Opinionate:

This is Owens other weblog.
I plan to host all the 'other' stuff here; technology and opinion. Hopefully some `howto` articles; and other stuff that is not, in the great scheme of things, too important.

PS; there is no freedom of speech here.. It's my blog, I decide which comments stay and which go, and it is entirely according to my personal whims.
mmmKay?

Manipulate:

About

I have F12 working beautifully on my Acer Aspire A110 (that’s the original model with the really slow 8Gb SSD drive); the purpose of this article is to show you how.

Note; 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a lot of the info and inspirations for this article came from them, but all of them also suffer from being either outdated, or full of weirdness.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.

[I have decided not to try and write this up..]
The info is old, and I cannot exactly remember all the steps I took. I used a number of online ‘F12 on a netbook/A110′ sites to work out what I was doing, but trying to capture all that here would be quite a long excercise.

Instead, I plan to make a Fedora 13 on the A110 guide, and to fully document things when I upgrade to F13 later this year. These later Fedora releases are good for these Atom based netbooks, the kernel and many other subsystems now have a lot of stuff to optimise their hardware and SSD disk, and gnome makes a very nice Operating Environment. Until then, here are some hints: The full details on how to do all of these actions are ‘out there’ on the internet but I’m not putting them here for speed, when I do the F13 writeup I will be giving detailed steps and examples/syntax.

  • Do not use the presto plugin for yum, it hammers the SSD.
  • After initial install reboot the machine off a external drive and remove the journal from the installed filesystems, ext4 is good, but the journal is not needed for this sort of system, and again, hammers the SSD.
  • If you use a MMC card for your home directory (or other storage) do not format it with ext3/4, use XFS instead. There is a bug which causes the ext filesystems to get corrupted if the machine goes into suspend. (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.
  • Set elevator=deadline, this avoids the kernel treating the disk as a mechanical device, preventing optimisations that work well on a physical hard disk drive, but make no sense with an SSD.
  • Disable lots of unimportant stuff, there are many services running by standard on Fedora which are good for a standalone desktop PC, but are not needed on a netbook.