Table of Contents
dCore on Acer Aspire One ZG5
The Aspire One ZG5 is a 8.9-inch netbook from 2008. It features an Intel 945GSE Express chip set with an Intel Atom N270 and up to 1.5 GB of RAM.
Tested
Hardware-switch for wireless card
The wireless card can be turned off by a hardware-switch located at the right of the front edge. Be warned about touching that switch, though, as it is impossible to re-activate the card from the running system. That is possible only during the boot-phase.
The sole solution to this problem seems to physically de-activate the responsible pin on the card (e.g. instructions in German).
The acer_wmi kernel module would be responsible for such task, yet the hardware is not supported and writes so to the boot-screen. (The same holds for the modules acerhk and wistron_btns.) Therefore the module may well be black-listed by the blacklist boot-code.
Fan Control
The fan is notorious for spinning up unnecessarily and not seizing to spin. The following code in 'bootlocal.sh' loads the acerhdf module at boot such that the fan starts running at a temperature above 65C and stops below 60C. The sleep command may be necessary or not.
modprobe acerhdf interval=10 fanon=65000 fanoff=60000 kernelmode=0 verbose=0 #sleep 10s echo -n "enabled" > /sys/class/thermal/thermal_zone0/mode echo 0 > /sys/class/thermal/thermal_zone0/cdev0/cur_state
To manually shut off the fan, one may use the following command and maybe make a shell alias for it.
echo 0 | sudo tee /sys/class/thermal/thermal_zone0/cdev0/cur_state
Suspend
Suspending to RAM works without a flaw through the following command.
echo mem | sudo tee /sys/power/state
Seemingly the settings for the touchpad (see below) do not persist across suspension, likely because the X-screen is re-built in a way. Most notably two-finger tapping is interpreted as right-click then. Thus the scripts under '~/.X.d/' have to be re-run.
Embedding this all into a shelll alias can be done through the following line in '~/.ashrc' (add more scripts if applicable).
alias s='echo mem | sudo tee /sys/power/state ; ~/.X.d/synaptics'
The latter command is executed after waking up from suspension.
Touchpad
The touchpad works with two-finger scrolling out of the box. Due to its minuscule size, “middle-tap” (lower right corner) is quite hard to get right. Therefore I prefer to have two-finger tapping be recoginzed.
The following code placed in a file 'synaptics' under '~/.X.d/' does it. Some more options are commented out. The page on Synaptics in the Archlinux-Wiki provides more information about available configuration settings.
#!/bin/sh #/usr/bin/synclient HorizEdgeScroll=0 #/usr/bin/synclient VertEdgeScroll=0 #/usr/bin/synclient VertTwoFingerScroll=1 #/usr/bin/synclient HorizTwoFingerScroll=1 #/usr/bin/synclient RBCornerButton=3 #/usr/bin/synclient RTCornerButton=2 /usr/bin/synclient TapButton1=1 /usr/bin/synclient TapButton2=2
The program 'synclient' is imported through the package xserver-xorg-input-synaptics.
Three-finger tapping does not seem to be recognized at all on this machine.
Screen back-light
The screen luminosity may be controlled by the keyboard (presumably via ACPI).
Further information
There are numerous Internet pages dedicated to this type of computer that contain tips and tweaks.
