Not Breaking an Acer Aspire One

Or how I remembered how little things have really moved on since I first disliked Unix.

Everything's still there, gently rotting in cyberspace, gathering crust and grime, getting steadily nastier with time. Well the software is free so you've no one to complain at. The machines are perfectly logical, but history's landed unix with a lot of illogical baggage. Is it "user" or "usr"? Of course sometimes it's the one and sometimes the other... you just have to remember which to use when. It's a shame that the machine can't use the huge amount of memory it now has to remember a little thing like that, really.

Anyway, here's how I made an Acer Aspire One machine (the one with the HDD and Linux) work reasonably well, recorded so I can do it all again when I brick the sucker the next time. It's all easy stuff, but somewhat frustrating until you know the path.

1 Initial Set up

Stuff you have to do to make the machine usable...

1.1  Menu

Change menu to right click.

1.2 Desktop

1.2.1 Remove Acer Desktop

Download the desktop switcher program from here.

Decompress and install it:

Once that's done there's a little icon on the task bar which you can click to switch to and from the original Aspire desktop, not that you're going to want to do that.

Taken from here.

1.2.2 Get rid of icons you don't need

Open a terminal session and type in:

cat > ~/.config/xfce4/desktop/xfdesktoprc

then hit enter and type:

[file-icons]
show-filesystem=false
show-home=false
show-trash=false

ctrl+z and it's done.

1.2.3 Remove Strange Menu Items

The menu is full of things which don't work (eg "help"), or which you don't want (eg "hotmail"), or which are duplicated and located randomly. Whilst it's quite fun hunting for things, it's not really what life's about. Run the "menu settings" thing, once you can find it, and delete the "system" include from that list. Then re-create the menu from the ground up, adding only the stuff which works/ which you need. If you're not sure what that is, then run through all the options, test them, write them down, then you can put them back in. The "system" thing is an include which I think you can't edit; once you're not using it, any changes you make are saved and it all works as you'd expect.

1.3 Add Supported Applications from Acer Site

You can get these elsewhere, but they're available in easy-to-install versions from Acer as follows:

Graphics - Gimp.

FTP - Filezilla (Skype is also there). Uninstall the old gFtp thing.

1.4 Video

Install VLC.

1.5 Audio

Install Amarok from the "add remove programs" menu. You need to select Amorok and also the "extras" or MP3 won't play.

1.6 Browser

Update Firefox to 3.*, and then the Flash player to 10.*.

1.7 Fan Control

The fan as shipped is very noise, at least in the hard disk system. This tweak makes the fin quiet when the machine is idle, but it still runs when you're playing Quake

First download acerfand and also acer_ec.pl

Open a terminal window in the download directory. Switch to the super user:

Type the root password at the prompt.

Copy the two downloaded files to their destination and set properties of acerfand:

Open /etc/rc.local and add /usr/local/bin/acerfand at the end of it.

Reboot the machine and the fan is quiet when the machine's idle.

Tweak taken from here.

1.8 Home Key

Make the home key do something sensible.

Tweak taken from here

2 Back It Up

It's remarkably easy to "brick" the AA1. Well it's not technically "bricked" as the factory restore will work, although be careful using the Acer recovery CD in any other machine. There's a defect in the supplied Acer CD, which will nuke your OS drive if you run it in a machine with more than one hard disk. No kidding, it happily nuked my operating system disk without so much as asking on boot - that CD is dangerous. What fun that was. You start with one stupid and dead machine, and then you have two. Research on this suggests that Acer's software just stomps on your MBR (master book record), but in my case it also wrote linux garbage to the disk, which I could not therefore recover. Thanks guys, where do I send the bill?

In any case restoring to factory configuration takes forever, and then you have to repeat all the garbage in (1) just to get back to where you were before. So backing up the OS seems like a good idea: this is the wild west of software. Anyway, after some research I burned a few dollars in a good cause and backed up my OS with the above tweaks like this. That keeps the cost of errors down a bit, but it's not quite enough.

This "standard" solution just backs up the whole Linpus partition to an external USB device (by design a USB key, but it works fine with an external hard disk too). That's well and good, but really I just want to back up the OS, as I can deal with backing up the data if the Acer is networked (see below). Talking with the developer of the scripts resulted in a new script which does precisely that... so now I can back up the OS or the data (or both) and recover either as necessary.

3 Network It

You can share folders from a non-password protected vista public folder set this way from a terminal session. Your IP address will differ, and in this case /mnt/home/net needs to already exist as an empty folder (no, really):

This works ok for a non-password protected NTFS folder such as the default Windows "Public" one. For other shares you need to set permissions on the share and the shared folder itself so that everyone can see it. All a bit hack really.

"smb4k" is in the built-in "add/ remove software" list and it should browse network shares on Windows machines, but it's unrealiable in my experience. Old Samba implementations seem to have trouble with Vista shares, although I'm not sure if that's the problem. Anyway, Konquerer itself seems to work rather better, and that's also a better file manager than "Thunar". So install that and you have "network neighbourhood" on the Acer.

Oh, and install "Gwenview" whilst  you're at it so you can get decent image viewing built in to the file browser.

4 Brick Yourself

Actually, "brick" the machine. The Acer can crash in lots of interesting ways, one of which involves crashing the BIOS. No kidding. The symptoms are what you'd expect: the screen goes black and all the lights go out. Well the battery-charge light is still on if it's connected to the mains, which it needs to be for what you have to do next.

You could get the packaging out and start wrapping it up to send back to the supplier, or you can take a look at this rather useful post which explains something Acer left out of the documentation. It's actually very simple: get the files, stick them on your USB stick used for OS backups as above, hold Fn and Esc and switch the brick on. Magically it updates its BIOS and works again.

I'm not sure if I should think: "oh, that's good, as now I can save it if the OS crashes, or if the BIOS crashed", or if I should think: "WTF am I doing with a machine which is this flakey?".