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 (works with new Atheros driver in 2.6.27 rawhide kernel, or madwifi otherwise)
• Everything working after waking from suspend

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.

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.

Wireless Activity LED

To enable the wireless status LEDs, add the following to /etc/rc.local:

sysctl -w dev.wifi0.ledpin=3
sysctl -w dev.wifi0.softled=1

This works in F9 using madwifi, but not in rawhide at the moment.

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).

If you have upgraded the RAM (1.5GB Max), 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    /           ext3     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

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.