Categories
Computers Linux

Acerfand crashes Acer Aspire One 110

I have an Acer Aspire One 110 Ab that I have upgraded with 1 GB RAM (for a total of 1.5 GB) as well as upgrading the BIOS to version 3309.

Before upgrading the BIOS, which was done in an attempt to improve the stability of 802.11 networking, the acerfand program worked wonders to keep the fan running as little as possible.

Once I upgraded the BIOS to 3309 the acerfand program no longer worked. Instead of turning the fan off the fan was running at full speed for a second every other second.

On March 14th, version 0.07 of acerfand was released and I tried it out in the hope that it would fix the fan issue for by BIOS version. While it did turn off the fan, it caused the computer to reboot after a few minutes. Clearly, this was even worse than the alternative.

I did some trial and error and changed the value 0x20 to 0x21 (two places) for the 3309 specific values. In other words, roughly half-way down in the file, my acerfand file now looks like this:

"${BIOS_VERSION_3309}")
	#change: handle 3309 seperate 0xAF -> 0x20
	R_FAN=55
	R_TEMP=58
	FAN_CMD_OFF=21
	FAN_CMD_AUTO=00
	RAW_FAN_STATE_OFF="0x21"
	;;

This has completely solved the issue. The fan now stays off as long as the temperature is below 70 degrees Celsius. The rest of the time (which is virtually always) it is dead silent. Case closed. For now.

4 replies on “Acerfand crashes Acer Aspire One 110”

David and others, Please have a look at the Aspire page on the Ubuntu Community. There is a kernel module (acerhdf) that replaces the functionality of acerfand. I have tested acerhdf on an Acer Aspire One 150 3G and it seems to be working great. Highly recommended.

Dear Martin,

I’ve read, that you upgraded your bios. Could you perhaps tell me, how you did it? Or even better, send me the img file you used to make a bootable usb stick? I have been struggling with this for ages. Here is how far I got:
1. downloaded a freedos img file.
2. downloaded the new bios
3. successfully made a bootable usb using the dd command.

the problem is, that the img file is only 1.44 mb big, so when i make the bootable stick, the size will be that big only. there is no way to fit also the flash bios onto it.
I tried to find a way to append the files to the img file, or enlarge the img, but did not succeed.

Your help would be greatly appreciated!
Szabolcs

Szabolcs,

I started off doing just like you because that’s the way I have always updated BIOS. However, I am happy to see that manufacturers have made updates much easier by making it possible to update the BIOS from the BIOS itself. Both the Acer Aspire One as well as Asus EEE Box (and others) allow BIOS updates this way. Please see this page for details.

Comments are closed.

css.php