System Clock

This wasn't an issue on my Acer, but part of the reason for this blog is to be a resource for me later on as I'm trying to learn Linux a little at a time. I couldn't get my clock to change for me... ever since DST, I've been an hour behind... I stumbled across a way to get it updated.

sudo ntpdate pool.ntp.org

Touchpad Issues

A few weeks back, I had installed Fedora 10 onto my netbook, and during some of my updates I had some issues that resulted in me trying to get to a terminal by pressing ctrl+alt+Fx buttons. Then after making some changes, all of a sudden my touchpad wasn't working. I spent a couple days trying to get other things to work while using an optical mouse, so I didn't really care too much. Then I noticed that when I running the live version of Moblin (prior to installing it) that the mouse touchpad was still not working, which led me to believe it was a hardware issue, I had taken the case apart to upgrade the RAM.

Long story short... after a few hours of research, I found that pressing Fn+F7 fixed the issue. I must have accidentally pressed it when trying to switch to a terminal during troubleshooting.

Assuming that someone may actually have this same issue and runs across my blog... perchance, they will only feel like a little bit of an idiot, rather than the complete idiot that I felt like... unless of course it took you 3 hours to find my blog. Hope I helped.

Lost /home in Kubuntu

So, I had my home set up in ext4 format on my SDHC card running in my left card reader... I don't know if this was part of the problem or not, but everything was pretty much corrupted. I thought that I could restore things using the fsck command, but that ended up going on forever. I thought maybe a mke2fs would work, but that ended up changing the filesystem from ext4 to ext2. I decided just to keep it as ext2, then set up a partition table for it, as that was part of the problem. Of course this changed the UUID of the SDHC card, so I had to update my fstab to reflect both the ext2 and uuid differences for automounting as /home. Now that my card would pass the fsck as clean, it was completely wiped.

To get a working user set up, I had to add a user...

sudo adduser test

which creates a user named test with the default settings from your /etc folder which is not on the SDHC card, so I figured this would work. I logged in as test, then rebooted the computer to a command prompt and logged back in under my own user as I still could not log in at the login screen using my user to create my user directory using the mkdir command. from my home directory I copied the test folders contents into my user directory using

sudo cp -rP /home/test/* /home/username/.

then change the owner of the files from root to me by changing directory to your user folder

sudo chown username:username *
sudo chown username:username .*

and wallah... it seems to be working for now, but none of my settings, but I can use my OS again... time to start making backups... luckily I didn't have anything important yet.

Flashing the BIOS

First you'll need to go to the official Acer website and download the latest BIOS zip file.

You'll have to make a Dos Bootable USB Stick, I used UNetBootin to make a FreeDos bootable USB drive by selecting FreeDos from the dropdown menu. It downloads FreeDos and prepares your thumbdrive for you. When that's done, I extracted the files from the zip to my newly created bootable usb.

Now just reboot your computer, press F12 at the Startup screen to select your bootable devices. Select your USB Drive, and then you'll have to use DOS commands to change to the location where your .bat file is... usually c:, and then the name of the .bat file to get it to run (i.e. 33-9.bat)... make sure your computer is plugged in, then it will flash your bios and restart on it's own.

Here's another guide if this didn't help.

Acer Mods

Initially, my Acer One came with 1GB of Ram. It's only expandable to 1.5 GB of RAM, which doesn't sound like a lot, but that's a 50% increase in memory capability and depending on the OS you're running this is a significant amount.

Find out how to add the RAM, or do other mods here, at http://tnkgrl.wordpress.com/category/aspire-one/. It was very helpful for me and may help you in the process, although it will void your warranty when modifying your netbook.

Linux Distros on the Acer

Fedora 10 Red Hat free project, and it seems to work pretty well on the acer, wireless works out of the box.
Moblin short for Mobile Linux is based off of Fedora, designed for the Intel Atom chipsets booting up in less than 10 seconds, but is still in the early development and needs some work as far as support and applications go.
Ubuntu Netbook Remix is a "remix" of ubuntu for the netbooks... duh. Still ubuntu, just in a different package to maximize screen real estate.
Kuki Linux just released their Alpha and it's designed specifically for the Acer Aspire One and is based off of Ubuntu.
Linpus Linux Light is a lightweight Linux distrubution that was shipped on many Acer One's. I haven't tried it myself. Just downloaded it, you know to mess around with it, I've heard it's kind of limited.
Puppy Linux is very lightweight distribution (95MB download) that loads completely to RAM. I have yet to get the wireless to work for it though. Look here if you're interested in trying it out.

On the Aspire One, I've used Kubuntu 7.10, 8.10, and 9.04 (beta), UNR (Ubuntu 8.04 Netbook Remix), Fedora 10, Moblin, and the Live versions of Mint and Puppy Linux.

My Setup

Currently I have the Kubuntu 9.04 Jaunty Beta running on my machine (http://releases.ubuntu.com/releases/kubuntu/9.04/)
My current setup is as follows:
/ (root) directory on SSD in EXT4 with no SWAP partition
/home directory on 8GB SDHC card in the left card reader in EXT4 format.

The first thing I had to worry about after install was getting the wireless to work. I had to finagle with the following to get it to work:
- First I had to install linux-backports-modules-jaunty per https://help.ubuntu.com/community/AspireOne community documentation.
- I blacklisted ath_wmi and ath_pci and added ath5k to the modules list. append to your /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf file.

blacklist ath_wmi
blacklist ath_pci

append to your /etc/modules file

ath5k

- If the above doesn't work, mess with the madwifi drivers enabling in jockey (after I had first selected them, I deselected them), but I would not mess with this unless it's not working for you at this point.

My Acer Aspire One

Acer Aspire One
Model: ZG5
Processor: Intel Atom CPU N270 @1.60GHz
Screen: 8.9" LCD 1024 x 600 DPI
Hard Drive: 8 GB SSD (SSDPAMM0008G1)
Memory: 1.5 GB RAM
Networking: Atheros Wifi and Realtek Fast Ethernet connection
Accessories: 3 USB2 ports, SDHC Card Reader, 5-in-1 Card reader
Video: Intel Mobile 945GMSE Chipset, VGA ouput
Audio: Intel 82801G (ICH7 Family) HDA
Webcam: 1.3 MegaPixel and Mic