Ubuntu on the Aspire One
Okay, I didn’t last long. After 24 hours of sticking with Linpus I eventually decided to install Ubuntu on the laptop, even though adjusting it for the Aspire One was going to involve some tweaking – sticking with Linpus would’ve ended up annoying me.
The AspireOne page on the Ubuntu wiki explains how to get you Ubuntu up and running. The Aspire One supports PXE booting, which I found far easier to setup than fiddling about with a USB stick just to get the install going.
The Ubuntu Netbook remix includes some great packages which are useful for running GNOME on a small screen, I did try them all however I wasn’t too happy with the UME launcher. I’d highly recommend Maximus, an application which maximises open windows and removes the top bar from running programs, window-picker-applet which is ideal with Maximus and doesn’t hog too much space for switching between programs, and human-netbook-theme for a few visual tweaks.
Overall I’m fairly happy, now I’ve got the power of Ubuntu for this laptop. Hopefully the weird quirks and bugs which the Aspire One has will be ironed out in future releases.
Aug26
Acer Aspire One
After resisting the EeePC for so long in the hope that better ultra portable laptops would appear with better specs, I finally decided to go for an Acer Aspire One. The 8GB flash storage and 512MB RAM are perfectly adequate for basic use in Linux, it’s a great little device for browsing a few sites without having to take a huge laptop around with you.
The Aspire One comes with Linpus Lite, a Fedora based distribution aimed at lightweight devices. After using it for a day it seems reasonably adequate for an average user, but for someone who understands Linux well might get a little bit annoyed at the quality of this particular distribution.
This version of Linpus Lite is based on Fedora 8, slightly out of date as it was released back in November 2007. Firefox 2 is included, which is also a little bit old and support is ending shortly as Firefox 3 has been out for quite a while. I suppose this is sort of expected with the fast pace of change, but it’s slightly annoying. The one thing I did try to do is run yum upgrade from the command line, however the dependencies are broken so it won’t update – not exactly great.
I’m keen on replacing Linpus with Ubuntu in the future, however the support for the Aspire One isn’t quite complete at the moment with some functionality not quite working. I’ll keep track of it for the future, however I want ease of use instead of having to deal with command line tweaks to fix broken functionality.
Overall a thumbs up for the Acer Aspire One, but a bit of a thumbs down for Linpus Lite. I just wish they could’ve sorted out Ubuntu for this device.
Aug23
Hello world!
It’s taken over a year for me to finally get my blog up and running, I registered the domain back in April 2007 but I’ve only recently managed to get the urge to finish it. Many thanks to Joni for helping me finish the design off.
Some of you may recognise that the avatar at the top of the page is my current Mii avatar from the Wii. The only problem is that it’s taken so long that it isn’t entirely accurate – I’ve recently had my eyes lasered, so no more glasses for me. Looks like I’ll have to update it eventually, hopefully it won’t take me another year to get that sorted though!
I’ll be using this place for my various thoughts and rants, so check back often for updates.