preparing netbook

This began mainly as a page for myself to remember how to prepare a netbook for the usage in an art exhibition. In this case it is a Acer Aspire One with a Linplus Linux which was rather usuable and actually run my installation First Person Spam several months in La Motte Servolex, France.

 

This is what I did to backup the installation to a gzipped file

dd if=/dev/sda | gzip > /mnt/windows/Backup/hdimage.gz

The kernel missed the usb joystick module which is essential for that installation, it uses a hacked gamepad as input

sudo cp joydev.ko /lib/modules/2.6.23.9lw/kernel/drivers/input/

maybe my circuitbending skills are not that good or the gamepad is to cheap, it can crash internally and reconnect the computer which leads to an assignment to another usb device adress so that the software cant find it anymore, making it necessary to restart the USB stack:

Restart USB :

sudo rmmod ehci_hcd

sudo modprobe ehci_hcd

It worked well and ran several months. But when I received the laptop it was rather mixed up. So I decided to reinstall everything but favored a complete and maintained Linux. I tried Xubuntu but had some difficulties with the screenresolution during the installationprocess making it impossible to reach some buttons. So I decided to use eeebuntu which is mainly for the Asus EEE netbooks but works also well on the One. The boot time is still very fast, cpu frequency scaling and suspend works, wifi works well with NetworkManager, camera almost works, runs in opencv applications which is important for me but also in Skype, it doesn't work in camorama for whatever reasons.

3D acceleration runs well too although I did manage to knock it out temporarly. After I connected the netbook to a big screen it decided to create a huge virtual display and since that it only uses the mesa software renderer. Reason was that the size of the virtual screen, written in the xorg config file, exceeded 2048 pixel and the intel driver couldn't handle it. By deleting the entry it came back but it took me a while to discover it.

Some Links:

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/AspireOne

If you prefer Fedora:

http://jorge.fbarr.net/2008/11/10/fedora-10-on-the-acer-aspire-one/

Lightweight webbrowser (the Aspire One 110L got only 512mb ram)

http://www.terminally-incoherent.com/blog/2007/10/02/lightweight-browser-rundown/