Installing Ubuntu Netbook Remix 10.10 on Acer Aspire One D150
Author: Simone Labels:: acer aspire one d150, Ubuntu netbook remixI just got a nice, little piece of hardware, the tiny, tiny Acer Aspire One D150. It shows a shiny 10.1 screen, 160Gb of hard drive, 1Gb of memory, and a few other nice features, including integrated mic and webcam.
It is, of course, ultraportable, which makes it very desirable for almost everybody, including my wife :) The processor is an Intel Atom, which delivers decent performance. Not stellar, but good.
This particular unit had the (in)famous Ubuntu Netbook Remix 10.04 on it, which I actually put myself. Not sure if you are asking yourself, but this was my mom's computer. She upgraded to a new Dell, and so...
Anyway, I wanted to stick with Ubuntu, but UNR 10.04 was very buggy and had something I considered very annoying, namely a very much reduced desktop space. So I decided to upgrade to the 10.10 version of UNR.
I always prefer a fresh new install to an upgrade and this case was no exception. Installation was quite fast and uneventful. Unfortunately, the wireless does not work during installation because of the proprietary firmware, and so one is forced to update the system later. The firmware is installed during the installation and so the wireless works out of the box. Actually almost everything does, which is always a good news and shows how much linux has evolved in the last few years.
The appearance of the new UNR 10.10 is great. The unity sidebar, which is very similar to the mac dock, is really cool, even though it has still a few glitches. Since unity is going to be the default in the new 11.04 Natty, I am expecting it to be much more stable and, above all, customizable. That is the big drawback of the sidebar: I have not been able to spot where the settings are for it. Thanks to the Ubuntu forums, I have figured out that I can add programs to it by right click on the icon when the program is running and select "Keep on the launcher".
Yeah, the right click... It looks like UNR has banned the right click from the whole environment. This is an open attempt at becoming more mac-like, but I am not sure I like it very much. The reason is that it takes now a few clicks to do things or access menus that were only a click away. This is not strictly a right click issue, in the sense that it does take now a few clicks to do almost everything. Why is it so, I have no idea. But for somebody that is used to optimization like I am (heck, my most accessed program is gnome-do, which, by the way, does not work very well) this may become a big waste of time.
UNR 10.10 performance is average. It is not snappy (10.04 wasn't either, I doubt the desktop edition would be better), but one can live with it. Notifications are reduced to the minimum, which means that you will find yourself wondering for several seconds if you really clicked that icon before the program appears. This happens notably with the ubuntu software center, which is awfully slow to open. Yeah, the little icon of the program wiggles on the sidebar, but this happens only when the program appears, not before, which completely defies the point.
Down to the dirty, here there are the post-installation issues I had to face.
- The mic has a very high level of noise. This is due to pulseaudio thinking the mic is two channel stereo and it is very noticeable in skype, less in other programs. There is an easy fix: Install pulseaudio controls (sudo apt-get install pavucontrol), then unlock the input channels. Reduce the volume of the right channel to zero, keep the left channel high (75% works for me). The noise will be reduced, even thought it will still be present. In some cases, this also solves the problem of muted mic. This problem impacts also the new gmail "Call phone" feature. Once you install the plugin and try to make a call, the plugin will reset both mic channels to the original setting, muting the microphone (and screwing your conversation). In order to solve this problem do the following:
cd ~/.config/google-googletalkplugin
gedit options (If the file does not exist, create it)
And insert the following in the file:
audio-flags=1
Save, reboot and make sure the microphone channels are decoupled and the right one level is at 0. Enjoy your free conversations!
- A big issue I still have is with power management. Out of the box, unplugging the power causes the unit to go on standby. This is, of course, unacceptable. The cause is that power management recognizes the event "unplugging the power" as "lid closing", and so it suspends the netbook. There is a simple workaround for this issue. Open gconf-editor by typing gconf-editor from the terminal (BTW, did I mention that Alt-F2 does not work? Too much mac is not so good, man!). Go to Apps -> Gnome-Power-Management -> Buttons. Where you see lid_ac and lid_battery, click on "suspend" and replace it with "nothing" (write it, with no quotes). Reboot (or restart power management) and it will work. Unfortunately, the netbook will not suspend when you close the lid, which my wife hates! The only way of solving this issue is to update the bios to the version v1.11 at least (the v1.13 is out at the moment I am writing). However, this operation is not very easy to do on this computer, since it does not have a floppy or a cd drive. There is a little utility called flashrom that can be used to flash the bios from within the operating system, but at the moment it has been reported to brick the unit, so I am not going to a attempt. I am at the moment looking at ways of flashing the bios through a usb stick, but I have not found anything yet.
So now you have your new little toy with a shiny Ubuntu on it. While the desktop 10.10 was great, this UNR 10.10 looks like a transitional release. Hopefully, in a few months most of the problems this release has will be solved in the new Natty 11.04.
Credit for the tweaks goes to various sources, including several posts in the Ubuntu forums (the first place to stop for help) and the google help forum. All the rest is mine! :) 0 comments |
