Ubuntu Netbook Remix on an Acer Aspire One A110 24 Sep 09

For my weeks on call, Brightbox let me choose an ultra-mobile (netbook) PC. This will allow me to leave the house without having to carry a heavy full-size laptop with me.

I wanted one that worked well with Linux, preferably Ubuntu Netbook Remix, had SSD rather than hard disk, and built-in 3G connectivity.

I’ve picked the Acer Aspire One (AAO) A110. It was available in the UK from Tesco in this spec with 1GB of RAM for GBP 179 – a bargain.

It came with a truly dreadful pre-installed build of Windows XP Home. Very slow and very much not recommended. Ubuntu Netbook Remix is, on the other hand, superb.

I’ve installed the pre-release Ubuntu 9.10 “Karmic”. Here’s what I’ve found that’s specific to the A110. I’ve written up these notes in the hope that they’ll be useful to someone else thinking of running Linux on an AAO. While there is a wealth of information about it out on the Internet, it’s not all collected together in one place.

• The 3G unit is an Option GTM380 (USB ID 0af0:7211). SIM card goes in behind the battery in a very strange orientation – connectors facing outwards – but the correct orientation is the only one it will click home in. This is a good card and works well out-of-the-box in Ubuntu. I’m using a “3″ PAYG SIM in it, with the “50p for a day’s Internet” offer, but it’s unlocked for all networks – if 3 isn’t available, I can pop in the SIM from my own phone very quickly.
• The wireless toggle switch on the front works in a slightly unexpected way. When “disabled”, both the 3G and Wifi interfaces still appear to the OS and can be configured – but their radio interfaces appear to be disabled so they can’t communicate.
• The 3G Wifi, sound, webcam, keyboard and synaptics touchpad all worked fine out-of-the-box. There are widespread complaints on the Internet about the poor quality of driver support for the Atheros
  chipset the wifi uses, but it’s fine for me in Ubuntu Karmic.
• The left-hand SecureDigital card slot works as shipped, but the right-hand (multi-card) one is not detected. To fix this, edit the kernel command-line (in /etc/default/grub) and append “pciehp.pciehp_force=1″, then run update-grub2 and reboot.
• The above SD slot fix also fixes suspend; without it, the AAO hangs on resume.
• The SSD is quite a lot slower than a traditional hard disk, but uses less power and is more robust. To compensate for the slowness there are a few things we can do.
  • Mount the root filesystem “noatime”. This stops it from recording the last time every file has been accessed – a functionality few people need. Add “noatime” to the options for “/” in /etc/fstab to do this.
  • By default, Linux tries to combine hard disk activity involvin parts of the disk which are close together. Normally, this is faster because it reduces the amount of (slow) seeking the disk has to do. The SSD is solid-state, so seeking is free – we can get quite a speed-up from disabling this behaviour by adding “elevator=noop” to the kernel commandline. In the new Karmic grub2 this is controlled from
    /etc/default/grub, and you need to run “update-grub2″ after editing it.
  • If you want to take this a bit further, you can reduce the amount of syslog logging, or have syslog log to a tmpfs (memory) filesystem.

• The BIOS will control the internal fan adequately, but it’ll end up turned on quite a lot. It’s pretty quiet, but you can silence it completely by turning it off unless the AAO’s innards are properly warm.
  Beware if you play with this that it may be possible to cause permanent damage to the AAO by overheating if you set these values incorrectly. You may also render your AAO inaccessible by causing it to become just pleasantly warm, which results in your cat going to sleep on top of it.
  • Fetch the “acerhdf” source from http://piie.net/index.php?section=acerhdf; I’m using 0.5.17 with Ubuntu’s 2.6.31 kernel.
  • You’ll need the Ubuntu linux-kernel-headers package installed, and the C compiler & libraries; if you install the “build-essential” package, it depends on everything you’ll need and it’ll all get installed for you.
  • untar, “make” and “make install” the acerhdf module.
  • As of 0.5.17, the module behaves slightly differently to how its README file suggests. What you now need to do is:
    - “modprobe acerhdf verbose=1″
    - Watch the kernel log (dmesg) to see if it’s outputting succesfully
    - If it is, then add the module to your /etc/modules with your desired parameters – I’m using “acerhdf fanon=75 fanoff=70 verbose=1″
    - Enable it by adding a line above the “exit 0″ in your /etc/rc.local: “echo -n “enabled” > /sys/class/thermal/thermal_zone0/mode”. It will then take effect at next reboot
• BIOS flash – if you have anything before v3309, upgrade to get worthwhile fixes (eg to the card readers). Alternatively, Packard Bell and Gateway 2000 both make a model of Netbook which shares hardware with the AAO.I like the Gateway 2000 BIOS because
  • It changes the BIOS logo to a cow-coloured cube.
  • It provides a better choice of screen brightnesses, specifically giving the option of a really low brightness level, which saves battery power and is still ample for low-light conditions.
  • Fetch it from here – note that this probably voids your warranty:
    http://sites.google.com/site/maclesblogspotcom/BIOS/PBG

Useful AAO links

• AAO blog http://macles.blogspot.com/
• AAO Ubuntu pages https://help.ubuntu.com/community/AspireOne
• AAO forums http://www.aspireoneuser.com/forum/

Some non-AAO-specific suggestions

• Throw out Firefox and get Google Chrome installed. The Linux version is now more than ready for everyday use.
• If you want remote-control of your Netbook (eg as you configure it), the VNC Server package for the Ubuntu desktop is called “vino”. It’s not installed by default in UNR.
• I strongly recommend removing the “quiet” and “splash” options from the Kernel command line – again in /etc/default/grub. This removes the pretty graphical effects at boot-time, but allows you to see what’s happened if something goes wrong.