Acer Aspire One

[graedus]

Has anyone tried installing PCBSD on this netbook?

Four devaluated Franlkins for the hdd critter sound like a good deal for me.

[Dingens]

http://laptop.bsdgroup.de/freebsd/ here you could post your experience! freebsd or pc-bsd... it doesn´t matter!

[ligregni]

Yes, I have, I tried PC-BSD 7.0 RELEASE just today!

I obviously downloaded the USB-bootonly.img file, then wrote this, and let's have fun!!!

Booting from USB is simple with the great BIOS that the Acer Aspire ONE (R) has, then, it's kind of "guessing" the buttons about the installer (just the NEXT Button, but with a good TAB work it is simple) because the screen is too small (but don't worry, it's just in the install process, because the OS automatically adjust the resolution when first booting), and let it all the nigth to perform a network install (in my dreams :wink: I timed about 3 hrs with an 1Mb DSL Broadband Connection), and let the daemon takes control of you!!!.

Great desktop, great performance, all the power of FreeBSD, fitted in a little notebook, that makes it rock!!!.

Sergio Ligregni
Greetings from Mexico!

[selasforos]

Greetings from sunny Greece,

Recently i bought an AA1 110L and i gave a spin on PCBSD.
Everything looks ok except of the support WLAN card and the big size of applications which cought a total amount of 7.5 GB to my 8GB ssd.

Does anyone know how I get rid off the 85% of the pre-installed apps
and bring into life my wifi card? :twisted:

Thanks in advance

[graedus]

Well, I finally got my hands on this critter, I'm attempting to install 7.0.1 today, I'll give some feedback once I get the system running.

[graedus]

Installed 7.0.1 from the usb image. A couple of pendrives didn't worked (both kingston).

The installation went pretty smoth, though as it is mentioned on this thread, the form factor and shorter screen estate required some tab pressing and guessing to proceed. Attention devs, for these new netbooks, keep in mind the 1024x600 screen resolution.

Sound works, video works, ethernet works. Ath wifi doesn't, had to do ndisgen.
On some freebsd list there's some indication that on -CURRENT, the ath driver supports this particular card (ath ar5008).

Haven't tried both flash card drives, but my guess is both won't work. Neither have tested the webcam. I guess it won't work as well (common issues, no surprises there).

As another user pointed out in other thread, dolphin won't mount large (>128gib) fat32 drives. I had to do this manually using the -o large flag, and as a normal user, no need to su.

I'll keep updating this thread as any particular issue arises.

So, let's see how 7.0.1 works overall.

Let the pcbsd netbook exerience begin.

[selasforos]

I am still trying to fit the daemon into this brick.

I face big problems on WiFi card, card readers and after search i saw that PCBSD reads only the 1GB ram of 1.5GB that i have. :shock:

Any help is welcome.

[graedus]

Although the ndis driver worked fine, I still had the hunch the ath driver should work... and IT DID!

so, to enable the wireless functionality, just add the following line to /boot/loader.conf:

if_ath_load="YES"

Then proceed to adjust your network settings.

[car1]

I installed the latest release of PCBSD on my acer aspire one (120GB hard drive). Everything, including wireless, worked. I thought the desktop was running a little sluggish, I guess that's to be expected though with 1.6ghz processor.

CORRECTION: Actually, I don't know if everything was working, I didn't test the camera or card reader

And if anybody out there is considering either this netbook or the eeePC, I'd definitely go with the Acer. The keyboard is almost a full inch bigger, which really made the difference for me (I guess this wouldn't matter if you had small girlish hands though...).

[graedus]

Haven't tested the camers or card readers either. What I'm now figuring out, is several kernel panics at startup (30% of boot attempts, perhaps caused by bad hyperthreading smp implementation?), and that the speakers won't mute when earbuds are plugged.