The sun is shining for a change, so I’m heading outside for the rest of the day. You know, catch some rays and relax, maybe make myself a Mojito or some other cocktail. I suggest you all do the same! See you when I get back.

Some Acer Aspire One netbooks out there suffer from a noisy fan. Mine too and it was really starting to drive me crazy. I really wouldn’t want to be caught using it in a quiet place like a library for example. Luckily there’s a couple of scripts you can use to control the fan. The aspireone.net Wiki has all the details, but here’s a quick rundown of what you need to do to get rid of the noise:

• download the acerfand daemon script
• download the acer_ec.pl script (direct download)
• Copy both files to /usr/local/bin
• make acerfand executable using chmod 755 /usr/local/bin/acerfand
• open /etc/rc.local as root (or use sudo) and add /usr/local/bin/acerfand at the end of the file

You can create an /etc/acerfand.conf configuration file if you like, but that’s an optional extra (see the Wiki entry for details). After I followed the steps outlined above I haven’t heard the fan on my Aspire One anymore. Of course, your mileage may vary.

Nail, head, hit, andsoforth.

Well, I kind of went ahead and got myself an Acer Aspire One. You know, one of those netbook devices that are all the hype at the moment. Asus kind of got the ball rolling with their Eee PC a while back and ever since similar devices have been appearing left and right (Wind, Cloudbook, Mini-note, etc).

At first I didn’t really feel the need to reinstall the OS since it ran a Redhat version of sorts (Linpus Lite). Hey, Linux is Linux, right? I found out the hard way though that upgrading the system using yum is a bad idea. Apparently Acer patched a couple of libraries (libpurple and the Xfce panel code to name only two). To say a couple of things broke is a bit of an understatement. I figured it was time to give Ubuntu a whirl.

I was aware that I would be losing the 15 second boot time and I knew some hardware might not work as well, but on the flipside I would have a system I could fully customize. The installation procedure is quite simple: create a USB pen Ubuntu installer, boot the device from it, install the OS and do a full update/dist-upgrade, compile and install the wireless drivers and do some system tweaking (mostly to not wear out the SSD too fast). It all went pretty smooth and I now have a cute little Ubuntu laptop. Then again I already had Ubuntu running on my Dell X1 from work. Still, the Aspire One is quite a bit smaller. So there! :D

Anyway, in case you might be looking for some resources on how to install Ubuntu on an Aspire One yourself, here’s a little list of links you can root through for some more information (some contain different tweaks to basically do the same thing, so you might have to do some experimenting).

• the main howto on the Ubuntu wiki
• Install Ubuntu Hardy (8.04.1) Guide
• Debian on the Aspire One
• kodos.wordpress.com’s blog entries on the topic

Something I noticed was that, in the section where they create some tmpfs volumes to store /tmp, /var and the likes, they also create a tmpfs volume for /var/log/apt. It doesn’t work for that directory though, so you might as well just remove that one line from /etc/fstab. To fix it: simply add the following script to /etc/rc.local to create the directory in case it doesn’t exist:

#!/bin/sh
if ! [ -d /var/log/apt ]; then
mkdir /var/log/apt
fi


I checked the boottime and startup bottlenecks using bootchart and I’m somewhere around 30 seconds now. Double that of Linpus, but still not too bad for an Ubuntu system with everything running. Oh word to the wise: don’t try hibernation with this setup, it can cause file corruption in some cases.

There’s a couple of tough ones in there. Try it yourself.