Getting an Acer Aspire One (722-BZ610) to run Linux

From Ben's Writing

I just got my hands on a new (to me) Acer Aspire One (722-BZ610). It's a nice little 10-11 inch netbook with a rather interesting CPU. Actually, it's an APU: it is a CPU and GPU combination. Anyway, before I could working on running experiments on it, I needed to get it to run Linux. Surprisingly, given the state of most modern Linux distributions, there were a number of frustrating issues that came up during the configuration of the new machine.

First, the wireless did not work. It turns out the "Broadcom Corporation BCM4313 802.11b/g/n Wireless LAN Controller" is one of the few modern wireless network cards that is not supported on Linux. (If it is, then all the instruction listed on the official Broadcom Linux site do not fix the problem mine has encountered.) To remedy this, I went and picked up an inexpensive "D-Link" usb nub adapter to replace it. The problem with the D-Link nub, is that is was not functioning well with the regular drivers, which meant I needed to install the back-ports versions.

All this mess of things required that I add and remove various wireless kernel modules. This is the basic procedure I followed: To stop the Broadcom adapter from continuing to freeze my machine, I decided to disable it outright. This meant, among other things, disabling any drivers it might need. The wl driver will not function properly if ssb, et. al. the module is loaded.

First, check if any of these modules are loaded:

 # lsmod  | grep "b43\|ssb\|bcma\|wl"

If any of these are installed, remove them:

 # rmmod b43
 # rmmod ssb
 # rmmod bcma
 # rmmod wl

To blacklist these drivers and prevent them from loading in the future:

 # printf "blacklist ssb\nblacklist bcma\nblacklist b43" >>/etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf

Lastly, to fetch and install the back-port modules on the machines:

 # sudo apt-get install linux-backports-modules