Posted by Ben Smith on Fri, Mar 05, 2010 @ 09:40 AM
Everything appeared to be working fine after installing Ubuntu Netbook Remix on my Acer Aspire One...
...then the AAO tried to go into Suspend mode and it decided to lock up and requiring a hard re-boot. After much soul (and Google) searching, I came across the cause and solution. Suspend will not work right if you're using a SDHC card in the left SD slot without doing the following:
- Adjust the linux kernel boot parameters to address an issue with the SD slots
- Open up /etc/default/grub in an editor (I use vi)
- Edit the GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT parameter to include pciehp.pciehp_force=1
- Save the file
- Run update-grub2
- Install a new linux-backports-modules-karmic package running the following command in terminal: sudo apt-get install linux-backports-modules-karmic (You'll need to reboot after this is done.)
- Add a script that unmounts/remounts the SD card at the time of system suspension and re-awakening. Here's a link to the Ubuntu help page that contains the unmount/remount script. Create the script file /usr/lib/pm-utils/sleep.d/010_unmount_SD.sh, fill it up with the script provided, and chmod it to 755 per the instructions.
That's it! Suspend will work and it will resume correctly.
Image by Yoppy
Posted by Ben Smith on Thu, Mar 04, 2010 @ 09:03 AM
Whenever I rebuild my netbook, I have to go through the arduous process of getting the software tools that make this little computer a little more fun to use. After a Windows install, I've got to run around the internet to find apps like Google Chrome, Firefox, OpenOffice, the GIMP, a lite twitter client, etc. A lot of times I hit up download.com (cnet's download center) to look for interesting apps to try. More often than not, I end of with something that doesn't meet my needs and the uninstall is more painful than finding the crapplication was. I say...NO MORE!!!
Ubuntu's native Ubuntu Software Center is an App Store for Linux
Realizing that learning to use a standard Linux package manager (like rpm or yum) was a barrier to entry for those new to Linux, the Ubuntu community set out to make software installation and removal easy by following the app store paradigm. With the Ubuntu Software Center, users can:
- Browse for applications by "Department"
- Search for applications by term
- "One-click" install applications
- "One-click" remove unwanted applications
Like other popular App Stores, when a user finds an app that they would like or is already installed, it's easy to see what to do!
Once an app is installed, there's no need to do anything to keep up to date with the latest version as the Ubuntu Software Center is integrated into the operating system and application updates will arrive auto-magically along with the regular system updates. I'm glad to see that the Ubuntu community is hard a work bringing Linux to the masses!