Fedora 10 on the Acer Aspire One « The Road to Elysium

November 10, 2008

Fedora 10 on the Acer Aspire One

Filed under: Linux — jorge @ 20:39

Update: I have now reinstalled Fedora 10 on my Acer Aspire One, only this time I downloaded a spinoff, Fedora 10 XFCE Live CD, to see how it performed. And not a huge surprise, but it worked remarkably well, far better than Fedora 10 with GNOME. Not to mention that the battery time went from 1 hour and 50 minutes to 2 hours and 50 minutes. I’ve also modified this tutorial a bit, and I have followed these steps myself, so I know it works. But give me a shout anyway should you find that something is lacking.

Righty then. This is going to be one of those posts that probably is going to be a bit longer than usual (if you don’t include the Acer Aspire One-post).

I had settled down with Linpus on my Acer Aspire One, but it nagged me like mad that I had to just settle for it. I mean, Linpus is fine, but I want to have a system that’s up to date, I want to be able to remove packages as I see fit, without worrying that the hal-daemon breaks *shakes his fist at Linpus*. In any case, surfing the web yesterday, I came upon the post http://dgoodwin.dangerouslyinc.com/2008/11/08/fedora-10-on-the-acer-aspire-one/. So in fear of that post being lost at some point, I’m going to write something similar here, with my own hacks and modifications that I made. Here’s how I went about installing Fedora 10 on my Acer Aspire One.

Preparing your USB-pen

For starters, by installing Fedora 10 XFCE Live CD, mostly everything works out of the box. That means webcam, SD-cards, wireless, you name it. How brilliant is that! But I’m getting a bit ahead of myself here. What we need to do first is to install the Live CD to a USB-pen/drive. To do that download the torrent from here. With me having a stationary machine using Fedora 9, I’ll assume that you do as well. :D su to root and install the package livecd-tools:

# yum install livecd-tools

Once the package is installed, and the iso has been downloaded, plug in your USB-pen/drive. I will also assume that your USB-pen/drive has been given the name sdb1. You can check it with the command dmesg, just look at the bottom of output if it has detected it. It should look something like this:

sd 10:0:0:0: [sdb] 234441648 512-byte hardware sectors (120034 MB)
sd 10:0:0:0: [sdb] Write Protect is off
sd 10:0:0:0: [sdb] Mode Sense: 00 00 00 00
sd 10:0:0:0: [sdb] Assuming drive cache: write through
sd 10:0:0:0: [sdb] 234441648 512-byte hardware sectors (120034 MB)
sd 10:0:0:0: [sdb] Write Protect is off
sd 10:0:0:0: [sdb] Mode Sense: 00 00 00 00
sd 10:0:0:0: [sdb] Assuming drive cache: write through
sdb: sdb1
sd 10:0:0:0: [sdb] Attached SCSI disk

Now, with the USB-thingie plugged in, and your iso downloaded, execute the following command:

# livecd-iso-to-disk /home/jorge/downloads/Fedora-10-i686-Live-XFCE/F10-i686-Live-XFCE.iso /dev/sdb1

F10-i686-Live-XFCE.iso being the Live CD iso we just downloaded. This command will copy the Live CD iso to your USB-pen, making that your bootable device.

Installing Fedora 10

Now that the USB-pen is ready to go, reboot your Acer Aspire One, and at boot press F12 to be able to select what boot device to boot from. Your device should pop up in that list. Log in as usual, and double-click the icon that says Install to Hard Drive. Follow the process as normal, however, when it gets time to partition the disk, everything (and I mean everything) that is ext3, change it to ext2! Why? Because having a journaling system on a netbook that uses an SSD-disk is bad. You will experience that your system is pretty much crawling at the pace of a turtle. Anyway, when getting to the partition-section, remember to click on the box named Review and Modify Partitioning Layout, and press Next. In this next window, we want to remove the swap-partition. So click on the line that says Swap under Type, and click Delete. Now that the Swap-partition is gone, we still see that both / and /boot/ are ext3. Click on each line, select Edit, and select the volume corresponding to it, then Edit again. There you can change from ext3 to ext2. When done, click Okay. When pressing Next now, you’ll get a warning about not having a Swap partition. Ignore it and move on with the installation as usual.

Disabling SELinux

Once your installation is all done, you need to reboot for changes to take effect. Answer some questions, create a user, and you’re done! ..for now. Still have a lot of things to do. The first thing that comes to mind is to make your root-filesystem to be ext2. But didn’t we specify that when we partitioned? We sure did. Why the root partition STILL is ext3 is beyond me, but we need to fix that. The user Turnip mentioned that he didn’t really feel like having LVM, so he just deleted the big partition that held it, and recreated an unvarnished ext2 partition in it’s place. When he rebooted to change what he believed was ext3, it was in fact still ext2. I have to test this myself to be certain (I sure wish I had an Acer Aspire One for testing purposes).

Before we fix the whole LVM/ext3-problem though, we need to disable SELinux. SELinux is such a pain in the butt it’s unbelieveable. Press Alt-F2, type terminal, su to root, and edit the file /etc/selinux/config and set the variable SELINUX to disabled. Save and close the file.

Converting the filesystem from ext3 to ext2

I sure hope you have your USB-pen/drive in hand, because we’re going to need it. Reboot your machine, with your USB-thingie plugged in, and again press F12 at boot, selecting your USB-device as the boot device. When done booting to the Live CD, press Alt-F2 and type terminal, and su to root.

What we need to do next is to convert the root-partition of our system to ext2 (as it is currently ext3). The root filesystem is on an LVM-partition, so the way to change it isn’t exactly your usual way of doing it. Run the command vgscan, and it’ll look something like this:

# vgscan
Reading all physical volumes.  This may take a while...
Found volume group "VolGroup00" using metadata type lvm2

You can now find your root partition in /dev/VolGroup00/LogVol00. To convert this to ext2, run the following command:

# tune2fs -O ^has_journal /dev/VolGroup00/LogVol00
# e2fsck /dev/VolGroup00/LogVol00

When this is done, your system should be ext2. To test this, you can do the following things:

# mkdir /mnt/disk
# mount -t ext3 /dev/VolGroup00/LogVol00 /mnt/disk

This last command should fail, as we’re not mounting an ext3 partition. Try it with ext2, it should now work.

Next step is to update an important file, and making a new initrd.

Updating /etc/fstab and making a new initrd

Now that our filesystem is updated, we need to change the entries in /mnt/disk/etc/fstab to read and specify the root partition as ext2, and not ext3. So open up the file /mnt/disk/etc/fstab, and replace ext3 with ext2. When done, save and close the file. Remember that you need to do these changes as root!

We need to do some changes to the boot partition as well, so mount it up, and other things as well (thanks skug67!):

# mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/disk/boot/
# mount -o bind /sys /mnt/disk/sys
# mount -o bind /proc /mnt/disk/proc

What we will do now is to change our root-enviroment so that we’re working directly inside the mounted partitions. You can do that by running this command:

# chroot /mnt/disk/ /bin/bash

We’re now in the new enviroment. It’s time to create the new initrd. Now, the image-versions shown below does not necessarily have to be what you have. The iso you downloaded from the Fedora torrent might be newer than what I’m writing here, so just do an ls /boot/ to see what your image-file looks like. We proceed:

# mv initrd-2.6.27.5-117.fc10.i686.img initrd-2.6.27.5-117.fc10.i686.img.ext3
# mkinitrd initrd-`uname -r`.img `uname -r`

When this is done, you’ve created a new initrd. Follow up with exiting the enviroment, unmounting the partitions and rebooting:

# exit
# cd /root/
# umount /mnt/disk/boot/
# umount /mnt/disk/sys/
# umount /mnt/disk/proc/
# umount /mnt/disk/
# reboot

With SELinux gone, ext3 converted to ext2, and a new initrd created, you should be able to boot into your Fedora 10 on the Acer Aspire One. :)

And now, optimizing the system.

Optimizing Fedora 10

I assume that by now you are actually using the Fedora 10 installation. Here’s how to improve the system performance a bit.

Quoting the Ubuntu wikipages:

Frequent writes to the SSD will cause failure eventually. We can reduce the number of writes to the SSD by moving our logs to a temporary filesystem in RAM that gets destroyed at ever reboot. Now this means your logs will not be persistent across reboots making debugging difficult in some cases. This step is optional of course, so if you need the logs for an extended period of time do not follow these steps.

Let’s assume that you want to do this. su to root, and open up the file /etc/fstab, and place these following lines there:

tmpfs      /var/log        tmpfs        defaults           0    0
tmpfs      /tmp            tmpfs        defaults           0    0
tmpfs      /var/tmp        tmpfs        defaults           0    0

Also, modify the first line in /etc/fstab to include the options noatime and nodiratime. When done, your /etc/fstab should look something like this:

/dev/VolGroup00/LogVol00 /                       ext2    defaults,noatime,nodiratime        1 1
UUID=43882dc4-109b-40c9-b3eb-6e2c7ebd2758 /boot                   ext2    defaults        1 2
tmpfs                   /dev/shm                tmpfs   defaults        0 0
devpts                  /dev/pts                devpts  gid=5,mode=620  0 0
sysfs                   /sys                    sysfs   defaults        0 0
proc                    /proc                   proc    defaults        0 0
tmpfs                   /var/log            tmpfs   defaults        0 0
tmpfs                   /var/tmp                tmpfs   defaults        0 0
tmpfs                   /tmp                tmpfs   defaults        0 0

Save the file, and close it. The next thing we can do is to place the following into your /etc/rc.d/rc.local-file:

# Economize the SSD
sysctl -w vm.swappiness=1               # Strongly discourage swapping
sysctl -w vm.vfs_cache_pressure=50      # Don't shrink the inode cache aggressively
 
# 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 1500 > /proc/sys/vm/dirty_writeback_centisecs
echo 20 > /proc/sys/vm/dirty_ratio
echo 10 > /proc/sys/vm/dirty_background_ratio
 
echo 1 > /sys/devices/system/cpu/sched_smt_power_savings
echo 10 > /sys/module/snd_hda_intel/parameters/power_save
echo 5 > /proc/sys/vm/laptop_mode
 
#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
 
/sbin/setpci -d 197b:2381 AE=47
/sbin/modprobe pciehp
/sbin/modprobe sdhci

Create a file named blacklist_msreader in /etc/modprobe.d, with the following in it:

blacklist jmb38x_ms

Open up the file /boot/grub/grub.conf and add elevator=noop to the kernel-line, making this:

kernel /vmlinuz-2.6.27.5-117.fc10.i686 ro root=/dev/VolGroup00/LogVol00 rhgb quiet

Look like this:

kernel /vmlinuz-2.6.27.5-117.fc10.i686 ro root=/dev/VolGroup00/LogVol00 rhgb quiet elevator=noop

Proceed with rebooting your machine, and everything should be working fine. :)

Ways to extend your battery life

There are several things you can do to extend the battery life on your Acer Aspire One.

Turn the screen brightness down – your screen is the most power-intensive component in your laptop, and why turn the brightness all the way up if you already can see well enough?
When not in use, turn of the wireless and bluetooth functions.
If you have enough memory on your laptop, disable swapping. I would suggest putting in more memory, as swapping writes to virtual memory.
Journaling-filesystem on a SSD-disk = baaad. More writing to disk means more power used. Switch to ext2 instead.
Disable all services that just aren’t used. A lot of distributions come with say httpd enabled at start up. If you don’t need it, get rid of it.
When you’re in no need of sound – mute it!

Jason Farrel has these following tips to apply as well:

Not exactly a performance tweak, but add vga=0×315 to the end of the kernel-line in grub.conf in order to see the fancy new plymouth solar bootup screen. Kernel mode setting isn’t yet supported for the intel gma display, so this vesa mode set workaround is needed.
Use powertop to eliminate more power hogs.
If using mplayer to play video, and you see nasty horizontal tearing, it’s because the fast overlay isn’t being used by default. Edit ~/.mplayer/config and gui.conf to use vo=xv:port=XX where XX is the port returned from the xvinfo util for the overlay adaptor – this should be 79.
To cut the bootup time almost in half (down to 25 seconds here), disable uneeded services. Here’s a one-liner to disable them (run it as root):

for s in atd auditd avahi-daemon bluetooth cups gpm ip6tables kerneloops mdmonitor nfslock portreserve rpcbind rpcgssd rpcidmapd sendmail setroubleshoot livesys livesys-late microcode_ctl; do echo "chkconfig $s off"; chkconfig $s off; done

This one makes a big difference: don’t forget to disable firefox’s disk cache or you’ll grind to death.

Thanks for the tips Jason. :)

Now this next bit is VERY important, if you want your AAO to perform as best as it can. I’ll quote what our star said:

I installed FC10 like you described. It works fine. I was a bit surprised the AAO appeared rather slow compared to my EEE 1000H. So I ran cat /proc/cpuinfo. It appeared the CPU ran at 800 Mhz. I first looked at the BIOS, but the CPU ran at 1600 Mhz over there. Then I looked at services and found cpuspeed running. This is for scaling the CPU speed. After disabling this service the cat /proc/cpuinfo reported 1600 Mhz CPU speed and the system runs much smoother (and most probably consumes more power!).

And he is completely right. Jaap, thanks a million!

Minor troubleshooting

Make the sound work properly

When checking the initial volume-settings, you’ll notice that you can hear a little bit of sound, but not much, even if you’ve cranked up the volume to the max. Thing is, we need to specify a little something, just a line really, to make it work properly. Create a file named /etc/modprobe.d/sound with the following in it:

options snd-hda-intel model=acer-aspire

If you were previously using options snd-hda-intel model=acer, change it to options snd-hda-intel model=acer-aspire. This should sort out your problem when plugging in a headphone, and the sound would still get out by the normal speaker at the same time. Thanks to Bruno Malone for the tip. :)

Reboot, and your sound should be working perfectly fine, even after you’ve resumed from suspend. :)

Using Fn-Arrow Up/Down to control the volume

You’ll probably come to notice that Fn-Left/Right works perfectly fine for adjusting the screen brightness. Unfortunately, Fn-Up/Down doesn’t work for controlling the volume. But that is easily fixed. :) A program that’s needed, named aumix, isn’t installed. So as root, install it this way:

# yum -y install aumix

That should make things peachy again. ;)

Making the Wifi LED work

In order for you to have a functional Wifi LED working, you need to have madwifi installed. Upon installing madwifi, it will automatically blacklist the atheros-driver for your wireless card. Don’t get me wrong, your wireless will still work (and rumor has it that madwifi is faster). Another reason that you might want to use madwifi instead of the one included in the kernel is that there seems to be a weird bug where the wireless flakes to the point where it won’t work until you do a full power down (pulling battery and discharging the caps). To be able to install madwifi you need to have the rpmfusion-repository enabled. You can enable it by doing so:

# rpm -Uvh http://download1.rpmfusion.org/free/fedora/rpmfusion-free-release-stable.noarch.rpm http://download1.rpmfusion.org/nonfree/fedora/rpmfusion-nonfree-release-stable.noarch.rpm

Once that is done, you can continue by installing madwifi like this:

# yum -y install madwifi

Once it is installed, add the following to the bottom of the file /etc/sysctl.conf:

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

Now reboot your machine, and your Wifi LED on the front will now do the association blink, as well as blink based on wireless traffic.

Making suspend work when closing the lid

When closing the lid on your Acer Aspire One, you expect it to suspend, right? This behaviour does not come as default with the XFCE desktop. You can make it work by doing the following.

First you have to have acpid installed. Execute:

# yum install acpid

to install it. Once it is installed, create a file named lid.conf in /etc/acpi/events/ and place the following in it:

event=button/lid.*
action=/usr/sbin/pm-suspend

This will now suspend your machine when closing the lid.

If your wireless networking isn’t working after resuming from suspend, and you are using the madwifi driver instead of the native kernel provided driver, you can prevent that problem by placing the following content in a file named /usr/lib/pm-utils/sleep.d/06acerwifi:

#!/bin/sh
 
. "${PM_FUNCTIONS}"
 
unload_madwifi()
{
/usr/bin/madwifi-unload > /dev/null
}
 
load_madwifi()
{
/sbin/modprobe ath_pci > /dev/null
}
 
case "$1" in
hibernate|suspend)
unload_madwifi
;;
thaw|resume)
load_madwifi
;;
*) exit $NA
;;
esac

When done, change the permissions:

# chmod 755 06acerwifi

Reboot, and it should suspend when closing the lid. :) The only problem with this is that NetworkManager won’t automatically connect to your previous wireless network, so you’ll have to click and select it. I’ll see what I can find out about it. :)

Thanks to derge from the Fedoraforums for the tip about the resume-sound from suspend issue.

That’s pretty much what I have, so far. But I can’t end this post without an image. :) This is how my Fedora 10 XFCE desktop looks on the Acer Aspire One.

Good luck!

Comments (193)

193 Comments »

So what battery life do you get from this OS? I was only getting an hour reported by the OS before I formatted and went back to linpus.

Have you thought about puppy linux or Mandriva 2009 these are good for Acer aspire ones.

Comment by bertybassett — November 12, 2008 @ 18:11
forgot to say I had the 120GB HD version. Does the SSD version last longer before the battery dies?

Comment by bertybassett — November 12, 2008 @ 18:14
I believe so, yes. :) As far as I know, a regular HD has more moving parts, which in turn requires more power to have it running. The SSD has no moving parts, thus making the battery last longer. I just finished charging my Acer Aspire One, with Fedora 10 on it, and it seems to be reporting 1 hour and 55 minutes remaining (98.4%). I’m sure this can be tweaked even lower, by investigating properly and removing unnecessary things. I’ve done a bit of that, but not much. =/

I haven’t though about Puppy Linux, no, but I’ll make sure to have a look. :) As for Mandriva, what the heck, we’ll give that a shot too. :)

Comment by jorge — November 12, 2008 @ 20:36
Hey Jorge,
I too have been running F9 & F10 on my SSD AAO w/ 1.5GB ram for a while (wiped Linpus after a few days), and consistently get around 1h 45m of battery life with the supplied 3-cell 24Whr battery, and with most known performance tweaks. I used to get the same 1h 55m when it was new, but after 2.5 months of usage the battery only charges to 92% capacity.

Fedora 10 is great on the AAO — everything mostly works outofthebox, unlike F9. There are some minor issues still, like audio problems after suspend/resume, but bugs are filed and I suspect those will soon be fixed.

Some more Fedora10-specific tips for the AAO:
1) add “vga=0×315″ to grub.conf in order to see the fancy new plymouth solar bootup screen. kernel mode setting isn’t yet supported for this intel gma display, so this vesa mode set workaround is needed.
2) use the “powertop” to eliminate more power hogs
3) if using mplayer to play video, and you see nasty horizontal tearing, it’s because the fast overlay isn’t being used by default. edit ~/.mplayer/config and gui.conf to use “vo=xv:port=XX” where XX is the port returned from the “xvinfo” util for the overlay adaptor. should be 79.
4) to cut the bootup time almost in half (down to 25 seconds here), disable uneeded services. here’s a one-liner to disable them:
for s in atd auditd avahi-daemon bluetooth cups gpm ip6tables kerneloops mdmonitor nfslock portreserve rpcbind rpcgssd rpcidmapd sendmail setroubleshoot livesys livesys-late microcode_ctl; do echo”chkconfig $s off”; chkconfig $s off; done
5) this one makes a big difference: don’t forget to disable firefox’s disk cache or you’ll grind to death.

Even after all this, the bottleneck is still the slow SSD write speed (~8MB/s) blocking.

–Jason

Comment by Jason "zcat" Farrell — November 13, 2008 @ 07:01
Heya Jason. Thank you for your tips! I’ll make sure to try them out when I get home, and I’ll make sure to add them to the post during the day, full credit to you of course. :) Thanks again!

Comment by jorge — November 13, 2008 @ 08:01
well even with the HD version I get 2 hours and 30 minutes from Linpus.

I have spent many days getting linpus setup so I think this time I’ll clone it wioth ghost before I try out fedora again.

@jorge what boot loading times are you getting with those tweaks?

Comment by bertybassett — November 13, 2008 @ 14:09
I think you may have left out a step before rebuilding the initrd. When I followed your steps I got an error complaining about missing /sys/block/*. I solved the problem by doing “sudo mount -o bind /sys /mnt/disk/sys” (and for safety’s sake I also did “sudo mount -o bind /proc/mnt/disk/proc”) before chrooting into /mnt/disk.

With this one additional step, your instructions worked perfectly.

Thanks a million.

Comment by skug67 — November 19, 2008 @ 22:24
bertybasset: If you mean the boot-time, it’s about 15-20 seconds.

skug67: Ah, right you are, I’ll add those things to the post, credit to you. Thanks! :)

Comment by jorge — November 20, 2008 @ 08:03
Note that in the Fedora preview i installed today the kernel is version “2.6.27.5-117.fc10.i686″, but the live-cd still uses 2.6.27.4-68.fc10.i686 . Therefore the mkinitrd part doesn’t work as advertised. It should read (at the moment of writing):

# mv 2.6.27.5-117.fc10.i686.img 2.6.27.5-117.fc10.i686.img.ext3
# mkinitrd initrd-2.6.27.5-117.fc10.i686.img 2.6.27.5-117.fc10.i686

Comment by rolf deenen — November 22, 2008 @ 20:41
Hi! Thanks for all the tips. I have a quick question: how did you manage to have smaller fonts?

Comment by Sty — November 26, 2008 @ 22:46
So after playing with ubuntu and the proprietary Acer/Linpus distros on teh Acer One 150, I loaded Fedora 10 onto my unit this morning. Booted up nicely was playing around with things-it looked great. I shut it down to go about my life. Returned to it this afternoon. Fired it up….nothing! Nothing but the power light and fan noise ….no hard drive action… Any thoughts…? I powered down as in removed the battery and retried-seems to vacant.

James

Comment by JCameron — November 26, 2008 @ 23:08
Sty: Go to System -> Preferences -> Look and Feel -> Appearance, and there you have a tab called Fonts. Click on each of them, and just specify what font and size you want to use. :)

JCameron: Nothing immediately comes to mind as what the problem might be. =/ Have you tried an USB-rescue image, and checked the logs? Did you remove anything in particular before you shut down the machine?

Comment by jorge — November 27, 2008 @ 08:04
Thanks for the post, I tried the official release. Installed fine.
Tried your solution to the ext2 fix. All gone wrong. Complains
about not being able to find the root when booting up standalone
(withouy USB thingie)

I did get some errors when running the mkinitrd part. Two lines
of text saying it couldn’t find something or other. But the .img file was created so thought it might be output from code for debugging.

I am novice when it comes to this stuff, although your post was clear and precise.

Any help. Greatly appreciated.

Comment by iestyn — November 27, 2008 @ 10:12
iestyn: Hey there. :) When installing Fedora 10 on my Acer Aspire One, I was using the Preview-Live-CD, meaning that Fedora 10 wasn’t finished at all. =/ So what I wrote is in accordance to the Live-CD I mentioned. I haven’t yet tried to install it with the new ISO-files that are out, so it might very well be that you’re doing everything just right, only that they’ve made some changes of late that affect the installation process. I’ll see if I can install Fedora 10 on my AA1 (again), and get back to you. :)

Comment by jorge — November 27, 2008 @ 11:05
thanks Jorge. Much appreciated.

Comment by iestyn — November 27, 2008 @ 14:13
Hi Jorge, thanks for the tips, they helped out alot.

Also, skug67 is right with mounting proc and sys before chrooting:
mount -o bind /proc /mnt/disk/proc
mount -o bind /sys /mnt/disk/sys

It should solve the problem iestyn is having.

Also, for the font sizes, I think a better way of doing it is going to System -> Preferences -> Look and Feel -> Appearance, and under the tab Fonts, click the Details button, and change the Font DPI to 100, it’s initially around 130+.

Comment by stoichyu — November 27, 2008 @ 16:48
I think I have come up with something. Just change the call in fstab to use EXT2 instead of EXT3 without all that conversion stuff and the file system gets picked up without the Journalling. Does this work like I think it works, and read elsewhere, or am I wrong? From what I have read the only difference between EXT2 and EXT3 is the journalling, so if you pretend its EXT2 the OS won’t bother with journalling.

Comment by iestyn — November 28, 2008 @ 16:07
Hi Jorge

Same problems as iestyn! I’ve worked it thru a couple of times, amending your instructions with those comments offered by skug67 and Rolf. Still no joy.

Thanks for taking the time to offer solutions for newbies like me; it is GREATLY appreciated.

Stu

Comment by Stu — November 28, 2008 @ 17:58
Hi Jorge

Got it to work _ I think I had a directory problem.

Thanks!
Stu

Comment by Stu — November 29, 2008 @ 05:35
Thanks for this great article.

The mkinitrd related part is buggy for me too – I have to use ext3 instead, before I found a solution.

Comment by AM — November 29, 2008 @ 14:37
Hello Jorge,
After I do
#mv 2.6.27.4-68.fc10.i686.img ……
I get “mv cannot stat ‘2.6.27.4-68.fc10.i686.img’: no such file or directory”. I’ve tried #mv 2.6.27.5-117.fc10.i686.img and used the proc and sys mounts but it still doesn’t work. Please help.

Comment by paul — November 29, 2008 @ 16:39
great post as usual. tried it and tried mandriva one 2009 gnome as well and both are perfect for the aspire one though i kept going back to linpus because of good battery life and fast boot times. i just added cairo-dock together with fusion-icon and the xfce desktop and everything is fine. i added VirtualBox as well and was running okay.

though fedora 8 RPMs and etc. will be extinct anytime soon so sooner or later i will have to move to Fedora 10 i think, permanently.

Comment by John Crisostomo — November 30, 2008 @ 15:43
Thank you, these tips work on my eeepc 901 and Fedora 10 – getting close to 5 hours battery. I thought i had done something wrong when i installed because i had chosen ext2 as the filesystem.. and it changed to ext3 now i know i’m not alone.
eeepc901 owners should also add
‘/sbin/modprobe pciehp’ to /etc/rc.d/rc.local
and
‘options pciehp pciehp_force=1 pciehp_debug=1′ to /etc/modprobe.conf to get wireless to resume from suspend

Comment by steve walton — December 4, 2008 @ 12:50
….i also read somewhere you should disable the ‘warn me of suspected attack site and suspected forgery site’ in firefox->preferences->security …..if your feeling safe. I think it stops the HDD spinning up and down ( if youve got a HDD)

Comment by steve walton — December 4, 2008 @ 12:59
Ugh, I just have to apologise a bit, I’ve had loads to do at both work and home, so I haven’t had the chance to install Fedora 10 again lately. Tomorrow is my day off though, so I’ll try to reinstall Fedora 10 and document what I’ve done.

Comment by jorge — December 4, 2008 @ 18:04
Are the notes the same for XFCE4 spin off ???

Comment by bertybassett — December 5, 2008 @ 10:29
Yes they are. :) Since the XFCE-version seems to be working better with the Acer Aspire One, I decided to modify the whole post to explain how to install the XFCE spinoff. Give it a try and let me know how it works. :)

Comment by jorge — December 5, 2008 @ 10:35
I do no have Fedora installed on any of my PCs. Is it possible to use Unetbootin to get the live CD to the USB install pendrive ?

Comment by Torstein Finnbakk — December 5, 2008 @ 14:03
Yes, I believe it is. :) I haven’t tried it myself, but I’ve read about others that have done it successfully. :)

Comment by jorge — December 5, 2008 @ 16:10
I’m having the same problems as others here, using the XFCE Live CD from the official torrent. At:
mount -o bind /proc/mnt/disk/proc
I get an error:
can’t find /proc/mnt/disk/proc in /etc/fstab or /etc/mtab
and I get the same error as paul for the next step. Any idea how we can get around this? I’m a linux noob (just one week old) so any help would be appreciated. I can’t wait to get this working.

Comment by The Jerk — December 5, 2008 @ 21:17
I think I see where most people are having problems. :) There’s a space between /proc and /mnt/disk/proc.

In other words, the command is:
```
mount -o bind /proc <SPACE> /mnt/disk/proc
```
I noticed just now that those two directories were without a space in between, I apologise for that. =/ I have corrected it though. :)

As for the error Paul is getting, once everything is mounted properly, and you have executed the chroot-command, do a ls /boot/. There you should get the filename to use. That was also an error on my part, so apologies again. =/

To cut is short:
```
ls /boot/
```
Now a filename named something like initrd-2.6.27.5-117.fc10.i686.img should show up.

Then perform these following commands to create the new initrd:
```
# cd /boot/
# mv initrd-2.6.27.5-117.fc10.i686.img initrd-2.6.27.5-117.fc10.i686.img.ext3
# mkinitrd initrd-`uname -r`.img `uname -r`
```
You enter the /boot/ directory with cd, you change the filename from initrd-2.6.27.5-117.fc10.i686.img to initrd-2.6.27.5-117.fc10.i686.img.ext3 (notice the ending .ext3, but you can rename it to what you want really), and you create a new initrd with the mkinitrd command.

Hope this clears things up. :)

Comment by jorge — December 5, 2008 @ 21:30
Does the merging of HDD and the left SD card function in Fed 10?

Comment by tf — December 5, 2008 @ 21:59
Having glanced briefly at the default setup, I would have to say no. =/ I’ll investigate it further though. :)

Comment by jorge — December 5, 2008 @ 22:43
Great! I was about to think if you would consider the XFCE desktop spin because it is much lighter. I am going to try this right now but may I know if the wifi led is working? I know it’s not a big deal but i am oc. hahaha. thanks jorge, you are brilliant.

Comment by John Crisostomo — December 5, 2008 @ 23:57
Unfortunately the Wifi-LED isn’t working. =/ I’ll try to dig deeper into it. :)

Comment by jorge — December 6, 2008 @ 00:02
I found out how to do it, check the bottom of the post. :)

Comment by jorge — December 6, 2008 @ 00:17
Thanks a lot for clearing things up – I needed to change directories!
Now, I’m going to bother you about something else. I’m not quite sure what you mean by that one liner to disable some uneeded services. Copying that whole line into the terminal doesn’t seem to work for me… do I copy each line separately and run each in terminal? I am root when I do this. Thanks for the help, this tutorial is awesome.

Comment by The Jerk — December 6, 2008 @ 05:00
Ah, I see what you mean. That line was broken up into several parts because of the length, but I’ve now modified the line to be in one piece. Simply copy/paste that line into your terminal, and run it as root. See if it works :)

Comment by jorge — December 6, 2008 @ 07:46
Really great! I couldn’t be more happy :)

last question though, how do you make hibernate work, since i thik it is not working? this would be my last question since i am beginning to be very satisfiedwith this distro :)

Comment by John Crisostomo — December 6, 2008 @ 08:33
According to http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Acer_Aspire_One, suspend and hibernate aren’t quite working yet as wanted. But I’ll look further into it.

Comment by jorge — December 6, 2008 @ 08:45
Okay then, but for the meantime, this will do. :)

I’m pretty sure they’ll include it in a future update.

Comment by John Crisostomo — December 6, 2008 @ 09:35
oh, and how do i disbale swap by the way? maybe it should be included here as well. thanks.

Comment by John Crisostomo — December 6, 2008 @ 09:38
oh never mind my last post, i can see it was there. so sorry.

Comment by John Crisostomo — December 6, 2008 @ 09:39
Why am I not supposed to make a swap file? My AAO has only 512 MB ram.

Comment by tf — December 6, 2008 @ 10:19
When your computer needs to run programs that are bigger than your available physical memory, most modern operating systems use a technique called swapping, in which chunks of memory are temporarily stored on the hard disk while other data is moved into physical memory space. Needless to say that this involves writing to the disk. And writing to an SSD-disk goes very very slowly. Of course it’s your choice if you want to remove the swap partition or not, but I wanted to remove it, and so I documented that. By removing the swap, there are less occurrences of writing to the disk, and the space you spent on swap is now added to your total free diskspace.

Like I said, the choice is yours. :)

Comment by jorge — December 6, 2008 @ 10:26
what’s powertop btw, jorge? :) and can i install kpowersave?

Comment by John Crisostomo — December 6, 2008 @ 11:29
btw jorge, since aufs is not working or is not yet configured with F10, it might be a good idea to make the SDHC on the left to be the Home directory. I know it just need some fstab tweaking, but maybe some might find it useful, since aufs is a lot more complicated protocol( has 3 modes of operation, tdp and etc.) when you want to insert the sdhc card to another machine for copying files, some people might find their files evenly distributes between the sdhc and the ssd so I was thinking that it would be better to just make the sdhc as the Home directory.
maybe you’ll consider posting how to do it here. :)

Comment by John Crisostomo — December 6, 2008 @ 11:37
Hi Jorge,

I’m having problems in the vgscan part. When I make:

# vgscan
Reading all physical volumes. This may take a while…

nothing happens: no results and no /dev/VolGroup00/LogVol00

Do you know what’s happening?

Thanks.

Comment by alfoglez — December 6, 2008 @ 21:39
Hello, here is some similar information that might be of use to someone. How to get sound to work properly after resuming from suspend, how to get wireless to resume after suspend, and how to resolve the locked up wireless card issue that requires a cold boot to fix.

http://forums.fedoraforum.org/showpost.php?p=1125390&postcount=8

Comment by Darren — December 6, 2008 @ 22:06
Now I have installed Fedora 10 to my AAO. Seems to work fine :)
Thanks a lot!

How can I change the system so that /home folder is moved to the left SD card?

Comment by tf — December 6, 2008 @ 23:35
Unforunately I tried to install LXDE, but it didn’t function. Instead it destoyed the gdm configuration, so taht the grafical login hangs.Until I get this resolved I have changed to runlevel3. But how can I edit the gdm configurations?

Comment by tf — December 7, 2008 @ 16:59
Really great article.

I still have a problem, though. Now my AAO freezes on the login screen whenever I boot up. Any ideas as to why?

Comment by Zach — December 7, 2008 @ 22:16
Sorry for the multiple comments, but once in a blue moon it will allow me to enter my username and password but after I hit enter the screen flickers and then returns to the login screen.

Comment by Zach — December 7, 2008 @ 22:20
I am trying to get the wifi lights working on my AspireOne. When I try to install the madwifi package I get the following:

# yum -y install madwifi
Loaded plugins: refresh-packagekit
fedora | 2.8 kB 00:00
updates | 2.3 kB 00:00
Setting up Install Process
Parsing package install arguments
No package madwifi available.
Nothing to do

Is anyone else seeing this?

I have tried installing the rpm from livna.org but this did not help.

Thanks.

Comment by Alexi — December 8, 2008 @ 08:31
After Sunday’s update i got this bug when trying to install software:” Failed to get a TID: A security policy in place prevents this sender from sending this message to this recipient, see message bus configuration file (rejected message had interface “org.freedesktop.PackageKit.Transaction” member “SetLocale” error name “(unset)” destination “org.freedesktop.PackageKit”) (0)”. Used the bug fix from here: http://forums.fedoraforum.org/showthread.php?s=a644fcb0a592997eb31f3bd4516a3b46&t=206797&page=6
but my AAO hangs under reboot after the fix. Reinstall everything?

Comment by tf — December 8, 2008 @ 08:33
tf, this thread might help you.

got that error message on my desktop after update and figured out it happened on my aao as well.

http://forums.fedoraforum.org/showthread.php?t=206797&page=1

Comment by John Crisostomo — December 9, 2008 @ 00:30
here’s how you do it (credit to Darth01 for the idea]:
[i used mousepad, assuming everone here uses xfce, replace with kate for kde or gedit for gnome]

su -
mousepad /etc/dbus-1/system.conf

find the lines:

delete them and replace them with this one liner:

worked very good for me. seems like an update from fedora did this.

Comment by John Crisostomo — December 9, 2008 @ 00:50
here’s how you do it (credit to Darth01 for the idea]:
[i used mousepad, assuming everone here uses xfce, replace with kate for kde or gedit for gnome]

su -
mousepad /etc/dbus-1/system.conf

find the lines:
[code]

[/code]

delete them and replace them with this one liner:

[code][/code]

worked very good for me. seems like an update from fedora did this.

Comment by John Crisostomo — December 9, 2008 @ 00:53
oh no i can’t make the code appear on here. :(

Comment by John Crisostomo — December 9, 2008 @ 00:55
Thanks a lot John, the problem is solved.
Another question: The wifi is working but not the wifi led, though I have used the option #dev.wifi0.ledpin = 3
dev.wifi0.softled = 1″ in the file /etc/sysctl.conf.
“yum -y install madwifi” gives the output “No package madwifi available”. Can this also be a bug related to the last update? Some updates came yeaterday too, but was uninstallable due to unsolved dependecies. Is Fedora such an unstable distro?

Comment by tf — December 9, 2008 @ 07:19
well not really, fedora is great compared to other distros though not really aimed for linux new comers such as us. lol.

i really don’t know how that update was released without knowing that it would screw something up. well in linux, it’s really good to backup often especially when updating or vhanging something since based on my experience, weird things really happen on linux though i like how it goes for some mysterious reasons.

Comment by John Crisostomo — December 9, 2008 @ 17:17
Ok. Last time I used Red Hat was more than 10 years ago, in fact the first Linux distro I tried. Now I mostly use Ubuntu/Kubuntu at home – rather problem-less and the apt-get system works like a dream. Sigh. I have tried eeeUbuntu with Netbook Remix on my AAO, but found that it made the machine too slow, so now I try Fedora 10. It is a bit slow, Fedora too. Tried to install the LXDE desktop in Fedora, but as a result the login screen hung – – – and I had to make a reinstall. I am also following the Puppy Linux AAO remix project. Hope they will come up with a light weight distro that really works out of the box.

Comment by tf — December 9, 2008 @ 22:24
A little information for everyone. Seems a yum update has been creating quite a bit of problems for everyone. Check out http://forums.fedoraforum.org/showthread.php?s=6bee2929f15a7905ae48ccbac367a620&t=207069 for more information.

As for not being able to install madwifi, that is my bad, I completely forgot that it comes from the rpmfusion-repository, and not the default ones that come with Fedora 10.

To install the rpmfusion-repository, do the following, as root:
```
# rpm -Uvh http://download1.rpmfusion.org/free/fedora/rpmfusion-free-release-stable.noarch.rpm http://download1.rpmfusion.org/nonfree/fedora/rpmfusion-nonfree-release-stable.noarch.rpm
```
Now you can install madwifi with:
```
# yum install madwifi
```
I’ll be adding this to the post soon.

Comment by jorge — December 10, 2008 @ 06:02
I’ve now updated the post again, adding some various tricks concerning wifi and sound, and how to add the rpmfusion-repository. After some research it actually seems that suspend and hibernation works. I just have to dig a bit more before I have something to show.

Comment by jorge — December 10, 2008 @ 07:30
Managed to make suspend work. :)

Comment by jorge — December 10, 2008 @ 12:35
how?? hehehe

i managed to make suspend work using gnome power manager and did some tweaks for the wifi and the sound but some things jus do not work. and plus i corrupted my sdhc card with suspend.

maybe your method was better? teach me how please. hahaha.

Comment by John Crisostomo — December 10, 2008 @ 20:08
oh sorry, it is on the post now. let me check it out and thanks a lot.

Comment by John Crisostomo — December 10, 2008 @ 20:16
oh, it is not working for me. when i close the lid, nothing happens. T_T
when i try to rum pm-suspend or acpid, it says child process cannot be executed, no files or directory. any ideas, jorge?

Comment by John Crisostomo — December 10, 2008 @ 22:16
Have you installed the package acpid? And have you placed what I wrote in the file /etc/acpi/events/lid.conf? The command can’t be run as a normal user, only as root. If you’ve done all the steps I’ve mentioned, reboot your machine, and give it another go. If not, tell me what you have done so far, step by step.

Comment by jorge — December 11, 2008 @ 05:54
Yes, I have done everything in your guide, I triple checked everything. When I close the lid, the activity light flashes and shows activity but after a while, it stops and when I tried to see if the power light had turned orange, no it is still green. I wonder why. Maybe I should remove acpid, reinstall it and make the lid.conf again.

Comment by John Crisostomo — December 11, 2008 @ 07:35
oh, sorry my bad.
suspend seems to work, but it might be hibernate that i want and i am referring to. sorry :)
please let me know if you have made hibernate to work. hehehe.

Comment by John Crisostomo — December 11, 2008 @ 09:50
By the way Jorge, have you noticed that when we reboot, or cold started the AAO, the sound volume is set to a default level of 0%? Any way to change this? :)

Comment by John Crisostomo — December 12, 2008 @ 08:51
Yes, I have indeed noticed it. I know for a fact that there’s something you have to modify with Pulseaudio, but I haven’t bothered to find out. For me at least, when having mounted a directory through NFS or CIFS, playing a movie with either VLC or Mplayer ends up with the sound being real choppy. Upon doing a:
```
# yum remove pulseaudio
```
and rebooted, everything worked just fine, and the volume didn’t reset to the level 0. :) There seems to be some known issues with Pulseaudio and 2-6ch audio as well.

Comment by jorge — December 12, 2008 @ 08:57
Great guide, F10 with Xfce is getting close to A110 usability/desktop perfection for me.

I wanted to point out a typo in the instructions for enabling Plymouth, I’d cut’n'pasted the ‘vga=0×315′ boot command fragment from here but it had no visible effect; I still got the ‘progress bars’ old style boot. That’s because I should have said ‘vga=0×315′; note the ‘x’ vs ‘×’… Correcting that got plymouth working during boot.

- Note! you can press ‘esc’ at any point in plymouth to drop to the old-style console boot messages. Handy for debugging, or seeing why the boot is taking so long (fsck disk checks normally).
- This setting also improves the ctl-alt-f2, f3..f7 consoles.
- Now we need the intel KMS stuff finished and in the kernel for a really slick boot sequence! See:
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Njg3Nw

Comment by Owen — December 12, 2008 @ 13:56
Note for Jorge: This commenting software is ‘helpfully’ correcting the x in hex numbers like 0×315 to a multiplication symbol.. Maybe you can manually fix the posts?

Comment by Owen — December 12, 2008 @ 14:00
Thanks Jorge, you are really reliable as always, since the Linpus Lite days. lol.

Owen vga=0×315 never worked for me, but vga=789 did the job :))

Comment by John Crisostomo — December 12, 2008 @ 19:18
btw jorge, i have a personal question. if i wanted to manually add my sdhc card to my fstab [UUID=mmcblk0], what would be the proper options? would it be defaults,noatime,nodiratime as well? thanks.

Comment by John Crisostomo — December 12, 2008 @ 21:27
oh, just found out that sound level still resets to 0. Have you done any other mods after removing pulseaudio? thanks.

Comment by John Crisostomo — December 12, 2008 @ 21:36
This guide is great, thanks!

To make the card readers hot-pluggable I roughly followed the debian aspire one wiki and added an “/etc/modprobe.d/aspire-fix-sd-slots” file with this content:

options pciehp pciehp_force=1
install sdhci /sbin/setpci -d 197b:2381 AE=47 ; /sbin/modprobe –ignore-install sdhci
install sdhci /sbin/setpci -d 197b:2382 AE=47 ; /sbin/modprobe –ignore-install sdhci
install sdhci /sbin/setpci -d 197b:2383 AE=47 ; /sbin/modprobe –ignore-install sdhci
install sdhci /sbin/setpci -d 197b:2384 AE=47 ; /sbin/modprobe –ignore-install sdhci

Comment by sklnw — December 13, 2008 @ 00:21
Jorge, on the mkinitrd step I get the following response:

“/sbin/mkinitrd: line 981: too many arguments”
“/sbin/mkinitrd: Line 986: binary operator expected

and then some couldnt open directory lines also…anything?

Comment by Matthew Ferran — December 14, 2008 @ 05:49
When i run the chroot command, it always return error message “cannot run command ‘/bin/bash’: no such file or directory’. What is wrong?

Comment by Frank — December 14, 2008 @ 06:18
First thank you for a great tutorial.
Now i only have one problem (that i am aware of at least!) i don’t understand why my ’system/services’ does not work, when i try to start the hd is working for a short time, but nothing pops up, anyone have any idea?

TIA

Comment by Öyvind — December 14, 2008 @ 19:30
I have the Fedora 10 installed in my Acer One 150L, 120GB HD, and my battery can’t stand more than 1h40m. I’m using ext3 with a commit time of 15sec. I disabled a lot of services but I can’t understand why I can’t get more battery time ?

I think that when I had Linpus installed the lifetime of the battery was greater, but really I’m not sure…

Comment by Alberto — December 15, 2008 @ 17:43
Nevermind my q about the services, it’s a well known bug.

Jorge: Is there a huge difference in performance on ordinary fedora and the xfce spinoff?
I notice more things work with ordinary fedora(like my BT 2.1+ dongle), and was a bit curious about its performance.

Comment by Öyvind — December 15, 2008 @ 20:04
Hi,

thanks for this great post :) I’m trying to install F10 on my AA1, but I got same problem as alfoglez with vgscan, nothing happen so I can’t go further…

I don’t know what to do i’m really a newbie :s

thanks for any help :)

Comment by Switzy — December 18, 2008 @ 04:41
Hi

I made a usb bootable version of Fedora 10 XFCE. It starts up real fast and indeed, the wireless starts immediately. But I cannot find the webcam anywhere! Where to look for it?

Comment by Anne — December 18, 2008 @ 14:43
“…there seems to be a weird bug where the wireless flakes to the point where it won’t work until you do a full power down (pulling battery and discharging the caps).”

Thank you! I thought it was just me. Weirdly, it only seems to affect me when I’m using WEP or WPA encryption

Comment by Joe — December 19, 2008 @ 17:32
Great!
After some great failures, I got to install it and run it without many problems. It’s a bit slower, specially when doing simultaneous tasks, and the start up.

You could add to your tuto automatic login, don’t you think it’s usefull?

Comment by curumbao — December 19, 2008 @ 19:05
Anne: I believe you need to install some software for it, ex: with aMSN(a msn/live messenger clone) camera do work.

Comment by Öyvind — December 19, 2008 @ 21:51
Hi Jorge,

I installed FC10 like you described. It works fine. I was a bit surprised the AAO appeared rather slow compared to my EEE 1000H. So I ran “cat /proc/cpuinfo”. It appeared the CPU ran at 800 Mhz. I first looked at the BIOS, but the CPU ran at 1600 Mhz over there. Then I looked at services and found CPUSPEED running. This is for scaling the CPU speed. After disabling this service the “cat /proc/cpuinfo” reported 1600 Mhz CPU speed and the system runs much smoother (and most probably consumes more power!).

Thanks for your comprehensive guidelines!

Cheers, Jaap

Comment by Jaap — December 20, 2008 @ 23:54
Jaap: You are a star! If you hadn’t said anything I wouldn’t even have noticed! And you are indeed right, it improves the system drastically. Thanks a million, you can be sure I’ll be adding this to the post. :)

Comment by jorge — December 21, 2008 @ 00:01
Hi Jorge,

Pleased to help you out. How’s your son doing?

Well, I suppose the low CPU speed explains why your battery life went up dramatically. For me it made CPU scaling works under Linux on the AA0. But how to properly deploy? I’ll have a look on the web on that. Dynamic CPU scaling would be a great benefit to both battery life and performance.

Cheers, Jaap.

Comment by Jaap — December 21, 2008 @ 00:32
My son is good, thank you. :) Acting as if nothing ever happened. In fact, it was close to impossible getting him to bed last night, he was bouncing around like a rabbit, hehe.

Comment by jorge — December 21, 2008 @ 09:59
Hi jorge, cool post. I might try this on my 120HD aspire one at some point, but before I do any chance you (or someone) could specify exactly what I should do differently to set this up on a 120HD machine. Do I change all to ext2 for example? (I guess not, but I am a newb). What else, if anything, would I do differently to the SSD-Disk machines setup. Thanks :)

Comment by jinja — December 21, 2008 @ 16:11
Hi jorge. I wish your son is okay now.

By the way, removing pulseaudio did not resolve my sound issue, so i decided to keep it and instead install alsa-utils. After installing it, I configured my sound settings and then typed

alsactl store

on the terminal, and I got my desired sound level after every reboot. :)

by the way, adding options snd-hda-intel model=acer to /etc/modprobe.d/sound seems to disable the internal mic, so instead I replaced it with options snd-hda-intel model=acer-aspire. Also, to make the front speaker stop playing after plugging headphones, I added options snd-hda-intel model=acer-aspire to /etc/modprobe.conf

Comment by John Crisostomo — December 21, 2008 @ 18:50
I’ve followed your instructions with probably 10 fresh installs of Fedora, but everytime there is something that does not work as expected, like menu’s not starting, desktop skewed up, suspend dont work and so on.
Now this time i have jumped over some of the things i have a feeling could be the source of my troubles, like not installing aMSN, setting tmpfs etc.

Anyway now everything seem to work, except that when i look through my boot.log i notice at the bottom it says:
Starting anacron: [ok]
vm.swappiness = 1
vm.vfs_cache_pressure = 50
setpci: Warning: No devices selected for ‘AE=47′.

Any idea what this does mean?

TIA :)

Comment by Öyvind — December 21, 2008 @ 22:12
Öyvind: the setpci line should activate the card readers, but (at least for me) it doesn’t work. Look at post 79 above for a solution!

Comment by sklnw — December 21, 2008 @ 23:35
Hi Jorge,

Yes those kids can be so full of energy!

Because my system ran a bit hot I restarted CPU speed again and ran powertop. What do you think? Well dynamic speed works great. Try to run a youtube video and you’ll see the speed going up to 1.6 Ghz. My reco to leave CPUSPEED running. Sorry for any inconvenience.

Cheers, Jaap

Comment by Jaap — December 22, 2008 @ 10:46
Jaap: I checked that out myself, cpuspeed do work was my conclusion.

Comment by Öyvind — December 22, 2008 @ 14:36
Öyvind: Thanks, how about your memory footprint after start-up? Mine is about 116 MB. Did you ever try to run OpenOffice?

Cheers, Jaap

Comment by Jaap — December 22, 2008 @ 15:49
Jaap: My system is far from being optimized(running all default services except ipv6) i have a total of about 310MB in use.

Comment by Öyvind — December 22, 2008 @ 21:56
what a wonderfully helpful post

i installed f10 on my aspire one a few days ago, and i just can’t get over how fun it is. my only concern was the boot time (which was considerable)

and now it’s running and booting smoother and faster. and i apparently gained 800mhz i didn’t know i was missing.

cheers.

Comment by ts — December 23, 2008 @ 21:24
@Matthew Ferran:

Pls. copy-paste from the internetsite, or be _sure_ to use the right ‘ as there’s difference between ‘ and ‘

Comment by Axel — December 23, 2008 @ 21:50
Anyone know how to get wifi a bit more stable?

i am running the madwifi update in this guide, but my wifi is quite unstable, sometimes it wont connect to AP at all, like after a reboot, from suspend and so on, solution has been shut-down, pull out battery, and a startup.
It is quite annoying at times. :)
All AP’s i’ve connected to are using WPA-PSK.

Other that that my AA1 has been very stable now.

If only i could get my hands on a Samsung SSD, seems like ebay.com is the only solution for that. :(

Comment by Öyvind — December 25, 2008 @ 03:30
Öyvind: My AA1 is extremely stable with FC10. I think all the tweaks on this site are very valuable. My WiFi connection (most times secured by WPA2 PSK) uses the native drivers. As long as there is one network defined it works fine. Multiple networks defined in the configuration tends to fail. So I always erase all networks when I connect to a new one with my default user ID. Or I use a second user with a clean network config.

The only thing that doesn’t work properly is sound. At least MP3 and Youtube make sound, but my Skype does not make ringing sounds when I make a call or am being called.

While this Acer is just my lightweight system I don’t care that much about disk performance, although I consider to look for a ZIF to CF converter and buy fast Compact Flash.

Cheers, Jaap

Comment by Jaap — December 26, 2008 @ 11:42
Great guide!
I now have everything working really well.
I noticed my One tended to use the 800MHz setting, only if I ran something intense for a long time, over half a minute, it used the fastest setting.
So I commented out the
“cat /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq/ondemand/sampling_rate_max…” -line in rc.local and it started working :) Now my system is really responsive but still has good battery life.
I even got my Nokia E51 working as a modem with NetworkManager, no more gnome-ppp :)

Comment by Foranamo — December 26, 2008 @ 14:46
Boot time, “Could not detect stabilization, waiting 10 seconds”, mkinitrd bug.

Thanks for the most helpful guide.

Bought AAO-110 (linpus, ssd)
I installed F10 from the released livecd with xfce, converted to ext2, makeing a new initrd seemed to work ok, machine boots and reboots ok.

Then I deleted the reference to rhgb in the kernel line of the file /etc/boot/grub/menu.lst, that’s when I saw the “stabilization” error message, at the beginning of the startup.

Turns out a known bug? in the mkinitrd that is part of the livecd release. I updated mkinitrd, and then repeated the making of a new initrd, this time directly from /boot directory of the ssd, no chroot.

Now no error message and 10 sec. faster to start.

I make mention of it, perhaps persons booting only with the graphical loader might not notice.

Regards.

Comment by glenc — December 26, 2008 @ 21:42
I have some problems though regarding the internal mic and the phone jack with Skype. Even if I plug in a headset with microphone, it seems that the machine is still using the built in mic, but I can hear my voice on the headset. If I try to set the volume for the internal mic to zero, I can hear my voice through the mic, although the person on the other end cannot! How strange. I need help regarding this one. Is this Skype-specific? How would I find out, btw, I haven’t removed pulseaudio, could it cause this problem? Hmm.

Comment by John Crisostomo — December 27, 2008 @ 10:24
Please help me, I do not want to go back to Linpus again.

Comment by John Crisostomo — December 27, 2008 @ 10:26
I changed the line inside /etc/modprobe.d/sound into this one:

options snd-hda-intel model=acer-aspire

With the new kernel 2.6.27.9-159.fc10.i686 now my internal mic works on my 150L

Comment by Alberto — December 27, 2008 @ 18:03
any idea if we can disable scrollkeeper to speed up yum updates/installs??? it is excruciatingly slow. I was able to do it in ubuntu and i would realy love this feature in fedora!!! everything else is farrrrr superior. esp. because of this post!!! you rock dude!

Comment by nick — December 28, 2008 @ 14:35
Hi Jorge,

I was wondering if you have successfully installed VLC? I can get it to install using YUM, but it will not run. Running in terminal show a segmentation fault every single time. I have removed and reinstalled all vlc components, but still the issue persists. I can’t find a resolution through google. Thank you so much in advance.

PS, any instruction on how to get compiz running linpus-like would be great as well… but vlc is my main concern at this point

Comment by James — December 29, 2008 @ 09:15
A tip:
I (and several other AAO users) have with success installed Ubuntu 8.10, adding Sickboy’s kernel:
http://www.aspireoneuser.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=28&t=7560&sid=6172bf04f8d1c59202a909e4ec7b3cf0

Ubuntu now seems to work better on AAO than Fedora.
And Jan 1th the new version of Eeeubuntu, http://www.ubuntu-eee.com/ or http://www.facebook.com/home.php#/pages/Ubuntu-Eee/51856875275?ref=ts ) will be released. Also said to be compatible with AAO.

Comment by tf — December 29, 2008 @ 15:11
has anyone had a problem connecting to a netgear dg834 since installing fedora? I could before but not now, also I can see several over secure networks, but not mine… any ideas?

Comment by Adam — December 29, 2008 @ 17:35
Excellent guide :-) Just one question though – under Limpus it was possible to ‘right click’ by tapping on the corner of the touchpad, and that ability doesn’t seem to be preconfigured by default. Can anyone point me in the right direction?

Comment by Sarah — December 29, 2008 @ 21:47
Sorry for the double post – and I know I must be missing something really obvious (I’m a noob – but learning fast!) but after I have created and saved the file regarding the wifi resume after suspend – I then enter chmod 755 06acerwifi at the command prompt and it tells me there is no such file. Should I be typing in the full path to the file?

Comment by Sarah — December 29, 2008 @ 22:59
Okay – sorry, sorry about triple posting! I’ve sorted out chmod (I really was being that daft and not doing the obvious). Now just need to get my touchpad tapping sorted.

Comment by Sarah — December 29, 2008 @ 23:07
there might be a typo in step where you make the new initrd.

yours reads:

When this is done, you’ve created a new initrd. Follow up with exiting the enviroment, unmounting the partitions and rebooting:

# exit
# cd /root/
# umount /mnt/disk/boot/
# umount /mnt/disk/sys/
# umount /mnt/disk/proc/
# umount /mnt/disk/
# reboot

i think it should be cd /boot/ not cd /root/

Comment by keith — December 31, 2008 @ 01:17
As this is a live cd would it be possible to skip the USB pen part and use an external cd drive. As I happen to have one and already used it to re-install linpus.
Thanks for all this info, I like Linpus, but would really like a more up to date system.
ARC

Comment by TonyC — December 31, 2008 @ 11:37
OK – touchpad all set up and working. Left SD slot working, right SD slot only works if card in at boot. Tried suggestion (@post 79), unfortunately ended up with neither slot working. So scrapped that and returned to the previous situation – Any ideas?

Comment by Sarah — December 31, 2008 @ 14:44
Sarah: and i thought i was the only one not getting card reader to work like it should. :)

How did you fix the touchpad?
TIA

Comment by Öyvind — December 31, 2008 @ 17:36
For the touchpad – just follow the instructions here:

http://www.aspireoneuser.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=71&t=7759&start=90

In the thread Podus=me :-)

Comment by Sarah — December 31, 2008 @ 17:45
If this is a duplicate – sorry! but my last post didn’t appear to be uploaded. Anyway the touchpad: follow the advice here:

http://www.aspireoneuser.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=71&t=7759&start=90

If that hasn’t come out as a clickable link, sorry again. In the thread Podus=me :-)

Comment by Sarah — December 31, 2008 @ 17:50
I’m very new to Fedora Linux, please forgive me! I thought i would give it a go anyway. Unfortunately i’m having problems near the very beginning, when disabling the selinux option, i did the alt-f2 and su thing. but when i type /etc/selinux/config it keeps saying permission denied. i also tried changing the file system after this step which went ok until i tried to edit the /mnt/disk/etc/fstab. again it said permission denied. please can you tell me what i’m doing wrong.

Thanks

Comment by Murray — January 1, 2009 @ 01:31
Great guide, thanks for compiling it.

Screensaver and LCD backlight:

I noticed that the LCD display would go blank, but the backlight stayed ON.

I solved this problem by

1) installing xscreensaver: sudo yum install xscreensaver
2) removing gnome-screensaver: sodu yum remove gnome-screensaver
3) Set power management settings appropriately.

Without installing xscreensaver, XFCE does not display screensaver in its settings menu. After installing, it cribs about gnome-screensaver daemon running, and xscreensaver not running. Following the above steps gets everything working right.

Thought someone may find this useful.

Comment by Kedar — January 1, 2009 @ 04:23
Hi Jorge,

thanks for this great tutorial! I’d like to add some tips I came across during my install.

(1) main install
Since the xfce spin is quite old a huge update will take place after the setup. Expect it to take at least a few hours. Best is to let it run overnight.
I found it relatively easy to screw things up… Therfor I suggest to make a full backup after the longish update and start to tweak things after this. A great tool for the backup is macles program found here:

http://macles.blogspot.com/2008/12/acer-aspire-one-aa1backup.html

The backup takes no more than 20min!

(2) energy related stuff
On my system I had no suspend button. I deceided to autostart the ‘gnome-power-manager’ Use the ‘xfce-autostart-editor’ for this. I think the apci deamon is not needed. I have disabled it without any probs yet. A command line for suspending the system is ‘pm-suspend’. However it needs to be run as su.

(3) external monitor
There is no way to start and configure an external monitor from within the GUI. First you need to create an /etx/X11/xorg.conf file. See this thread for details:

http://forums.fedoraforum.org/showthread.php?p=1124345#post1124345

I use the exactly the xorg.conf file posted by hotdog and it works great!

(4) audio
The pulseaudio thing is actually quite nice! It gives a good sound quality, per app volume mixing and supports hot plugging usb audio devices. Take a look at this site and install additional utilities:

http://www.pulseaudio.org/wiki/PerfectSetup

Overall sound quality is way better than the original linpus stuff. A nice audio player/manager that can be installed via yum is ‘banshee’

thats it for the moment

klaus

Comment by klaus — January 2, 2009 @ 14:25
am I the only one here who can’t make wifi work with madwifi?
it just doesn’t work after reboot and there isn’t any gui t. even via the command line it doesn’t seem to scan for networks.

Comment by 6apxat — January 10, 2009 @ 16:14
Great guide, thanks for all the hard work.

I have the 8G SSD and wanted my /home to be on the left SDHC slot. WIth a little work on adding the sdhc and pciehp modules to the initrd I’ve been successful. However the suspend doesn’t work correctly, actually it’s the resume that’s a problem as /dev/mmcblk0 isn’t recognized soon enough so my /home directory isn’t there in time. I’m looking into one of the Union FS solutions but for now. Instead of having the lid event do a suspend. I have it do a shutdown. Just a thought for anyone else who wants their /home on the SD card.

Comment by bwlinux — January 11, 2009 @ 17:23
Hey!

Thanks for the tutorial! I am getting stuck at this part:
# mv initrd-2.6.27.5-117.fc10.i686.img initrd-2.6.27.5-117.fc10.i686.img.ext3

The file cannot be found. If I use /boot/ and move the file in there, I get Error 15: File not found on rebooting. Any ideas as to how I can fix it?

Thanks very much again and best wishes!

Comment by Ad — January 11, 2009 @ 17:58
It’s a greate guide, thanks a lot!
Some users have overseen the necessary change in fstab, as everything else in the guide has code for your comments but this part.
Maybe you can just add that line:
sed ’s/ext3/ext2/’ -i /mnt/disk/etc/fstab

Comment by Therket — January 11, 2009 @ 18:10
Thanks for the great guide. I just bought an Aspire One this weekend. The first thing I did was wipe Windows XP off of it an load Fedora 10.

One question though, do you know if it’s possible to get the two finger scrolling working on the touchpad? That’s the main feature I miss coming from a Macbook.

Comment by Josh — January 11, 2009 @ 21:53
Creating USB stick was problematic. Had to remove existing fat32 partition, create fat16 partition nad filesystem instead, and then I was able to boot from the stick. Used Fedora LiveUSB Creator tool to create the stick from F10 XFCE ISO image file; see https://fedorahosted.org/liveusb-creator/

Before creating new initrd with mkinitrd tool, you must set proper filesystem info into /etc/fstab file. Otherwise it won’t boot. So if you converted ext3 root filesystem to ext2, you must say it in /etc/fstab file before creating new inittab.

For delayed boot caused by ‘Could not detect stabilization, waiting 10 seconds’ I managed to fix this updating all the available fixes (yum update), rebooting and then manually re-creating initrd. It really is a bug in mkinitrd tool. Sorry don’t have Fedora Bugzilla ticket number available.

Great document, thanks. Rolled F10 into my AA1 immediately after finding this doc.

Comment by Jussi — January 13, 2009 @ 19:04
First: Thanks for the great guide!

I’m trying to get back the hotkeys as in the standard linpus instalation. I found out the following things:
- There is a package called linpus-hotkey which contains most of the necessary parts like splashd, volcontrol, pixmaps, etc. I copied the files (you can also install it as rpm-package if you prefer) from the rescue-cd to the fedora-installation.

- The package also includes a file called .XHkeys, located in the user’s homedir. I also copied this file to my homedir.

- I also installed the xhkeys-package (not in the repository, but rpm is provided at the website) and I copied the files /usr/bin/superhome.sh and /usr/bin/showdt to the fedora installation.

- Now the problem: I’m not able to start xhkeys without errors: “X Error of failed request: BadAccess (attempt to access….”
If I comment out the lines including codeline 21, 37, 38 and 16 I can start xhkeys, but these buttons are quite interessting.
So if you start splashd and xhkeys, for example the home-button or the wlan-button work. But I want to enable all the keys…
I guess the problem is located at the xorg-Configuration, but this is the point where I got lost… I’ve tried the xorg.conf from linpus, but then I just got a black screen after reboot.

Any ideas?

Comment by Flo — January 14, 2009 @ 00:38
Hi, congratulations for the guide. I was wandering if you know how to install the “ACER One Messenger” in Fedora 10. It is an excellent software, the best that I know for Linux, the only with simultaneous audio/video support. Thanks

Comment by Bruno — January 18, 2009 @ 05:21
NOOB ALERT !!!
I get:

Could not detect stabilization, waiting 10 seconds.
Reading all physical volumes. This may take a while…
Found volume group “VolGroup00″ using metadata type lvm2
1 logical volume(s) in volume group “VolGroup00″ now active
mount: error mounting /dev/root on /sysroot as ext3: Invalid argument

Hm…. I think I screwed up the process some where…. and now I’m without my “One”…..

Comment by Noob-o-rama — January 18, 2009 @ 06:33
Started over from scratch and it worked… with a lot of problems… :(

Problematic Audio for starters…

Comment by Noob-o-rama — January 19, 2009 @ 00:41
When i plug a headphone, the sound still get out by the acer normal speaker at the same time. any ideas to solve this?

Comment by Kamus — January 20, 2009 @ 03:10
I’ve also installed the aumix but doesn’t work… :(

Comment by Noob-o-rama — January 20, 2009 @ 10:29
Followed all instructions. Install of Fedora went smoothly. Sound and wireless not working yet, have not had time to play with it yet. But thanks so much for the guide!!!

Biggest issue is the system is so slow – I have Firefox with XForms plugin, + Apache/PHP/MySQL and am running my XForms application. Just loading a single record onto one of my forms takes about 2-3 seconds (takes under 1 second on my Pentium laptop). Is it just the Atom processor? Using AAO N270.

I also am using the disk for loading the instance XML from where I load again into the app. I tried using tmpfs setting (RAM drive), but there is no improvement, so I don’t think the slowness is related to disk reads.

Comment by Bala — January 20, 2009 @ 14:40
Magnífica guía, Jorge. I really thank you, now my AA1 does everything… For me “snd-hda-intel model=acer-aspire” worked better than “snd-hda-intel model=acer” This maybe can solve the audio problems some people are reporting in the comments.
Something else. You think it is possible to log in automaticly? Would be too much to ask you to include that in the guide if possible? I think somebody else asked already…
Good look with your family, I have a 4 years old child too..
Un saludo desde España.

Comment by Bruno Malone — January 22, 2009 @ 20:35
The mic today was fixed…. maybe an update came thru… I don’t know… The FN+up-down keys still dont work with the aumix installed… any other solution ?

Comment by Noob-o-rama — January 25, 2009 @ 00:13
@Noob-o-rama, you should have a Master volume level indicator in the top bar on the right hand corner next to the trash bin. This is what aumix controls. On my system, there’s a blue bar that goes up or down depending on the combination of keys you press.

Comment by michael hadham — January 27, 2009 @ 11:35
This is a great presentation and discussion of Fedora on the Aspire. I’ve had great success following the original directions and (most) of the tweaks in the comments. My A One was indeed A One … but I broke it, I think, with Google Gadgets.

My problem is that after installing GG, my sound went back to the barely audible, even at full blast. Changing the sound file line (/etc/modprobe.d/sound) to this one: options snd-hda-intel model=acer (i.e., BACK to just acer, dropping the -aspire appendage) restores the sound volume, but leaves me back with the non-functional headphone jack problem (plugging in headphones does not cut sound to speakers).

Anyone have any ideas, short of yanking GG out?

Love this whole blog …..

Comment by G. Miller — January 29, 2009 @ 03:25
1001% n00b here… but searching google seems a ton of people have the same problem, and no fix (my searches of google are thorough, usually).

Follow your instructions to the letter.

But on reboot with the USB stick in, after some splash screens, get:

mount: wrong fs type. bad option. bad superblock on /dev/loop0. missing codepage or helper program, or other error. In some cases useful info is found in syslog – try dmesg : tail or so. Bug in initramfs /init detected. Dropping to a shell. Good luck!

I have an Acer One, 4GB SSD, as bought (Fedora 7?).

Even if you just let me know that the instructions you gave aren’t supposed to work on my machine, that would save me wasting a lot more time (than I already have!).

Thanks :)

Comment by Tim — February 2, 2009 @ 07:58
Hi, I’ve just tried the Live boot environment to see what it’s like and thought I’d check that the acerfand module still works (as I like having the fan off where possible). I found that when set to off it went much faster and when set to auto was slightly more sedate. Is there a mod required when running under Fedora?

Thanks

Comment by Tony — February 3, 2009 @ 17:01
First off, thanks to Jorge for this great site and everyone else for contributing to the trials and tribulations with the aspire one.

I’m a little new to the linux environment so please excuse my inexperience. I installed Fedora 10 yesterday, have everything working (I think), but the wireless connection keeps asking for the encryption passcode. I am running WPA encryption. It’s a bother to have to re-enter the passcode every time. Is it because I’m not saving the passcode as root?

Thanks!!

Comment by EK — February 9, 2009 @ 22:47
Thank you guy!

I have Linpus running here (AA1 160GB) and i could notice that the HD is going to die soon (1 Load Cycle every 2 seconds or less), tomorrow i’ll install FC10 following your tips and i actually hope the problem to be magically solved :D. Possibly it will not be, so i’ll need some help, because i could not fix it on Linpus, to tell the truth, it’s very easy to run the command “hdparm -B 254 /dev/sda” on boot, but the actual problem is to run it after resume from suspend, it’s nearly impossible, i could do it on ubuntu, just adding a script on /etc/acpi/resume.d, but there’s no such folder in Linpus (Fedora 8). Could you aid me a little? Thanks.

Comment by Repgahroll — February 13, 2009 @ 13:07
EK,

To set the wireless key permanently do the following:
System, Administration, Network( enter root password), Devices (double click the wireless device wan0, go to the Wireless Settings tab, enter your network WPA passkey. Hit OK. File and Save.

You should be good to go with a permanent wireless passkey.

cgreen6911

Comment by cgreen6911 — February 20, 2009 @ 05:29
Jorge,

Thank your for putting this great site together for support of Acer AspireOne users. Very valuable tool.

I like a number of you purchased the unit but was not happy with the Linplus Linux O/S.

I installed FC10 and am much happier with the unit.

During bmy installation of FC10 I have ended up with versions of FC10 on my unit and during the Initrd I not point to to Initrd.2.6.27.5-117.fc10.i686.img but to 2.6.27.12.5-170.fc10.i686.img.
Now when I attempt to install madwifi, it does not install properly and the wireless driver is not found. When I use Add/Remove or yum to install madwifi the program installs but the wireless card does not work.

I believe that I have a Linux header problem and I may need to rebuild my Initrd. How do I do this?

My grub.conf is below:
#boot=/dev/sda
default=1
timeout=0
splashimage=(hd0,0)/grub/splash.xpm.gz
hiddenmenu
title Fedora (2.6.27.12-170.2.5.fc10.i686)
root (hd0,0)
kernel /vmlinuz-2.6.27.12-170.2.5.fc10.i686 ro root=/dev/VolGroup00/LogVol00 rhgb quiet elevator=noop vga=789
initrd /initrd-2.6.27.12-170.2.5.fc10.i686.img
title Fedora (2.6.27.5-117.fc10.i686)
root (hd0,0)
kernel /vmlinuz-2.6.27.5-117.fc10.i686 ro root=UUID=6097801b-4633-4d79-8436-3c2cf5c68477 rhgb quiet vga=789
initrd /initrd-2.6.27.5-117.fc10.i686.img

Any ideas on how to correct this w/o reinstalling FC10?

Thanks in advance.

cgreen6911

Comment by cgreen6911 — February 20, 2009 @ 05:57
you should remove portreserve from your list of unnecessary services. It may not be necessary for your config with madwifi, but it is crucial for the out-of-the-box setup with Fedora 10! If that gets disabled wireless connections do not work anymore as it seems the ath0 interface is not correctly used then. And this service has to be enabled at boot time, it isn’t sufficient to launch it later. And with the final Fedora 10 I also don’t see any reason to use madwifi, the built-in stuff works just fine right from the beginning.

Comment by bolero — February 24, 2009 @ 00:47
I couldn’t think of a reason to use LVM on the SSD, so when the live installer offered the partitioning plan, I deleted the LVM Volume Group and the big partition that held it, and I recreated a plain, unvarnished ext2 partition in its place. When I rebooted the live stick to reassert the ext2 file system, I found that it already really was ext2. I guess the bait-and-switch, where you get ext3 even if you ask for ext2, might be connected somehow to LVM.

Comment by Turnip — February 26, 2009 @ 03:18
Hey there. :)

Though I’m not able to answer each and everyone comment made here, I greatly appreciate the feedback. I’ll soon get to editing the post about Fedora 10 on the Acer Aspire One, adding the contributions you’ve made, that I find appropriate.

Thanks again. :)

Comment by jorge — February 26, 2009 @ 08:16
Post has now been updated. I’ll have to test Turnip’s contribution with just deleting the whole LVM-partition, and creating one single ext2 instead. Wish I had an Acer Aspire One for testing-purposes, I can’t even count the times I’ve reformatted my own. :)

Comment by jorge — February 26, 2009 @ 08:41
Great article and how to… I am new to Fedora 10 on the Acer Aspire. Working in XFCE (thanks to you) but – basic question I know) how do I CREATE a file as above to get sound working??? Found the directory it should be in but….. how stupid a qustion is that, I know, but I have never done this before. Thanks – appreciate help here – Peter

Comment by Peter — February 27, 2009 @ 09:29
Hi Jorge… ok, got the file done but still no sound… is it just me??? Also, just discovered that I have to re-set the keyboard language after every re-boot. Me again here do you reckon?

Thanks again for the article and I would love to crack all these niggles in the Acer Aspire One and Fedora (and learn from it!!).

Comment by Peter Gifford — February 27, 2009 @ 17:52
In post 79 above, the illustrated commands like “install sdhci /sbin/setpci -d 197b:2381 AE=47 ; /sbin/modprobe –ignore-install sdhci” don’t work if you copy-and-paste them. Before “ignore-install” it’s supposed to be a double-dash.

Comment by Turnip — March 1, 2009 @ 00:27
Hi,

Just bought a acer aspire one with 120gb hd and 1gb memory, ran the software via the usb stick to see how it ran, ok apart i cannot get all the info on the screen as it seems to big

Comment by Michael Gammon — March 1, 2009 @ 17:36
GDM-free autologin:

to autologin without GDM:

use chkconfig to turn gdm off

change the last line in /etc/events.d/tty1 to:
exec /sbin/mingetty –noclear –autologin dave tty1
replacing ‘dave’ with your name (unless your name is dave :)

Then add a test to your .bashrc:
TTY=`tty`
if [ "$TTY" = /dev/tty1 ];then
startx
fi

This is similar to what linpus did, but cleaner IMHO.

Can’t for the life of me figure out why they used linpus instead of a custom fedora spin…

Thanks all for the tips & tricks!

Comment by Dave — March 1, 2009 @ 21:22
Thank you for your tip Dave. :) Doesn’t seem to work though. =/ GDM isn’t listed with chkconfig, and the changes done to /etc/events.d/tty1 and .bashrc didn’t seem to work either. :)

I did find an alternative way though.

Open up /etc/inittab and change the line that looks like:
```
id:5:initdefault:
```
to:
```
id:3:initdefault:
```
Save and close the file. When done, open up /etc/rc.d/rc.local and add the following to the bottom:
```
/bin/su - jorge startx
```
Replace jorge with your username. That should make Fedora fire up into runlevel 3, then hop directly into X. :)

This is however a bit faulty right now, seems the wireless isn’t working as intended when done like this. Will have to take a closer look at it.

Comment by jorge — March 2, 2009 @ 06:41
I installed F10 a few days ago and didn’t do much with the computer before I had the chance to make a complete system update. I don’t know if the sound worked prior to update but now it’s completely muted. One other forum reports this sound problem and blame kernels newer than 2.6.27.9-159.fc10.i686 (my current is 2.6.27.19-170.2.35.fc10)
If I check which ALSA-packages are installed I see that PulseAudio is still at 1.0.18 while the library is at 1.0.19. Perhaps we just have to wait for an update of the PulseAudio-package?
What do we do about this? I’m a true NOOB to Linux but love it despite these kind of problems. How do I backport to an earlier kernel?

Comment by Lars — March 3, 2009 @ 00:07
I have abolutely no sound at all!
I have the SSD Aspire One but installed a 60GB HDD the other day. Installed Fedora 10 XFCE on it and made a complete system update before I continued to tweak the system according to Jorge’s superb tutorial. Of course leaving the SSD-tweaking out since I now have a standard HDD.
One other forum have pointed out that sound seems to be a problem with the latest kernel but since I didn’t use the system very much before system update I don’t know if it worked after the initial F10 install.
Any ideas?

Comment by Lars — March 3, 2009 @ 13:09
I don’t know what the issue might be. I’m running a fully updated installation of Fedora 10 on my Acer Aspire One, and it works perfectly fine. However, I have removed pulseaudio completely, as it had been causing trouble for me when playing things over NFS. You can always try to remove the pulseaudio-package by doing a yum remove pulseaudio as root. Also check all of your mixersettings to see if anything is muted. Wish I could give a better answer, but I honestly don’t remember how I fixed the problem, I did it a while ago.

Good luck though!

Comment by jorge — March 3, 2009 @ 13:31
I don’t know about sound (I didn’t test it), but the latest kernel (2.6.27.19-170.2.35.fc10.i686), which I got from the automatic updates just a few minutes ago, broke my wireless. Is this the one you have? It’s bedtime so I didn’t search too hard for a solution, instead I just commented out the appropriate lines in /boot/grub/menu.lst. So I am back to using the previous kernel version I had installed (2.6.27.15-170.2.24.fc10.i686).

Comment by Luke — March 4, 2009 @ 06:18
@Lars

This is a long shot, but do you have alsa to pulseaudio backend (alsa-plugin-pulseaudio) installed? I removed this and it cured the choppy and occasional non-existent sound on my AA1. BTW, I still have the pulseaudio package installed, running alongside Alsa.

Thanks for the F10 guide, Jorge.

Comment by popeye — March 4, 2009 @ 21:52
Hey,anyone got ideas why my sound does not function at all after fresh install? I had XP on it but like F10 much better. All would be perfect if I could get sound to work.

Followed directions above to the letter, but I’m a bit new at linux… where should I look?

Comment by john armentrout — March 6, 2009 @ 04:30
Any idea how to make the 3g modem MD300 from sony ericsson to work on fedora?
I´ve tried a bunch of things, but no one solved the problem.
thanks

Comment by Kamus — March 7, 2009 @ 00:45
Great guide! Fedora runs great apart from some odd problems which no one else has.

For some reason in the settings menu, nearly everything (the odd one work e.g Volume Control) nothing works when I click it! I can’t access my desktop settings or anything… anyone have any pointers?

Comment by aaron — March 12, 2009 @ 00:22
hey guys, the new xfce version is now available for fedora 10, see the post here for details >> http://www.aspireoneuser.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=71&t=12501 8-)

Comment by phil — March 19, 2009 @ 22:36
Sound stopped working because the “front” volume was set to 0, but it isn’t visible by default. I got sound to work by going into the settings/settings manager/sound. set device to default. Under the usefulcontrols window only master and capture was enabled, I enabled headphone, pcm, front. Now when you click on the volume controls you will see a “Front” control, turn the volume up. You may also need to set PCM volume up too. You also get a separate “Headphone” control which is nice if you use headphones. I dont know why these controls aren’t enabled by default.

Note: it appears your volume settings arent saved across reboots, so you need to turn up volume each time you reboot. Anyone have a fix for this?

I also did the “yum remove pulseaudio” to fix the sound choppy-ness.

Comment by flaavadave — March 22, 2009 @ 20:26
Thanks for the guide. Save me hours in trying different things.

Comment by Shop - Acer Laptop Computer — March 22, 2009 @ 23:16
Thanks for the guide and inspiration. Unfortunatly i’m suffering from the same thing as Murray, post 124, I do not have Permission to do any changes although i’m logged in as root with my root-password.

Comment by Noa — March 25, 2009 @ 21:30
You convert from ext3 to ext2 and I understand your reasons… Fedora 11 alpha uses ext4, is this any good?

I’m thinking of upgrading in desperation as (I assume) updates have destroyed wine, hibernate, suspend, wifi…. all of which were working until a few days ago… grrrr.

Comment by natalie — March 26, 2009 @ 14:16
Has anyone with the “no sound” issue found a resolution yet? I have the same problem and removing pulseaudio doesn’t give results. Will I have to start watching silent movies?

Comment by basil — March 28, 2009 @ 19:00
has anyone with the “no sound” problem found a solution yet? I have the same problem and removing puleaudio made no difference. Any ideas? I’m just not into silent movies…

Comment by basil — March 29, 2009 @ 02:27
the steps related to:
“Frequent writes to the SSD will cause failure eventually. We can reduce the number of writes to the SSD by moving our logs to a temporary filesystem in RAM that gets destroyed at ever reboot….”

is this only for aspire ones with SSD’s or will i need to do this for my aspire one that has a hard disk?

thanks

Comment by supreme monkey — March 30, 2009 @ 01:21
Hi, first I want to say that is an excelente guide for Fedora 10 on AA1. I don’t know if you didn’t notice but if you turn off the wireless swich it’s imposible to turn on again, even if you reinstall fedora, the only way is to reinstall limpus :S. I don’t know if maybe we can do a script to swich on wireless.
Thanks :)

Comment by Allan Galaviz — March 30, 2009 @ 02:31
Ahh searching on the web I find the solution
when wireless is off, to enable again just un su mode type
rmmod acer_wmi

the information about this is here
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/jaunty/+source/linux/+bug/319825

Comment by Allan Galaviz — March 30, 2009 @ 03:35
my aspire 150 has a 64bit sticker on it… anyone tried this with fedora 10 x86_64??

Comment by paul — April 2, 2009 @ 11:44
I have installed Fedora 10 with ext4 after first messing around with ext3 and ext2. It is a bit experimental but definitely faster than ext3 and also faster than ext2. Especially when you have the SSD vesion like me, it makes a huge difference.

Comment by Mahony — April 9, 2009 @ 22:21
My FC10 Device works great with your explaining, thanks. But now I have upgraded to FC11-Beta. It works very fine and stable, but I’m figgering with the soundproblems, and the automount right SSDcard. The left is as /home and should not removed. And suspend or hybernate corrupt the filesystem of the /HOME device in FC10. I dont know for FC11.

Comment by David Sandberg — April 11, 2009 @ 03:25
My FC10 Device works great with your explaining, thanks. But now I have upgraded to FC11-Beta. It works very fine and stable, but I’m figgering with the soundproblems, and the automount right SSDcard. The left is as /home and should not removed. And suspend or hybernate corrupt the filesystem of the /HOME device in FC10. I dont know for FC11 resently. For full working the touchpad you can install the gsynaptics.i586 to configure the touchpad.

Comment by David Sandberg — April 11, 2009 @ 11:23
Ok, the touchpad in FC11 is anabled and full configurable with the gsynaptic Tool. The XFCE4-Mouse Tool is not able to do this all.

Comment by David — April 11, 2009 @ 14:45
On FC11 to enable full mousepad function you have to configure xorg.conf. If there is no, you have to create a new /etc/X11/xorg.conf. The sections to enable the synaptics driver xou have to write

Section “ServerLayout”
InputDevice “Synaptics Touchpad” “SendCoreEvents”
EndSection

This is most importent and

Section “Module”
Load “synaptics”
EndSection

and

Section “InputDevice”
Identifier “Synaptics Touchpad”
Driver “synaptics”
Option
Option
Option
….
EndSection

Please researche the right options via google. but without this three sections, the Touchpad won’t run properly

I’m not able to bring the Audioservice up. The PulseAudio does not play. I ‘ll figgering out why.

David

Comment by david — April 12, 2009 @ 15:43
basil, I did:

yum install pulseaudio alsa-utils

After removing pulseaudio to reinstall it and alsa-utils. I then typed:

alsamixer and adjusted the volumes with that. I now have sound, but it’s choppy. I’m going to try deleting pulseaudio again to see if that’ll fix it.

Comment by anon — May 18, 2009 @ 17:57
After doing:

yum remove pulseaudio

yum install pulseaudio alsa-utils

yum remove pulseaudio

and adjusting the volume in alsamixer(just type alsamixer in terminal and adjust with arrow keys) my sound went from non-existant, to choppy, to normal. So it seems like installing alsa-utils and using alsamixer will fix the sound, while uninstalling pulseaudio will fix the choppiness. I’ve rebooted now and the sound still works.

Comment by anon — May 18, 2009 @ 18:05
Installed F11 from live usb on Acer Aspire One.
100MB /boot on SSD, / on left side SD-card.

mmcblk0: p1 is the last message I see after reboot. F11 fails to boot.

Comment by vlad — June 23, 2009 @ 10:28
GETTING SUSPEND AND HIBERNATE TO WORK

From the terminal, as root

echo mem > /sys/power/state

will suspend the system and

sudo echo disk > /sys/power/state

will hibernate it. Both of these commands work with no issues.

You can set either up to work with a keyboard shortcut or an awn launcher. The following example shows how to do this for suspend. Note that, for simplicity, I am going to assume you have sudo set up to work with no password. If you need help here, see http://fedorasolved.org/post-install-solutions/sudo

First, create a folder in your home directory, let’s call it sys_scripts. In this folder, you will need to create two files.
We shall call the first susp.sh and it should read:

#!/bin/bash
/usr/bin/terminal –command “sudo /home/your_username/sys_scripts/suspend.sh”

What this file does is open a terminal making it possible to call the second script, the one which actually does the lifting, as root. Now, create the second file, suspend.sh. The contents should be as follows:

#!/bin/bash
echo mem > /sys/power/state

Save the files and make them executable:

chmod +x /home/your_username/sys_scripts/*.sh

You can test by calling

~/sys_scripts/susp.sh

from a terminal. Now just set up your awn launcher or keyboard shortcut to call this script and you’re done.

Comment by eggdeng — June 26, 2009 @ 20:54
i hav an acer aspire one and i tryed what you told me but when i try to install fedora 11 it comes up with a silver screen and asking for a password. once i put the password in it has a blank box and at the bottom it says press tab to edit options but that just dissappears. then im just left with a silver screen and nothing happens. can u help. thanks

Comment by Tim — July 19, 2009 @ 19:05
I’ve read about installing Fedora 10 on Aspire one first on a small forum in my language http://linux-alternativa.com/site/component/content/article/34-articole-linux/53-fedora-10 , and they recomended your tutorial. You did excelent work. I installed Fedora 10 as you instructed, and later Fedora 11 and it works great. Thank you.

Comment by dan — September 15, 2009 @ 22:50
This is a great “how to” and I succeeded to do all the little details you suggested here; except that I do not need the LED for the Wifi.So very great thanks to Jorge for this work and the other authors giving the little tricks which help do optimise the use of Fedora11 on the AAO.
However, yesterday I made a software update and loaded about 78 packages. When I rebooted to my surprise all my peripherals were disabled: no Wifi; no detection of USB sticks; no extension SD card detected, which holds all my data to keep my tiny 8GB SSD clean.
So I have a AAO 110L, which works but is of no use since I can not go on the internet and can not read eg my SD cards from my Camera.
I rebooted the AAO with my USB stick with the Fedora 11 live image and it works: Wifi and USB and SD detection.
Any idea what could have happened. Is there a general switch which I have to work on in order to get the peripherals working again? I searched through “System” and System tools”; there is in principle the Selinux trouble shooter but I disabled it following the advice of this forum.
I would be greatful for help
Winfried

Comment by Winfried — October 12, 2009 @ 12:41
Great tutorial, I’ve followed it closely in order to install Fedora 10 on my A110 with 8 GB SSD and just 512 MB of RAM and it works fine. I’ve also learned new stuff :)

Comment by Iceman2160 — October 21, 2009 @ 19:11
Glad to know it worked well! You should check out the Fedora 11-documentation I’ve put up as well. :)

Comment by jorge — October 22, 2009 @ 08:42
Nice work. :) greap tuto.

I slove the lack of not detecting my 2 externals USB DVD, by setting a PXE server on my FC10 desktop, and using FC10 DVD as souce for the PXE server.

Comment by nomadeh — October 29, 2009 @ 02:05