Aspire One
Contents |
News
We bough a 320USD Acer Aspire One, cheap Linpus edition but with the 160Gb drive alas, and only a three-cell battery: Neat, fine, small, elegant; it doesn't shout "CHEAP" like all these Asus out there. Actually, it's classier and seemingly better built than my 1.000USD Core2Duo laptop... Sitting next to an EeePC 701, those Eee are well built I must say, with a 'serious' mat-black, angled look. I see why my wife prefers the Acer, and why I find the very little Asus arch-cool.
Back to the Aspire One, the original Linpus agenda: The PITA effect:
After the Fedora Servers compromission one or two years ago, they had to move stuff around and renew their GPG keys, rename their repos and all that... But some HowTos out there on the net date back to before that, since Linpus is based on the now deprecated Fedora 8... And so lots of dependencies went broken because you try to follow instructions, believe a repository is available but is not: You need to install the new fedora-release package like this:
sudo yum install fedora-release
So the issue is that most post from before the 'invasion' will guide you through false information on how to retrieve for instance VLC; some later posts just assumed there was the usual limitation regarding non free software and push you to install extra repos that will be out of sync, hence unable to find dependencies, anyway.
And for your own sake, use common sense: I've seen a post out there saying that Linpus is build out of Fedora 7 but it's not, it's Fedora 8! Go to rpm.livna.org and follow the actual info from the actual provider rather than contradictory posts in any 'netbook rage' forum. And that is, only if you want something that is not available in the base repos.
More Software
Installed:
- livna & Fusion repos (free and non free + fedora-release) - repos for more, non free, software.
- mlocate - find files by their name, maintain a database of files in your system.
- VLC - best media player out there (I love MPlayer usually, dunno why the Linpus one isn't as good).
- yumex - less obfuscated package management software.
- openssh - remotely access your computer from a terminal.
- gFTP - transfer files from a computer to another or a server.
- Skype - Hey, I live 8.000km away from family and friends, I don't care it's not Open Source.
links
http://www.aspireoneuser.com/forum/
http://forum.videolan.org/viewtopic.php?f=13&t=48759
http://www.linuxforums.org/forum/linux-applications/135584-vlc-acer-aspire-one.html
http://rpm.livna.org/livna-release-8.rpm
http://tnkgrl.wordpress.com/2008/08/14/modding-the-acer-aspire-one-bluetooth/
http://tnkgrl.wordpress.com/2008/10/28/modding-the-acer-aspire-one-hsdpa/
Cool
Screen incredibly bright. Cool keyboard for the size.
WebRadio works, be it
mplayer http://mp3.live.tv-radio.com/franceinter/all/franceinter-32k.mp3
or just plain with VLC
.avi, .mpg, .mkv and .flv video works, but without the xfce compositor
Skype works (so far) with webcam - but these tends to brake down right when you need it so...
The Update process wasn't Data-Plan Melting, but then I don't update stuff that works, only the ones I read about having a documented failure or softs that doesn't behave as expected.
The RecoveryProcess over USB works, albeit not from SD
Issues
- Temperamental WiFi, transmitter works when it feels like (documented hardware issue).
- No out-of-the-box VNC or SSH server, as if no one would try to work on the One from the comfort of a larger machine.
- No out-of-the-box support for 3G/GPRS cellphones as modems.
- No external indication of sleep/off status; the On button glows orange but is hidden beneath the lid. Stupid, since:
- Lid sometimes doesn't put the pc asleep, need to 'suspend' manually to be sure.
- Lame battery, battery life.
- Dubious on-line vendors of larger batteries have track record of selling mislabeled higher capacity ones.
- Compositor kills video, webcam image.
- Sound too low, no power from internal loudspeakers.
- Screen can't be dimmed enough (Documented hardware/bios issue).
- Can't recover from SD, it's an USB Flashdrive affair only.
- Very noisy fan (documented hardware issue).
- Software versions quite old (Fedora8): Firefox 2 & so on; obviously very few updates provided by Acer/Linpus (although the full Fedora8 stack is still available, but isn't updated anymore).
