Fedora 14 on Acer Aspire One (A110L)

Obsolete! Fedora 14 is now so old that it is no longer provided or supported by the Fedora Project:

I did not do a Fedora 15 version of this guide; but there is now a Fedora 16 A110 guide!

I have F14 working beautifully on my Acer Aspire A110L (that’s the original model with the really slow 8Gb SSD drive); the purpose of this article is to show how.

• There are other guides out there, a lot of the info and inspirations for this article came from them, but all of them also suffer from being either outdated, or full of weirdness. Here is my attempt at something properly definitive.

Please note; several steps are presented as ‘just do this’; the idea is that if you cannot do this for yourself, or find the relevant guides on line, then Fedora is not a very good match for you. At least not on a Aspire One Netbook which needs some detailed customisation to really run well.

• If you want to try a modern Linux desktop on your Aspire One, but have not tried Linux before; use Ubuntu for Netbooks.. it is much better for beginners than Fedora; and is well supported.
• If you really want to learn the technical side of Linux with Fedora (not a bad idea.. it’s a good learning environment) try a ‘commodity’ PC or laptop manufactured between 2 and 8 years ago.. It’s likely to be very well supported, have fewer ‘quirks’, and will be a much nicer experience all round.
• I’m sorry if this is ‘Brutal’; but I do not have time or energy to answer ‘Ow duz I prog my USB stik?loozer!’ type comments.

This is not a professional guide; and is still a little crappy in parts, you have been warned!
23/Nov/2010

• Download Fedora 14 (x686) Live.
• Prepare a USB boot stick (or a CD/DVD+USB Drive) and boot the Fedora 14 i686 Live Install.
  • Not all USB sticks boot properly on the A110; I have always had success with a decent (ie: expensive..) Kingston Datatraveller
• Use the far more detailed instructions Jeorgs excellent site to do the initial install; and disk optimisations.
• I wish I had the time to re-write his instructions since his they are both good and bad.. unfortunately they have not really been modified since the Fedora 12 days, but Linux and Fedora itself have moved on.
• Do the Fedora install via the ‘Install’ button on the live desktop, when the installer exits back to the live desktop you can do the optimisations below before the first reboot!
• Do not use a swapfile unless you only have a 512Mb Ram model and plan on running a lot of really big applications (like Openoffice and FireFox and The Gimp simultaneously).
  • I ran for six months with no swap and only 512Mb ram before I upgraded with another Gb.. and never saw any problems!
  • The only other reason to have a swapfile is if you want to enable Hibernation.
• Remove the Journaling on the ext4 partitions.. This is really easy to write here but quite complex to do; Jeorgs site has the instructions, I’d love to write this up again here but don’t have time or energy to do it.
• Disable Yum Presto; run 'sudo yum remove yum-presto' in a command prompt!
  • Presto saves time on ‘proper’ desktop systems but totally overloads the slow SSD disk in the A110, making updates run much slower, not faster
• Use Jeorgs changes for /etc/sysctl.conf
• Do not use the settings given there for /etc/rc.d/rc.local: This is better:
  

  # Owens SSD/ASpire Mods
  #
  # Use the deadline scheduler
  echo -n "deadline" >| /sys/block/sda/queue/scheduler
  echo -n "deadline" >| /sys/block/mmcblk0/queue/scheduler
  #
  # Stop disk activity being batched; not sensible on SSD.
  echo -n "1" >| /sys/block/sda/queue/iosched/fifo_batch
  echo -n "1" >| /sys/block/mmcblk0/queue/iosched/fifo_batch
  #
  # Keep the fan working properly..
  echo -n "enabled" >| /sys/class/thermal/thermal_zone0/mode
  #
  # Make the sound subsystem go off 10s after playback stops.
  echo 10 > /sys/module/snd_hda_intel/parameters/power_save
  #
  # SMT will fill first core+thread before starting others up; helps save power.
  echo 1 > /sys/devices/system/cpu/sched_smt_power_savings

  
  You can ignore the two entries for /sys/block/mmcblk0/ if you do not use a SD card in the left-hand slot for your user data.

• Before running 'yum update' for the first time; make sure journalling is disabled, scheduling is set to ‘deadline’ and the yum presto plugin has been disabled!

---

Notes:

• If you use a SD card for your home directory (usually in the LH card slot); do not format it with ext3/4, use XFS instead. There is a bug which causes the ext filesystems on the card readers to get corrupted if the machine goes into suspend. [Note: This error can be fixed with the 'testdisk' utility if you get caught out.]
• There is a bug with suspend (related to the above) that causes the machine to lock up when coming out of suspend mode, forcing a reboot. Disable suspend in the menus if you can, and set the power management to never allow the machine to sleep.
• Disable lots of unimportant stuff; there are services running by standard on Fedora which are good for a standalone desktop PC, but are not needed on a netbook.
• The actual parameters for the Fan can be seen (and set) at /sys/module/acerhdf/parameters/*

What Works:

• WiFi + Lights + Switch
• Function Keys: Sound, Brightness, Screen.
• Touchpad.
• Webcam.
• Wired Network.
• Sound (speakers).
• Microphone.
• Audio sockets (work; and override the built-in devices).
• Left hand SDHC card reader.
• All USB Ports.
• Fan (not continuously running).

..not properly tested but believed to work..

• Right Hand multicard reader (Memorysticks still fail..)

..and what does not!

• Playback of most (DivX+MP3) avi files in the default movie player fails; install and use VLC instead! (sudo yum install vlc).
• Suspend – Needs more testing but still appears to have problems with failure to resume and corruption of EXT filesystems on SD cards.
• Hibernate – Not available! it relies on swapspace to save it’s state to, but we have removed the swap on this low-end system..
• Memorysticks – Do not appear to work in R/H multi-card reader.
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
•