Fedora 16 on Acer Aspire One (A110L)

I should warn that F16 has been giving me a lot of wireless network disconnects under high network load; and also that Gnome3 is either good or bad, depending on your POV. I quite like it but think it has unaddressed weaknesses and weird UI defaults.

I think this is complete; but YMMV.

Create bootable Live CD image on a USB stick.

• I’m not giving instructions for this step here; the Fedora Site does a much better job of it than I can, all the info and downloads you need are there.
• Use the 32 bit Live CD image.
• If you see the boot starts but then you just get weird letters and patterns on the screen and the system becomes unresponsive.. Check you don’t have the 64 bit install media! It took me 10mins to figure what the hell was going on.
• Use a good USB stick, some cheap ones refuse to boot on the Aspire one. My Kingston DataTraveller works every time, but my SD Cruzer only worked once and has failed every time since.
• If having trouble with this a good alternative (one that I have used) is an external USB CD drive and a bootable CD/DVD.

Once you have booted from the Live Image and are on the desktop; move the cursor to the top left corner of the screen to open the Gnome3 menus. Click the ‘Install to Hard Drive‘ icon at the bottom of the ‘favourites’ panel to the left.

Follow the wizard!

• Keyboard (as appropriate; US English if unsure). Click on Next.
• Choose Basic Storage Devices. Click on Next.
• Hostname (eg: myserver.mydomain.co.uk). Click on Next.
• Nearest City (use the dropdown or map). Click on Next.
• Choose a strong root password, enter it twice, try not to forget it! Click on Next.

Now we come to the tricky part: Disk layout.

• On the first screen; select ‘Use All Space‘ from the installation types, unselect ‘Use LVM‘, select ‘Review and Modify Partitioning Layout‘. Click on Next.
• On the following screen select and use the arrow button to copy just the internal HD (ATA) device from the top of the list to the ‘Install Target Devices’ column; don’t select the Boot stick or your SD card homedir (if you use one). Click on Next.
• This next screen is the trickiest:
  We will work on the ‘sda‘ device, this is the SSD HD in a standard A110, the ‘sdb‘ device is the USB stick, and ‘mmcblk0‘ (if present) is for SD card homedirs.
  Select and delete the Swap partition (sda3 on my device).
  The list should now adjust its scheme to fill the disk without having swap; leaving the root partition (mount point=’/‘) as sda3 and occupying all the space previously assigned to swap (7193Mb on my device).
  When finished you should have something rather like this:
  
  [Note that I have a SD card at mmcblk0 which has my homedir on it, so I am not formatting it, the installer incorrectly identifies this as a ext2 filesystem. ]
• Get a pen and paper: Write down the device identifiers for the / and /boot disk partitions (by default ‘sda3‘ and ‘sda2‘ respectively). You will need to know this later when we turn journalling off.
  Click on Next.
• Say ‘Yes’ to the ‘Are you sure you do not want a swap partition?’ popup; for the SSD in the A110 swap is a bad idea, extremely slow and really just a waste of disk space. Which is why I strongly recommend deleting it in the previous screen.
• Click ‘Write Changes to Disk‘ on the next popup (having first double-checked that you have any backups you need.. BlaBlaBla..) and the filesystems will be created.
• On the final screen; leave the bootloader on /dev/sda. Click on Next.

The system should now install to the SSD (Hard Drive), this takes a few minutes.. Once it completes select Reboot (remember to boot from the system disk, not the USB stick!)

The system will reboot back into the install wizard, follow this to complete the final config steps, begin by pressing ‘Forward‘, look at the open licence and then go ‘Forward‘.

• Check the Date/Time is OK, I strongly recommend selecting the ‘Synchronise date and time over the network’ option (accept the default pool server list if unsure what to do there).
• Create a normal user account, and select the ‘add to administrators group’ option to make your life easier later on.
• Submitting a hardware profile is good; it lets the Fedora folks know that NetBooks are still being used.

You should now have a functioning system.

I suggest logging in and setting up a network connection at this point; the system will be quite functional, but there are still a few things we can do to perk up it’s performance.

Now it is time to ‘fix’ Some stuff.

In this next section you need to be able to open a terminal, sudo to root and edit files (with nano/vi/gedit/whatever). If you are comfortable with this then go right ahead, if not I suggest you start at some of the excellent online Linux guides and come back once you have a ‘root prompt‘ open. If you are new to Unix I think you will find nano much easier to use for editing files than vi.

Protips:

• Get online and enable the sshd service (‘# systemctl enable sshd.service ; systemctl start sshd.service‘) and open up the firewall for it; eg. via ‘# system-config-firewall').
  Logging in via SSH from a desktop machine made doing all the stuff below much easier (cut/paste on a big screen and mouse etc..
• I also installed ‘screen‘ (# yum install screen so that the update process could be detached without stopping when I disconnect from SSH.

First: we will set disk optimisations and set up some ‘ramdisks’ on the system for temporary and log files.

• Log in as root on a terminal; edit the mount map file
  # vi /etc/fstab
• Add ‘,noatime,nodiratime‘ after the ‘defaults‘ option for the ext4 disks already listed.
• Add tempfs (ramdisk) entries for some temporary filesystems that would otherwise live on the (very slow) SSD: /var/log /tmp and /var/tmp.
  [Putting the logfiles on a ramdisk has means you loose all your logs at every reboot, but saves loads of write cycles on the disk. If you have an issue where you need to keep logs you can simply comment out this entry while debugging it.]
• When complete my fstab looked like this:
  

  #
UUID=12345678-abcd-abcd-9009-123456789abc / ext4 defaults,noatime,nodiratime 1 1
UUID=87654321-dcba-dcba-8bb8-cba987654321 /boot ext4 defaults,noatime,nodiratime 1 2
tmpfs /var/log tmpfs defaults 0 0
tmpfs /tmp tmpfs defaults 0 0
tmpfs /var/tmp tmpfs defaults 0 0

• If you have a SD card in the left hand card slot to use for home directories you can also add:
  

  # Home directories on left hand SD card
/dev/mmcblk0p1 /home xfs defaults,noatime,nodiratime 0 0

  [Note: I use XFS instead of EXT for the filesystem type since EXT filesystems on SD cards can be corrupted by one of many bugs with Suspend. This might be fixed for Fedora 16 (it was definitely broken at Fedora 14) but I really cant be bothered to check.]

Tip: Try a reboot of the system now. The fstab file is very syntax sensitive, and a mistake in it can stop the system fully booting. It can be fixed via the emergency prompt you get dumped to, or you can restart the install from scratch if you cant work it out.

Change the location of the YUM log so that it is not on a virtual filesystem, this lets you keep your updates history intact; I simply dump it on the root of the filesystem.

• # vi /etc/yum.conf
• edit the line for the logfile; eg: ‘logfile=/yum.log‘

Use Jorges changes to some kernel parameters.

# vi /etc/sysctl.conf, add the following to the end:

# Economize the SSD
# Strongly discourage swapping (default 60)
vm.swappiness = 1
# Don't shrink the inode cache aggressively (default 100)
vm.vfs_cache_pressure = 50
# Make system wait longer before writing dirty data (default 500)
vm.dirty_writeback_centisecs = 1500
# Laptop mode setting tries to minimise disk power usage. (default 0=0ff)
vm.laptop_mode = 5

• We no longer need to set vm.dirty_ratio = 20 and vm.dirty_background_ratio = 10 since these now seem to be the default with Fedora 16.

Run a script that changes some device settings at startup (there may be a better way to do this, but if so I have not come across it, all tips gratefully received!)

• Create and edit a new file:
  # vi /etc/rc.d/rc.local
• Copy/paste the following into it:
  [Remove the mmcblk0 lines if you do not use a separate homedir in the left hand SD card slot].

  #!/bin/sh
# 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

• Make this file executable:
  # chmod 755 /etc/rc.d/rc.local
• Enable the service that runs this at boot time:
  # systemctl enable rc-local.service (ignore the warning)

Disable SElinux in the kernel (This saves resources and keeps the system responsive)

• # vi /etc/sysconfig/selinux
  Change the ‘default’ line to say:
  SELINUX=disabled
• SElinux will now be disabled after next reboot.
• You are not reducing the security of your machine much; SELinux is currently configured for protecting webservers etc, not personal PC’s. The disadvantages of running it on a netbook far outweigh any positives.

Disable Yum Presto with:

• # yum remove yum-presto
• Presto works well on systems with a nice big fast HDD; but is catastrophic to yum’s performance on a slow disk like the A110′s.

Now we want to make two changes to the kernel boot parameters, the first forces the use of the best access mode (elevator) for the SSD disk; the second makes suspend work properly if you use a the left hand SD card slot (thanks to JB for this trick).

• Edit the grub2 config file:
  # vi /etc/default/grub
• Add ‘ elevator=noop mmc_core.removable=0‘ to the default Grub commandline so that it looks like this:
  

  GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX="rd.md=0 rd.lvm=0 rd.dm=0 KEYTABLE=us quiet SYSFONT=latarcyrheb-sun16 rhgb rd.luks=0 LANG=en_US.UTF-8 elevator=noop mmc_core.removable=0"

• Then rebuild the grub config with the following command:
  # grub2-mkconfig -o /boot/grub2/grub.cfg

This final step is awkward and slightly risky.. but saves write cycles on the SSD and is worth doing.

• Reboot the netbook from the USB live stick like you did to begin the install
• Open a terminal and become the root user via the ‘su‘ command
  [liveuser@localhost ~]$ su -
• run tune2fs to remove the disk journals:
  This command can only be run on inactive filesystems; which is why we had to reboot from the USB media.
  [This example assumes the disk devices you noted when specifying the disk layout are the defaults; adjust this if you used a different partitioning layout when originally installing.]
  # tune2fs -O ^has_journal /dev/sda3
# tune2fs -O ^has_journal /dev/sda2

Reboot the system normally (if you only see ‘Suspend‘ in the user menu, press the ‘ALT‘ key to see the correct option and marvel at the stupidity of the Gnome 3 team when they imposed that on their users);

Now; your system should be running Fedora 16 about as well as it can. We are finally ready to do our first system update; it takes several hours at present (2 weeks after release there were 166+ packages to update.)

# yum update

• Look at the list, groan, press ‘Y‘ and remember you’ll need more than a cup of coffee to wait this one out.

Have fun…

You should follow some of the many existing Fedora 16 guides for installing Flash, gstreamer plugins, chrome, etc..

What works:

• As far as I can tell and have tested: pretty much everything; webcam, speakers, microphone, cooling (fan on/off), wifi, ethernet, r/h card reader, function keys, touchpad, suspend.
• I have not tried multi-monitor mode, but I expect that works properly too.

What Fails:

• The 2 small known issues are that sony memorysticks wont work in the r/h card slot, and the wireless switch on the case is not working.
• The big known issue is that the WiFi flakes out under high sustained load, it’s a pretty fundamental problem too, the network simply stops responding without generating any errors or warnings.
  This is really annoying when it happens, but does not actually affect me too much in my daily use. Mostly it prevents me using the machine as a media player (but I have an Android tablet which is better for that anyway).
  I have not had a chance to investigate this further, unless it becomes a bigger issue I probably wont either..
• Hibernate (suspend to disk) is not available because we have disabled the swapfile, this is no huge loss since hibernate is very slow with the SSD disk.

Thinks I would like to write up properly here but probably never will;

• Install the tweak tool: # yum install gnome-tweak-tool
  This will make a ‘Advanced Settings’ application appear in the applications menu.
• Install Fusion repos and then install vlc+gstreamer codecs in order to get a working media player.
• Install Adobe repo and flash to get bbc radio player working
• WeightWatchers; trim some fat from the install. Things that a netbook never needs.