Tips to make Acer Aspire One 751h (AO751h) work better with Ubuntu

The new toy from Acer is a affordable netbook featuring HT Intel Atom Z520 and a 1366×768 11.” LED LCD.

Almost all the hardwre included inside thie “piece of iron” is good and works out of the box with Ubuntu 9.04 (a.k.a. Jaunty) updated to 2.6.28-15 linux kernel version, but some manual configuration is needed to leave all the (at least for me) important things working:

Graphics Driver

I can’t stand without complaining about the stupid fact that Intel ordered another corp to develop the drivers for Intel GMA500 graphics chip. Somebody contracted Tungsten Graphics to build a driver that makes Dell mini family work with this piece of hell… and they did! So we now have a unmaintained old graphics driver with a binary privative piece inside it and we have to push it inside a free software system. I’d like to thank Lucazade at this point for the efforts made for this crap to work.

After complaining, let’s go for work. Remember this word, it’ll be your obsession th next hour afer you read this post: poulsbo. All GMA500 stuff is labeled with poulsbo or psk keyword, so, you know, you can begin by apt-cache searching for this term.

Begin by adding the following unofficial repositories to your /etc/apt/sources.list

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/ubuntu-mobile/ppa/ubuntu jaunty main
deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/ubuntu-mobile/ppa/ubuntu jaunty main

And authorize PPA packages to be installed

sudo apt-key adv --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com --recv-keys C6598A30

If you arrived here, you’ll probably know what to do:

$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get install poulsbo-driver-2d poulsbo-driver-3d psb-firmware

But, this is not enough, you must compile and install a kernel driver (let DKMS do the work):

$ sudo apt-get install psb-kernel-source

Time to reboot now, next time you login you’ll see a beautiful 1366×768 3D accelerated desktop. No need to edit /etc/X11/xorg.conf for me, but you can do to enable horitzontal scrolling for synaptics touchpad.

If you want to enable desktop effects, locate /usr/bin/compiz and add psb at the beggining of the list in the line “WHITELIST”

WHITELIST="psb nvidia intel ati radeon i810 fglrx"

Now you can activate compiz by selecting System -> Appearance -> Visual Effects and clicking in “Normal”

Remember, if you update the kernel you must reinstall psb kernel module and if compiz-wrapper gets updated, you should edit it again and add psb to whitelist. You can read the long thread about GMA500, poulsbo and ubuntu at ubuntu forums here.

Wireless

ath5k works out of the box. I tried to enable Atheros unsuccessfully, but there’s no need to enable it because ath5k seems to work fine, despite of some messages about jumbo packages being logged in syslog. I will try to make Madwifi work when I have some time, it’s useful if you need to inject frames in a signal.

Suspend to RAM

All the info above can be easily found in the internet, but there is no info about suspend. Suspend works out of the box, but it got broken when you installed psb video driver (Did i told this is a piece of shit?) and I can’t imagine a laptop that can’t be suspended. Fortunately Wander Boessenkool published a patch to hal mailing list. You must locate /usr/share/hal/fdi/information/10freedesktop/20-video-quirk-pm-acer.fdi and add the following at the end (before the last </match>):

<match key="system.hardware.product" string="AO751h">
   <merge key="power_management.quirk.dpms_on" type="bool">true</merge>
   <merge key="power_management.quirk.vbemode_restore" type="bool">true</merge>
   <merge key="power_management.quirk.vbestate_restore" type="bool">true</merge>
 </match>

This patch shouldn’t take too many time to be included in ubuntu hal packages. Remember to edit it it again if you update hal.

I couldn’t get suspend working by closing the lid. I’m working on ot and will update when it works.

Updated: It works fine by setting it in System -> Preferences -> Power Management

Enjoy the toy :-)