I stopped what I was doing and shutdown, then I removed the power and attempted to turn on again. Once more the machine wouldn’t turn on but I noted that the charging light wasn’t showing either.

A quick google and I discovered that I was not alone with this issue. It seems two types of AAO (the AOA100 and AOA150) can suffer from this problem. There is a fix and a workaround, the fix is obviously the better option. The workaround is to unplugged the battery from the device then power it up. After a moment, plug the battery back in and it should start charging, not ideal.

The fix is to download a BIOS update and patch it! Obviously you must insure that your AAO is the correct model before you attempt to flash the BIOS otherwise you might leave yourself with a very pretty brick. To ensure this you should find a label on the bottom of you device saying AOA150 or AOA100. Although my model indicated ZG5, a quick check on another label and I spotted AOA150.

The instructions on how to do this are available from Acer’s Support website. I will reproduce here what I did:

1. Turn on the netbook and enter the BIOS by pressing the button F2
2. Take note of the version number, this should change if the upgrade is successful.
3. Open a browser and go to the Acer website.
4. Browse through: Service & Support > Driver Download > Netbook > Aspire One > AOA150 (or 100) > BIOS
5. Donwload the file, it will be a zip.
6. Extract the zip and rename the file 3310.fd to be zg5ia32.fd.
7. Plug in a USB stick, and copy two files over, the zg5ia32.fd and FLASHIT.EXE
8. Make sure you have your netbook plugged in and powered on.
9. Power down the netbook
10. Press and hold down the Fn and Esc keys and then press the power button
11. When the power light comes on, wait a couple of seconds and then let go of the buttons
12. It will look like very little is happening, the screen stays blank, but you should see your USB light blinking.
13. After a while (it took around 2 minutes for me) the netbook will reboot itself and power on.

After this I powered up the device and spotted that the same thing was occurring. I rebooted and did the same process again. This time I entered the BIOS and spotted that the version number had changed.

So once it was back up, I waited a few minutes and spotted that the power indicator said it was charging the battery, success! Whilst I would normally not advise this sort of process for the average user, Acer had made it relatively simple and I feel some what foolproof.

Obviously if it doesn’t work for you then the next step would be to try the workaround or maybe go ahead and contact Acer if your warranty is still valid.

Oh and Happy Christmas to all !

I have owned this dinky wee notebook for sometime now and can highly advise it for anyone looking for a Linux Notebook.

Some tricks I have are:

Alt+F2 > xfce-settings-show > Desktop > Behaviour > Show desktop menu on right click.
The will enable the XFCE menu on right click, which is useful to me.

Alt+F2 > xfce-settings-show > Sessions and Startup > Advanced > Launch Gnome services on startup
This will allow NetworkManger to use gnome-keyring and therefore finally store the keys for wireless!

Simple but effective!