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

• Wireless

Installation

You can install Fedora by using an external USB CD/DVD reader or from an USB dongle.

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 printing 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.

Installation DVD

"TODO"

Miscellanoues setup

SD Card Reader

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

echo "modprobe pciehp" >> /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.

Notes on performance

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