tmlbl / acer-cloudbook-11-bunsenlabs

Installation guide for BunsenLabs Linux on the Acer Cloudbook 11

Acer Cloudbook BunsenLabs Install Guide

This is a great little budget laptop that boots Debian like champ, if you can get it configured properly. After some headaches I am very happy with how this system turned out considering I got mine on Amazon for only $157.

Installing BunsenLabs

After creating a bootable USB, press F2 when the system starts up to access the BIOS. In the boot menu change the boot mode from UEFI to Legacy, and move your USB to the first position in the boot order list. Restarting the machine should take you to the BunsenLabs LiveUSB menu.

Without a magic incantation of kernel parameters, the installer will not even begin to boot. Press TAB while highlighting "install" to edit the install command. You will need to add the following parameters to the end of the install command:

edd=off noapic modprobe.blacklist=pinctrl_cherryview

The installer will run with only the noapic parameter, but the system will not boot after install unless you include all of them. Once past this point you can follow the instructions to install the system as normal.

Booting into BunsenLabs

When booting for the first time you will need to speak the incantation once again. When the GRUB menu comes up, press e to edit the boot command. Go to the line starting with linux and add the same three parameters to the end of that line. Press F10 to boot into the system.

To avoid having to do this every time, we want to make these parameters part of the boot sequence by default. Edit the file /etc/default/grub and change the line with the GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT variable to look like this:

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet edd=off noapic"

Then run sudo update-grub. Then create the file /etc/modprobe.d/pinctrl_cherryview.conf with the following contents:

blacklist pinctrl_cherryview

Reboot the system to confirm that it boots normally with no editing of the boot commands.

Touchpad Configuration

The touchpad works reasonably well, but the tap-to-click feature is very annoying and I find I trigger it while typing normally. I edited ~/.config/openbox/autostart to configure the touchpad like so:

## Detect and configure touchpad. See 'man synclient' for more info.
if egrep -iq 'touchpad' /proc/bus/input/devices; then
    synclient VertEdgeScroll=1 &
    synclient HorizEdgeScroll=1 &
    synclient TapButton1=0 &
fi

Now only the mechanical click is enabled, which I prefer.

Getting Sound Working

After much frustration I realized the way to get the sound working is to just remove pulseaudio.

sudo apt-get remove pulseaudio

Then reboot. Sound works "out of the box" for me after that.

Device Scaling Weirdness

Chromium UI is way oversized for some reason. The solution for this is to start it with a flag:

chromium --force-device-scale-factor=1

I edited ~/.config/openbox/rc.xml so that when I press super+w it opens Chromium in this way.