The latest in the Aspire One 700 family. It has been available with a C-60 apu for some time, and now a new model with C-70 apu is also available. The price on the C-60 models has come down accordingly, making it a bargain in many cases.

This page is just for discussing using Linux on the Acer Aspire One 725. For a general discussion about this laptop you can visit the Acer Aspire One 725 page on LapWik.

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For full specifications see the Acer Aspire One 725 specifications page.

* C-60+HD 6290/C-70+HD 7290 varies with models.

Some reported that the touchpad doesn't work, in which case hitting Fn+F7 before login. However, it natively works with Debian Wheezy with its native kernel 3.2.0.

As Linux 3.2.0 didn't seem to suffice this laptop, I decided to give 3.8.2 a try. First and foremost, I compiled my own kernel, so installing a pre-built kernel may not get desired results. Here's my config (gzip'd), but I have many things disabled as it is unclean with things still enabled, and should only really be used for reference. This contains all the modifications that are listed below.

This shall be updated as I find out things.

Brightness largely works with 3.8.2.

X may do a full-screen flash whenever brightness up/down keys are pressed. looking at acpi_listen's output, hitting the brightness down button yields not one but two results:

video/brightnessdown BRTDN 00000087 00000000

and

video/switchmode VMOD 00000080 00000000 K

Remembering from research I did prior, many users had problems with laptop WMI extras, so I disabled CONFIG_ACER_WMI in the kernel's config, which fixed the problem
NOTE: This will only work for the radeon driver; it won't fix fglrx's equivalence.

Moreover, if using the radeon driver (not fglrx/catalyst), there's a special file,

/sys/class/backlight/radeon_bl0/brightness

which can be used for a more fine brightness adjust.
Valid numbers for this are 0-255, where 0 turns off the backlight and 255 is the brightest possible.

Although I cheated and enabled it in Windows before I started all of this, something tells me that

CONFIG_ATH9K_BTCOEX_SUPPORT

is needed to be enabled to turn on bluetooth in linux, but I may be wrong.

CONFIG_BT_HCIUART_ATH3K thinks that it is needed, may actually do something, can't figure out what.

I was successfully able to install the fglrx driver for this APU.

Catalyst versions 12.6, 13.1, 13.2 beta 7 on Linux versions 3.8.2 and 3.2.0 were unsuccessful, but as of Catalyst version 13.3 beta 3, I was able to get fglrx working. First trying 3.2.0, I was successfully able to install fglrx. Fortunately, Catalyst 13.3 will add support for 3.7 and 3.8 kernels. Trying with my custom kernel, I get an odd error from Xorg:

(EE) fglrx(0): V_BIOS address 0xd00 out of range
(EE) fglrx(0): Failed to obtain VBIOS from Kernel!

Trying 3.4.38 gave me the same error. Remembering that the beta release documentation talks about AGP in the kernel, and seeing that AGP is enabled in the 3.2.0 kernel, I enabled AGP,

CONFIG_AGP=y

(Not in the config.)
and all of its sub-modules in the 3.8.2 kernel. Trying again, I get no error and the “AMD Testing use only” watermark. Then seconds later, it switches to a black screen and no access to the TTYs. Progress! Then I tried completely disabling all of the sub-modules, including the AMD one, and then it worked!

Using this script from the archlinux wiki:

#!/bin/sh
DRIVER=/usr/lib/xorg/modules/drivers/fglrx_drv.so
for x in $(objdump -d $DRIVER|awk '/call/&&/EnableLogo/{print "\\x"$2"\\x"$3"\\x"$4"\\x"$5"\\x"$6}'); do
 sed -i "s/$x/\x90\x90\x90\x90\x90/g" $DRIVER
done

removes the “Testing use only” watermark.

I have recently purchased the latest model, which has a C-70 CPU, Broadcom WiFi and no Bluetooth. So far it works perfectly with openSuSE 12.3, Fedora 18, Ubuntu 13.04 (pre-release) and Linux Mint 14. It comes preloaded with Windows 8, UEFI Secure Boot and GPT partitioned disk. openSuSE and Fedora boot and install with no problem, even with Secure Boot enabled; Linux Mint requires switching the BIOS to Legacy Boot, but then installs and works as well.

The latest model, with C-70 cpu and Broadcom WiFi, works perfectly with every Linux distribution I have tried so far. I would go so far as to say that of all the laptops, notebooks and netbooks I have tried, this one works the best with Linux. Installation is easy, everything works, and it is a very nice system.