On 17/02/2009, Troy Dawson <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
>  Hi Simon,
>  I have just successfully booted my Acer AspireOne on the SL 5.3 Beta 2 Live
> CD.  I wasn't able to do that with SL 5.1 or SL 5.2.  So it looks like
> whatever the problems were, have gotten fixed with SL 5.3.
>  I know it's not fully released yet, but this looks good.
>

Hello Troy,

As promised I am reporting back with my results of trying to use SL 5.2.

First, here's a repost of the CentOS link (I make reference to it below):

http://wiki.centos.org/HowTos/Laptops/Acer/Aspire-One

Summary: I have got SL 5.2 running on the Aspire One, but I have had a
number of hurdles to overcome and I have had to implement a workaround
for the ethernet driver. I have not tried to get the wireless network
interface or the camera working as they are not needed by myself. I
used the general procedure in the above wiki, but made a number of
changes.

Detailed feedback is below:

Rather than take the options given in the wiki for using the supplied
Linpus operating system for some tasks, I used the SL 5.0 CD1 in
rescue mode, booted from an external USB drive instead; I wanted a
method which did not depend on having to boot the existing operating
system on the Aspire One.

BTW, when copying over the .ISO images from a USB stick, I needed to
insert the stick _before_ booting the SL 5.0 rescue mode. If I didn't
then the /dev/sdb* entries for the USB stick were not created when it
was inserted.

When I came to do the initial boot of the SL 5.2 CD, I didn't bother
extracting the required files from the ISO image of SL 5.2 CD1 as
suggested in the wiki and just booted SL 5.2 CD1 from the external DVD
drive before switching over to the /dev/sda1 based .iso images.

After installing SL 5.2, I used the SL 5.0 rescue mode to edit the
blacklist file to blacklist the r8169 driver.

I encountered major problems when trying to install the wired ethernet
driver as recommended in the wiki. The network came up and was usable
just fine on my home network (I used ssh and ftp between the Aspire
One and my primary desktop machine to test it), but a soft lockup
would occur _every_ time the interface was downed.

As this happens every time during system shutdown, I was unable to
perform a clean shutdown and as a result had a forced fsck on system
restart. Upgrading the kernel version, or switching between the .RPM
and the source kit from Realtek's website made no difference to the
behaviour.

In the end, I worked around the problem by altering the ifdown script
for ethernet devices to print a message and exit with status 0. This
works just fine for me, but be aware that the ethernet ifdown script
is the default script for networking devices which don't have their
own ifdown script and I haven't checked to see how the wireless
interface is handled.

BTW, if you have DHCP mode set on the wired ethernet device and the
cable is disconnected at system startup, it either hangs when bringing
up the interface or takes a very long time to timeout.

Sound works just fine after you install the latest kernel and then
apply the alsa driver from the link given in the wiki. The wiki does
appear to be out of date in one area regarding the alsa sound drivers
however, but I don't know if this specific to the version of the
machine I have or not (it had a 160GB drive installed instead of the
advertised 120GB, and I don't know if Acer have made changes to, for
example, the chipsets).

The suggestion in the wiki is to create a alsa-base file if necessary,
which includes a model type of "acer". I created this file after
installing the drivers to avoid having to do a second reboot if it was
necessary. This was a mistake as the file appears unnecessary and
using model=acer causes problems. I discovered the model type should
be acer-aspire on this machine with the current alsa drivers.

If you use model=acer then the internal speakers remain active after
plugging in headphones. If you omit the alsa-base file or use
model=acer-aspire, then the internal speakers are correctly muted when
a pair of headphones are plugged in. This is while using the SL 5.2
supplied music player with an mp3 sound track.

I hope this feedback proves useful to someone, but so far it's
certainly a nice machine for my requirements now it's got a full Linux
distribution on it.

Simon.

-- 
Simon Clubley
[log in to unmask]