Acer Aspire One ZA3 - Video Issue

[sean.bales]

Just to follow up ...

This thread did completely resolve my video issues with Ubuntu 9.04 and I would like to express gratitude to those who helped me. Thank you! I am still running 9.04 and I'm pretty happy with it. I wish I could upgrade to 9.10.

I have recently attempted to upgrade to Ubuntu 9.10 on the same Acer Aspire One ZA3 and that has been met with sure failure. I tried to do a dist-upgrade and that pretty much made the OS unable to boot, even if I tried a previous kernel from the Grub menu. I can not even get a live distro (built from USB) of 9.10 to boot. I get errors about modules being unable to load. I have tried both usb-creator.exe for Windows, usb-creator from a good 9.10 install on a different box, and unetbootin 377.

Has anyone else tried? Any successes?

Thanks,
Sean

[phantom21]

Purchased the Acer Aspire One ZA3 a few days ago (Black Friday, Radio Shack) and installed Kubuntu Karmic (9.10) and have to say I'm very happy with it. It gets everything, WiFi, wired, webcam, USB, etc.

My video is also at 1024X768 and I'd like to know if the instructions above will work with that before trying it.

Also, has anyone bought a larger battery for it, one of the 6 cells or even the 9 cell ones? All the ones I'm seeing are for the ZG5 and have a different number than I'm expecting.

Thanks,

Mark

[macachis]

To phantom21:

There's other topic in this forum about this same problem (http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1204386&page=2). There, I found this solution and, for me, works fine:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade
[restart]
sudo wget http://gma500re.altervista.org/scripts/poulsbo_ppa.sh && sh ./poulsbo_ppa.sh
[restart]

About the battery. I bought my za3 with a six cell battery and for me it's perfect. I can run my netbook for 7 hours. But I don't know if its possible to buy the battery alone.

To sean.bales:

I have updated from UNR 9.04 to UNR 9.10. In fact, I made a clean install of 9.10 from a USB, overwritting the previous version. I have a dual-boot with WindowsVista so, first of all, I recovered the mbr from Win. Then, I plugged the pendrive with UNR and made the installation. I only formatted the partition with Ubuntu in it. And I have no problems! (Ok, afterwards I have to fix de video issue and change some things to have it as I like, but everything works fine)

Hope this helps you!

[KingLear0]

Hey all --

I (like a moron) went ahead an updated my kernel yesterday from the *.31-14 to *.31-16 (the most recent in the Update Manager).

On the -14 Kernel I had everything working just fine by using the poulsbo_ppa.sh script. As always, updating the kernel broke my Aspire One. From my previous reading, I thought that what I needed to do was boot up, connect online, and run:

sudo apt-get remove psb-kernel-source
sudo apt-get install psb-kernel-source

So I went an ran that, and the psb-kernel-source has an error when it tried to reinstall. So, I tried just running the entire poulsbo_ppa.sh script again, same error (it wouldn't complete the install, sorry I don't have the exact error text handy, I will try to post it later today)


So, my main questions are:

1) Has anyone successfully updated to the most recent kernel and kept the video working?
2) Is there a new version of the psb-kernel-source that I was unable to find that will work with the *-16 kernel?
3) Am I missing something really, really obvious and that's why I haven't seen any other mention of this error regarding kernel upgrades?

Thanks in advance!

[deobotha]

Hi,

Di you finally solve this? I have an Acer Aspire One, ZA3 also, and, it comes with Windows Vista which is terribly and unbeareably slow. Since I have linux inmy desktop computer I was exited about installing it on my laptop, I donwloaded the latest Kubuntu Netbook version to it, and everything seems to work just fine(its so fast :O) ... but the screen resolution is wrong (its got 1024.768), and except for a few "weird colors" that appear for about half a second on the startup I haven't encountered any other video problem (but I haven't tried to playvideos in it yet though). I would like to solve this problem but there are various things here and I don't know which one to try.

Hi, I followed these steps with sucess!! Even Compufiz works - Although its laggy.
sudo wget http://gma500re.altervista.org/scripts/poulsbo.sh && sh ./poulsbo.sh
sudo gedit /etc/X11/xorg.conf

Replace everything with the following:
Section "Device"
Identifier "GMA500"
Option "AccelMethod" "EXA"
Option "DRI" "on"
Option "MigrationHeuristic" "greedy"
Option "IgnoreACPI" "yes"
Driver "psb"
EndSection

Section "DRI"
Mode 0666
EndSection

sudo gedit /usr/bin/compiz
Change this:
# Driver whitelist
WHITELIST="nvidia intel ati radeon radeonhd i810 fglrx"

To This:
# Driver whitelist
WHITELIST="nvidia intel ati radeon radeonhd i810 fglrx psb"

Hope it works !! Let me know via email

[ciclopropano]

from my computer (lucid-lynx) Im not being able to even download the psb-kernel-source
when I try to follow the instructions given by p.herewini
I guess the source is outdated or something :S can somebody post an updated url to download the driver from PLEASE!!!

[ciclopropano]

RESOLVED!

After trying all-sorts of bug-fixes including adding enable_mtrr_cleanup mtrr_spare_reg_nr=1 to grub I finally stumbled onto this ridiculously simple solution:

1. If you haven't got the native 1366x768 resolution working yet, try this:


2. FIXED FULLSCREEN VIDEO PLAYBACK FOR ME:
Applications > Synaptic > Install the following
psb-kernel-headers
psb-firmware
poulsbo-driver-3d
poulsbo-driver-2d
xpsb-glx
psb-modules

I'm not experienced enough to know exactly what each of these packages do, but after installing these and restarting, fullscreen video FINALLY started working smoothly.

it tells me I need libdrm-poulsbo1
but when I try to install that it tells me it has to erease a lot of files from my computer - what should I do??

[p.herewini]

I was also experience the same problem after my housemates updated my system and I had to choose the older kernel from grub. Now thanks to deobotha, all I do is install any updates, restart into the new kernel (which starts in the wrong resolution of 1024x768 ) and run deobotha's fix:

sudo wget http://gma500re.altervista.org/scripts/poulsbo.sh && sh ./poulsbo.sh
sudo gedit /etc/X11/xorg.conf

Replace everything with the following:
Section "Device"
Identifier "GMA500"
Option "AccelMethod" "EXA"
Option "DRI" "on"
Option "MigrationHeuristic" "greedy"
Option "IgnoreACPI" "yes"
Driver "psb"
EndSection

Section "DRI"
Mode 0666
EndSection

sudo gedit /usr/bin/compiz
Change this:
# Driver whitelist
WHITELIST="nvidia intel ati radeon radeonhd i810 fglrx"

To This:
# Driver whitelist
WHITELIST="nvidia intel ati radeon radeonhd i810 fglrx psb"

sean.bales, you should update your first post with this info for new visitors as I believe this is the best fix.

[p.herewini]

Ok so it seems now my acer aspire one will not wake from sleeping anymore. The power comes back on but the screen and keyboard do not come back. Is anyone else having this problem, who also used deobotha's solution?