The panel inside the A110 and the A150 is the AUO B089AW01. It's only capable of displaying 6bit per color instead of 8bit. Meaning that it can only display 262144 different colors instead of 16777216. This in itself is not a problem, most panels in notebooks and netbooks are limited that way. The reduced color palette results in banding, most noticeable in gradients. This effect can be greatly reduced by enabling dithering. However the Linux driver on the AA1 doesn't support it.

Looking through the source code of the driver I noticed two patches, named reduce-X-time.patch and driver-disable-flicker.patch, being applied. And in the first patch a small part has been disabled, probably by accident, where the driver asks the panel about dithering support. As a result it assumes that dithering is not supported.

There are two solutions to this. The first is to simply install the official Fedora driver. You will lose whatever customization has been made to the driver. The other solution is to recompile the original driver with a modified patch that doesn't disable dithering.

In order to do so open a terminal, download the source RPM and install it. You may get a few warnings which can be ignored.

wget ftp://guest@csdftp.acer.com.tw/Aspire_One_Linpus_Linux\
/Aspire_One_Srpms/xorg-x11-drv-i810-2.1.1-8.fc8.src.rpm

sudo rpm -i xorg-x11-drv-i810-2.1.1-8.fc8.src.rpm

The code between lines 56-58 and 122-129 needs to be re-enabled. The sed command below automates the process.

sudo sed '56,58s/^+[/]*/+/;122,129s/^+[/]*/+/' -i /usr/src/redhat/SOURCES/reduce-X-time.patch

Install a few packages required to compile the driver.

sudo yum install rpmdevtools yum-utils
sudo yum-builddep xorg-x11-drv-i810-2.1.1-8.fc8.src.rpm

Compile the driver and create the RPM.

sudo rpmbuild --target i586 --clean -bb /usr/src/redhat/SPECS/xorg-x11-drv-i810.spec

If a later image version is pre-installed on your AA1 the previous command may quit with a install: command not found message. In that case just update the package which provides install and run the previous command again.

sudo yum update coreutils

All that's left to do now is to install the just built RPM and enjoy a banding free display after a reboot.

sudo rpm --force -U /usr/src/redhat/RPMS/i586/xorg-x11-drv-i810-2.1.1-8.fc8.i586.rpm

The result will still not be perfect even with dithering enabled, because the physical limitation cannot be overcome, but it will be far less noticeable.