Acer Aspire One

Contents

Acer Aspire One with Debian Lenny

2009-06-21

Finally gave up fighting with Linpus, now putting Debian Lenny on it.

Tips moved to DebianLinux, because they're not anymore related to the Acer Aspire

Acer Aspire One with Linpus Linux

Foreword Here I will give some hints for modifying the Linpus Linux shipped with the Acer Aspire One. I will only cover things I did not found somewhere else :-)

Disclaimer
The modifications presented here can break your system! Know what you're doing before following my ideas here - and always have a backup at hand!

Install: mplayer with full codec support

2008-12-28

The default version of mplayer only has limited video playback abilities. To view videos also on the road this must be changed.
The basic setup idea is take from http://hp.kairaven.de/linux/fedora-mplayer.html

1. Add required repositories
   1. Get latest rpmforge-release from http://dag.wieers.com/rpm/packages/rpmforge-release/
      I just used rpmforge-release-0.3.6-1.fc3.rf.i386.rpm
   2. Install via sudo rpm -i filename
   3. sudo yum install freshrpms-release
2. Install repository GPG Keys, e.g.
   1. rpm --import /etc/pki/rpm-gpg/RPM-GPG-KEY-freshrpms
   2. rpm --import /usr/share/doc/rpmforge-release-0.3.6/RPM-GPG-KEY-rpmforge-dag
3. Upgrade mplayer: yum install mplayer
4. Manually install codecs from mplayer page http://www.mplayerhq.hu/MPlayer/releases/codecs/
   I took mplayer-codecs-20061022-1.i386.rpm and mplayer-codecs-extra-20061022-1.i386.rpm

Install: Keeping Acer's IM (IMApp) and installing pidgin in parallel

Experimental! I don't know whether this change will affect system stability in the long term. Try at your own risk! I presume that the double installation of libpurple could cause trouble in later updates.

The Acer modification of pidgin has one great feature: It supports voice and video calls for MSN. This pidgin cannot do. But pidgin has a lot of other features. So I don't wanna miss both. Unfortunately Acer was so inconvenient to hack the libpurple without changing the name. Thus, IMApp and pidgin won't coexist on the same system with sane package setup.
So, when this cannot be done with sane package setup, you need to hack and betray the package system.
Don't worry - it's only for self defence!

1. Force Pidgin Installation
   1. Find the latest pidgin version from the software installer and then get it:
      wget http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/fedora/linux/updates/8/i386.newkey/pidgin-2.5.2-1.fc8.i386.rpm
   2. Install it, ignoring the missing libpurple dependency
      rpm --nodeps -i pidgin-2.5.2-1.fc8.i386.rpm
2. After this, pidgin plugins can then again be installed over yum/pirut
3. To satisfy dependency of libpurple for libnssutil3.so: yum install nss
4. Double Install libpurple
   1. Again find latest version of libpurpe and download it:
      wget  http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/fedora/linux/updates/8/i386.newkey/libpurple-2.5.2-1.fc8.i386.rpm
   2. Install it parallel to the Acer libpurple. This will work on a file base, because the Acer files are located below /usr/acer
rpm -i -v  libpurple-2.5.2-1.fc8.i386.rpm

Running pidgin

To run pidgin you must not use the Acer version of libpurple. You can achieve this by unsetting the shared library path pointing to the Acer place. And not to conflict both configurations, I used a different path for the pidgin config files (wich option -c)
unset LD_LIBRARY_PATH pidgin -c ~/.purple-pidgin/

To automatically start it from the XFCE root menu you need to modifiy the file /usr/share/applications/pidgin.desktop and replace one line:
Exec=sh -c "unset LD_LIBRARY_PATH; pidgin -c $HOME/.purple-pidgin"

Security: BIOS Password locked, how's that?

2008-10-01

An very evil thing about the BIOS password of the Acer Aspire One is, that it's automatically converted to upper case. Thus when you can't enter your AA1 anymore after you set a BIOS password, just type it in capital letters.
Grr ... this gave me hell of a scare.

Security: No remote TCP access to your X server

2008-09-17

I was a little bit shocked finding out that remote TCP access to your X server is enabled by default - a port scan will short tcp port 6000 wiiide open. I assume a skilled evil guy could take over your X session or even worse things, therefore let's close this hole!

Replace in the following file '/etc/rc.d/rc.S' the following line:

/usr/bin/xinit -- -br>/dev/null 2>&1 &

#  Disable foreign network access to X Server
/usr/bin/xinit -- -br -audit 0 -nolisten tcp>/dev/null 2>&1 &

Reboot and Done - now sit back again and relax surfing :-)

Upgrades: Breaking nm-applet

2008-09-15

This gave me hell of a night, because latest Live update from Acer (2008-09-15) killed the network applet! So no network connection was possible anymore, because the Network Manager needs the Taskbar applet to run.

How to identify this problem: Manual start of "nm-applet" gives "segmentation fault"

Fix was as following

1. Forcily remove all NetworkManager Packets and libnl from Acer (having lp in the packet name)
2. Installing NetworkManager and all dependencies from the Fedora repository with yum install

Addition 2008-12-28

After this upgrade the caching of network keys does not works anymore. To get it back make the following changes

1. The gnome keyring and nm-applet both must run as user; verrfy with ps aux
   1. Change in /etc/xdg/xfce4/xinitrc: eval `sudo gnome-keyring-daemon` ---> eval `gnome-keyring-daemon`
   2. The nm-applet is started in the file /etc/xdg/autostart/nm-applet.desktop
2. Enable autologin in the file /etc/pam.d/gdm-autologin (not sure whether it's needed, but it should not do any harm either)
   1. Add lines concerning gnome keyring, as done in sample file gdm-autologin