibernate works perfectly on the AOD250. The BIOS patch also fixes the screen brightness notification problem (still has a noticeable lag to update). General responsiveness is much better (it can watch standard definition Flash videos with virtually zero lag.) Microphone works too. --eneekmot

CategoryBootAndPartition

AspireOne D250 Microphone Issue

Microphone doesn't work out of the box. Download alsa-driver-1.0.20 from www.alsa-project.org and compile it with ./configure --with-cards=all (initially microphone in the mixer is muted!) In mixer settings input source should be set to "Mic" (default), not "Front Mic". Still sound subsystem doesn't survive suspend-resume. Ethernet card also doesn't work out of the box for D250. Download AR813X-linux-v1.0.0.8.tar.gz from http://partner.atheros.com/Drivers.aspx and install it manually. Ignore gzip warnings about "trailing garbage".

• Webcam working with cheese (slow video), cameramonitor, luvcview and Skype (but X server crashes if Dual Head).
• Ext4 works out-of-the-box.
• Fn-Hotkeys seem ok. (brightness adjustable but visual feedback not 100% correct - some delays, patching the BIOS (see Laptop Lid) can fix this problem) Sound and keyboard short-cuts work.

• The home button (next to 'Fn' and 'Alt') can be configured to act as view desktop via Preferences->Keyboard Shortcuts.

• Related bugs:

  • LiveCD install screen (ubiquity) larger than the default 1024x600px resolution. To display the parts of the install window that are not visible, hold down ALT while clicking anywhere in the window.

  • Fixed: no wlan with Acer Aspire One 110L and not activatable

  • SD Card containing /home corrupted on resume

One issue is that the automatic partitioner only allocated 384 swap so I'm reinstalling using manual partitioning (may be faster than resizing) finished up with 6.5gb / and 1.6 Swap.

To Fix Choppy Video Playback With Intel Video

1. Pass enable_mtrr_cleanup mtrr_spare_reg_nr=1 to kernel in /boot/grub/menu.lst. (Explanation of problem at: http://perens.com/blog/2009/01/31/13/). (Explanation of solution at: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/xserver-xorg-video-intel/+bug/370552)

2. Determine video memory register and assign to mtrr. Explanation at: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/xserver-xorg-video-intel/+bug/314928. More detailed explanation at step 4 and 5 of This guide.

3. Make fix load automatically at each XSession startup. Explanation at: http://ubuntuforums.org/showpost.php?p=7078262&postcount=35
   Alternately create your fix file as root somewhere safe: sudo gedit /usr/local/bin/fixmtrr

   • #!/bin/bash
     if ! `cat /proc/mtrr | grep -q "write-combining"` ; then
     

     • echo "base=0xyourbase size=0xyoursize type=write-combining" > /proc/mtrr

     fi

   Set execute permissions on the file
   • sudo chmod a+x /usr/local/bin/fixmtrr
   Set sudoers access using sudo visudo - (following goes at the end of the file):

   • yourusername ALL=NOPASSWD: /usr/local/bin/fixmtrr

   Place the autorun command in the System/Preference/Startup Applications dialog (or Sessions on earlier Ubuntu's):
   • sudo /usr/local/bin/fixmtrr

4. *Optional* You can get latest version of Intel driver (v. 2.7.0) by adding the following ppa to your sources: deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/glasen/ppa/ubuntu jaunty main [Edit: The more recent and complete updates might be available here: https://launchpad.net/~ubuntu-x-swat/+archive/x-updates/]

To get Hibernate working (using TuxOnIce)

1. Make sure that you have a swap partition set up (it doesn't have to be as big as 2xRAM)

2. Add the TuxOnIce PPA repositories (and don't forget to add the auth key), which you can find here: https://launchpad.net/~tuxonice/+archive/ppa

3. Follow the instructions here: http://lists.tuxonice.net/lurker/message/20090409.181125.d20e0bbe.en.html

After that hibernate should work correctly!

[EDIT- Some have reported that Ubuntu Jaunty will hibernate out-of-the-box without this modification. Make sure your swap partition is larger than your RAM.]

Note about touchpad in a newely-installed 9.04:

After making a fresh-install of current development version of 9.04 on 3 Mar 2009 on AspireOne model:ZG5, touchpad did not work. The fix is easy: install xserver-xorg-input-all package with the help of an external USB mouse, if it is needed.

Try first Fn-F7.

References

• Laptop testing team

Discussion

Discussion of this process is happening here.

You can also join IRC channel #onelinux on irc.freenode.net.

Other distributions

Several other distributions have their own installation guides for the Aspire One.

• Archlinux

• openSUSE

• Debian

• Gentoo

Suggestions for this guide

Please use @SIG@ to sign your suggestions.

Use Unetbootin

On this website: Create a bootable USB Drive or Memory Card, the tool used was UNetbootin which seems to only require the one computer to run it on (as a statically linked binary, no install required, minimal dependencies) and generically works for a large number of distributions in addition to ubuntu and handles custom diskimages and custom kernels. This seems like a tool that is a little more quick than UbuntuLiveUSB.

To install:

• download .bin file from sourceforge
• right click on file, check executable (or run chmod +x *.bin in terminal)
• sudo apt-get install mtools p7zip-full
• run file (double click or type ./unetbooin-linux-282 in terminal) on any linux system
• select diskimage or distribution
• select USB drive from list (uses only device names unfortunately)
• click ok

Note: UNetbootin is now available in the repositories and can be installed using a package manager.

Flash drive or memory card will be formatted and set up as a bootable drive.

Stop hard drive death click

Both Hardy and intrepid may suffer from excessive load cycling http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=805570 This will fix the issue, but value 128 in script should be modified to 200.

interestingly fedora suffers the same issue and they decided on no head parking(not a great idea) and also "S 120" has anyone an view on using

Warning: Please do not run these commands if you do not know what they do, how to monitor your hard drive, and how to reverse them. These commands can cause your hard drive to over heat, and thus you will want to reverse them. In addition these commands probably are not relevant to more recent versions of Ubuntu (read the link to the forums post and the links in that post as well). Rebooting resets these settings to the default values.

Settings for running on ac power:

      /sbin/hdparm -B 254 -S 120 /dev/sda

      /sbin/hdparm -B 200 -S 120 /dev/sda

Section "InputDevice"
        Identifier  "Mouse0"
        Driver      "synaptics"
        Option      "Protocol" "auto"
        Option      "Device" "/dev/input/mouse0"
        Option      "ZAxisMapping" "4 5 6 7"
        Option      "CorePointer"
        Option      "HorizEdgeScroll" "1"
EndSection

• Note: The driver "ath5k" has been removed from the stock Intrepid kernel, because it's not working reliably on some machines. It works, however, on the AAo, you can easily get it by installing "linux-backports-modules-intrepid" christian-paratschek

• Be sure to install the backports package first if you rely on the wireless card, before you do a system update. You may also have to disable competing drivers in the Restricted Drivers manager after rebooting. -- dsm-iv-tr

Active thread discussing this

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=894852&highlight=aspireone+intrepid

2) The SD card / slot shows up as a partition option if you boot with a card in, and install from the live CD. Do manual partition options and it's simple to set an SD card as /home. -- julie-fuller 2008-10-28 04:46:43

• Note: Suspend does not work with this type of install. Suspend might kill all your data on the SD-Card. christian-paratschek

• Guide for the AAO 110L and Intrepid (cleaned up version of this one): AspireOne110L

• There are internationalization issues with the suggested wireless solution:

1. Your Access Point will be invisible to your NetworkManager Applet if the AP is using an Europe-only channel such as Channel 12 or 13 while it will be visible after changing the AP to e.g. Channel 11. Appending the line "options cfg80211 ieee80211_regdom=EU" to /etc/modprobe.d/options file as suggested elsewhere has no effect.

2. Connecting over Ch11 to an AP only succeeds if the AP passsword contains no diacrit characters; so presumably passwords should be ASCII only. This is a BUG.

Use a fresh install of Ubuntu 8.10 on an Aspire One with the latest Madwifi driver madwifi-hal-0.10.5.6-current as described in this guide. The AP is set for WPA2 Personal/AES.

• The shell script that brings the wifi0 down and up after suspend didn't do the job. Make a minor tweak, replacing the two wifi down and up lines with a single:

/etc/init.d/networking restart

• If you have any questions or new insights about Ubuntu 8.10 on the Acer Aspire One, please consider posting to this thread in the forums first. This should help to further unclutter this site.

CategoryWireless