Sometimes I post things to be able to recall 6 months later what I did. This is one of those “I’d better write this down” articles.
After a couple of iterations, my Acer Aspire One Netbook runs well on Ubuntu Netbook Remix 9.04. Here’s what I did.
I created one root 8 GB filesystem formatted in ext2 with no swap space. I don’t know why but using ext3 (a journaling filesystem) and/or swap meant poor performance. It’s probably due to the SSD not handling the read/writes well.
Following the advice from the Ubuntu AspireOne documentation page, I installed linux-backports-jaunty-modules and ran all the updates. Among other things this gets the wireless LED working. UNR 9.04 is still young yet so it’s not a lot of updates.
In my /boot/grub/menu.lst file I added “enable_mtrr_cleanup pciehp.pciehp_force=1” to my defoption line and kernel line. The mtrr_cleanup is to allow the X server to take advantage of a performance boost and with the pciehp I can use both SD card readers without any problem.
After using lspci to get the correct values, I added this line to my /etc/rc.local
echo "base=0x40000000 size=0x10000000 type=write-combining" > /proc/mtrr
The mtrr part is for improving video performance, the pciehp portion is to get both SD card readers working.
With these settings, the netbook is working well with only a few caveats. Youtube is still jumpy and slow. But I got this netbook to play with Ubuntu, ssh to my servers, and view web pages so I’m satisfied.