rm-rf.ca

Repost of a blog entry from a few months back, I either accidentally deleted this or Wordpress ate it.

Color me impressed. I’ve developed a healthy skepticism of the Linux on laptops experience over the past few years, something always seems to be wrong, usually flaky suspend or wireless. I’ve had my Aspire One for about a month now and, looking for the most stable and consistent (but still recent) distro experience, I gave Ubuntu 8.10 a shot first. Today I switched it over to the Fedora 10 preview release, which went something like this:

Downloaded F10 Preview Live CD ISO and copied it to a USB stick with UNetbootin, which I absolutely love. Booted up and used F12 in the Aspire BIOS to boot off the stick and the Live CD interface came up no problem. Install to hard disk went smooth as can be, even with such a small screen anaconda displayed all config options fine and no buttons rendered off screen.

Once installed I was even more pleased.

Wireless picks up and works out of the box with the ath5k driver found in the more recent Linux kernel. Ubuntu required some minimal tweaking to get wireless working and even moved the ath5k driver off into a sub-package in a decision for the lesser of two evils. (I didn’t look into the details) Regardless it’s working great in Fedora.

Suspend working well (and quickly). Ubuntu was about the same although seemingly a little slower. I had one substantial problem with Ubuntu where the wireless wouldn’t work properly after resume maybe once every 5-10 times. (which I can live with) This problem appears to be in Fedora as well, NetworkManager showed me no access points after a resume, I couldn’t pinpoint the same error in the logs but I suspect it’s the same issue. I read that it may actually be a hardware issue where a register isn’t getting cleared properly. I have seen about 3 successful resumes before that.

UPDATE: A commenter on a past location for this post pointed me to wicd, using this instead of NetworkManager results in 100% reliable wireless on suspend/resume, it hasn't failed me once in the past 4 months.

Hibernate appears to be working, which didn’t work at all with Ubuntu and this is good news because the Aspire seems to chew through quite a bit of battery in suspend. It is undoubtedly slower but I use suspend/hibernate not for quick startup but to not have to re-open all my applications afterward.

Sound works out of the box in Fedora, which again was not the case in Ubuntu where a small config file edit was required.

Webcam works great with both Fedora and Ubuntu, Applications > Sound & Video > Cheese Webcam Booth > Profit $$$.

So it appears Fedora 10 scores significantly higher in terms of having things working out of the box and to be honest that surprised me a little. Very pleased with how it's looking.

UPDATE: Since writing this post I've also switched my desktop environment from GNOME to Lightweight X11 Desktop Environment (LXDE). The speed difference is stunning, GNOME runs ok but it chugs at times and you'll notice the panels go unresponsive for quite some time. LXDE is a drastically better choice IMO, it doesn't do everything GNOME does but for a netbook that's often a good thing.

Hacks

So you may notice that the Aspire One fan makes a fair bit of noise. I found out via the Ubuntu Aspire One wiki page (which also contains a number of other helpful performance tips) that the fan can be set to come on when the CPU reaches 70 C quite safely (CPU is healthy up to 90 C at which point it shuts down) with the following:

wget http://aceracpi.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/acer_ec/acer_ec.pl
wget http://electronpusher.org/~rachel/acerfand
chmod a+x acerfand
sudo cp acer_ec.pl acerfand /usr/local/bin/
sudo acerfand # to start it immediately
echo "/usr/local/bin/acerfand" >> /etc/rc.local

I also used the Ubuntu hack by adding a GNOME startup program (System > Preferences > Personal > System) to run a command that’ll disable the touchpad for a second after every key press. (it’s a little too easy to hit when you’re typing)

syndaemon -d -t -i 1

And I stole some more performance hacks from the Ubuntu page as well, I verified the files involved all seem to exist in Fedora so I assume these are still legit settings.

Add to /etc/rc.local:

# Economize the SSD
sysctl -w vm.swappiness=1 # Strongly discourage swapping
sysctl -w vm.vfs_cache_pressure=50 # Don't shrink the inode cache aggressively
 
# As in the rc.last.ctrl of Linpus
echo ondemand > /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq/scaling_governor
echo ondemand > /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu1/cpufreq/scaling_governor
cat /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq/ondemand/sampling_rate_max > /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq/ondemand/sampling_rate
 
echo 1500 > /proc/sys/vm/dirty_writeback_centisecs
echo 20 > /proc/sys/vm/dirty_ratio
echo 10 > /proc/sys/vm/dirty_background_ratio
 
echo 1 > /sys/devices/system/cpu/sched_smt_power_savings
echo 10 > /sys/module/snd_hda_intel/parameters/power_save
echo 5 > /proc/sys/vm/laptop_mode
 
#Decrease power usage of USB while idle
[ -L /sys/bus/usb/devices/1-5/power/level ] && echo auto > /sys/bus/usb/devices/1-5/power/level
[ -L /sys/bus/usb/devices/5-5/power/level ] && echo auto > /sys/bus/usb/devices/5-5/power/level