Acer Aspire One 522 10.10 Freezing Issues

[GenBattle]

Do you have any idea why it freezes for us?

It could be possible that you have an earlier hw revision. Mine was sold beginning of march and manufactured in January 2011. There are versions with broadcom wlan chips, maybe some other revisions with more changes. I dont know.

The only difference I see judging from your howto is that you use the free display drivers.

Thanks for your HOWTO anyway. I will follow it and see what happens.

I also bought one of these laptops just this week (in New Zealand) and mine comes with the Broadcom wireless chip (which works fine under OpenSuse 11.4) and an Atheros ethernet chip. Both won't work in Ubuntu 10.10, and i get strange issues with the graphics in 11.04 Alpha which prevent gdm or unity from starting (switching to the ATI driver makes both Suse and Ubuntu unbootable).

So to conclude: graphical driver issues with OpenSuse 11.4 (KDE desktop), AMD CCC 11.2 drivers will not install properly.

Ubuntu 11.04 Alpha 3 installs, but gdm and unity won't start, installing AMD driver 11.2 (CCC) prevents ubuntu from booting. Due to the graphical issues I haven't been able to determine whether wlan or ethernet work.

Ubuntu 10.10 installs and run in 800x600 graphics mode, ethernet and wlan both not working.

[GenBattle]

Just tested OpenSuse 11.4 GNOME with no issues.

It's a little bit faster than KDE (a no-brainer i guess), and seems to be just as stable on the Aspire One 255. On mine the wireless and wired networks work fine under OpenSuse, and it has no problems resuming from sleep.

If you're looking for a relatively easy way to get your 522 up and running with linux, i recommend OpenSuse 11.4. In the meantime, hopefully Ubuntu 11.04's hardware support will improve as it gets closer to release.

EDIT:
Not completely true, i'm now getting freezes after startup. This seems to have started when i set up a default wireless network to connect to on startup.

[5tj]

I can confirm that the netbook does not freeze in linux after direct rebooting from windows 7 to linux.

I have reactivated the open source radeon driver.

I also had deactivated the atl1c driver. Now I am missing the network manager applet and the battery applet from the panel. I found that I can start the network-manager applet by invoking nm-applet, still searching for the battery applet. And for the reason why they are suddenly missing.

reactivated the atl1c driver, but the applets are still missing. Booting through windows 7 first and then rebooting still works but is rather inconvenient.

System is now Ubuntu 11.04 alpha 3 amd64. Notebook still gets very hot. in the area of the VGA connector.

May after all not be worth the trouble. Still have to try Cardreader, VGA and HDMI output.

[GenBattle]

Posting this from my Aspire One 522 running Linux Mint 10. Both Linux Mint 10 and Ubuntu 10.10 do seem to work ok with the Atheros/Broadcom version of this netbook.

Start with a standard install, reboot (it will be running at 800x600). Then just install both the ATI and Broadcom restricted drivers from the restricted driver manager, restart. Install the latest AMD graphics driver (11.2).

It seems half the problem is because of a mix of the new kernel and the non-binary drivers for network cards and video cards.

Haven't had any issues with overheating yet with all the drivers installed, although last night while i was installing Ubuntu it got very very warm.

[Lngly]

I also aqcuired one of the 522s and I have the same freezing problem with ubuntu 10.10 netbook edition.
I tried blacklisting the ethernet but it didn't seem to help. Any other ideas?
I have freezes even after rebooting from Windows into Ubuntu.

[andi666]

I tried blacklisting the ethernet but it didn't seem to help. Any other ideas?

Strange, did you regenerate your initramfs?
if you havent it wont have any effect.
check if it is really not loaded by typing

lsmod | grep atl

I have freezes even after rebooting from Windows into Ubuntu.

Hmm, for me either of the two workaround works. I have never had a single freeze since I blacklisted the ethernet module.

Under the VGA connector the netbook does not get hot for me.

I use kernel 2.6.38-rc8 and catalyst 11.2 with patch for 2.6.38 compatibility, maybe this makes a difference...

[Lngly]

I'm currently sending the thing back because the screen flickers but I'll check once I receive it again.
Thank you

[jason.s]

I too have issues after blacklisting the ethernet.

lsmod | grep atl produces no output, which means it is in fact not loaded.

The freezing seems very frequent when running on battery. I don't think I've seen it running plugged-in. As soon as I unplugged it though, it froze. It doesn't last long without freezing when unplugged...

Any ideas or is there anywhere I can look that might give me more information as to why this is happening?

[vladilinsky]

I have a aspire one 522 with a broadcom chipset. I am currently running kubuntu 10.10 with kde 4.6.1 and the display drivers from

ppa:ubuntu-x-swat/x-updates

and the kubuntu backports enabled from

ppa:kubuntu-ppa/backports

I also copied the control file copied from the newest ati driver (this is really important, before doing this it would freeze up and it gets rid of the annoying watermark in addition to really speeding up the netbook)

every thing works great now and the performance seams really snappy (I have only had this for 2 days so I may be in for disappointment yet) The biggest hassle was the sd card reader which does not work out of the box but if you follow comment #138 on this page https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+s...ux/+bug/530277 it will work.

If you need any more info from me I will do what I can to help

[andi666]

I just updated by BIOS to 1.07 (downloaded from the acer homepage). I had not much hope because the changelog does not say anything about ethernet.

But after updating I could actually unload the atl1c module whithout a total system freeze. I stopped blacklisting the module and had no freeze since I upgraded the BIOS.

It is too early to say that the problems are solved, if I dont edit this post soon, assume that it is fixed...

Oh and by the way, in Ubuntu 11.04, everthing seems to work out of the box, closed source ati drivers, cardreader, bluetooth, etc.

EDIT: I was stupid, the atl1c device was still "healed" by Windows 7 :/ Things dont get better by flashing the BIOS. If you really need ethernet in ubuntu, you have to boot in Windows 7 once and then reboot to ubuntu