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]