Debian on AAO

About this page

This page is designed to help with installation of Debian GNU/Linux on the Acer Aspire One Netbook. There is additional information on installation of necessary drivers and other optimizations.

Prerequisites

There are many ways to install Debian. One way to install Debian on the Acer Aspire One is to use a flash USB drive. This might be your first choice since the Acer One does not ship with a CD-ROM drive. You will need a flash USB drive that is 256MB or larger. The below method outlines how to modify a flash drive putting the Debian installer on it. For other methods of installation please refer to the section Alternative Installation Methods or see the install guide.

Preparing the USB flash drive

Get the latest daily build image: drive image and the latest netinst ISO image. It is critical that the kernel version in the boot.img.gz image and the net-install ISO are the same! If they are not identical, the installer will not be able to detect your hardware and the installation will fail.

Creating a USB flash boot drive

As the Installation Manual states: "The easiest way to prepare your USB memory stick is to download hd-media/boot.img.gz, and use "gunzip" to extract the 256 MiB image from that file."

This method temporarily limits your memory stick to 256 MiB and destroys all data on it, but is simple to get working. You can chose to re-partition your memory stick once you are done installing Debian with it. To keep the memory stick, (hereafter called a flash drive) in its current size and still have the installer on it, follow the Formatting your drive with additional software for booting directions below.

Before you put the boot image (boot.img) and the netinstall image on your flash drive, make sure you have a recent backup of your data, both on your flash drive and on your Acer One. First find the device node of your flash drive on the command line. Note that using the wrong node will destroy data on that node (note also that using the correct node will destroy anything on the flash drive as well). Assuming your flash drive is /dev/sdz, execute this command as root (or, if possible, a user with write access to /dev/sdz):

# zcat /path/to/boot.img.gz > /dev/sdz1

Afterwards, mount the flash drive and copy over the net-install ISO file. # mount /dev/sdz1 /mnt # certain desktops such as gnome will do this stage for you # cp /path/to/netinst.iso /mnt # umount /mnt

Now go to the Install section.

The above method would not work for me, so I just downloaded the latest Debian hd-media netinstall iso. Then put it on the USB drive with.

#fdisk /dev/sdz

Erase the partations, make one partition, format the partition with vfat:

# mkfs.vfat -I /dev/sdz1

Copy the iso over with:

# cat debian-6.0.5-i386-netinst.iso > /dev/sdz1 # umount /dev/sdz1

And it worked for me.

Gnome segfaults for libmouse.so

This is due to "disable touchpad while typing" is checked in mouse settings. Move '''/usr/lib/gnome-settings-3.0/libmouse.so" to "/root/libmouse.so" Then restart gdm3, goto settings, uncheck the box, logout, move "libmouse.so" back and your done.