The chances are that if you use a linux distro, you’re a natural fiddler. You just can’t leave things be, you have to constantly ‘improve’ things. I recently found myself tinkering once again after buying an Acer Aspire One. Hearing all of the bad reports about Linpus, the default OS for the Aspire One, I quickly decided that I too didn’t like it.
Had I really given it a chance? Or was this just a burning desire to ‘tinker’? Or was it the fact that my wife actually liked the look of Linpus and I had to prove her wrong?
Whatever the reason, I quickly forged ahead with my plans to remove Linpus (without my wife’s knowledge) and installed Ubuntu 9.04 Netbook Remix. At first glance, this is indeed a great looking distro for the Aspire. Everything works as it should and it looks far nicer than the default Linpus ‘large icon’ desktop that appears as if it was designed for children under the age of 5.
I used UNR for a day and had no complaints whatsoever. The next morning however, things weren’t quite right. The night before, I’d let the battery run down which (obviously) shuts the computer down. In the morning, the machine wouldn’t boot up. I had to manually run fsck to repair the corupted files. I tested this again by letting the battery run down and once more had to use fsck to get the bloody thing booted.
No problem I thought; there’s bound to be a fix for this somewhere. After a day searching the net, I failed to find a solution. Then I noticed, while trying to install a vnc client, that I couldn’t install any new packages (or indeed remove any). Somehow, dpkg had been corrupted. I couldn’t get round this problem either (clearly I’m not a linux pro). I’d had enough by now and just wanted a working netbook. There are lots of netbook specific distros to choose from and it seems that each distro has varying bugs, some more than others.
So for the time being I’ve gone back to Linpus. Once you’ve done some basic customisation, it’s actually not that bad. Following the tips on this page helped me out a lot so thanks to the author, jorge.
Before I go and install another distro, I’d love to hear other people’s experiences. Let me know what distro you chose for your Aspire One and why.
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Natural fiddler? Haha – that could be taken in more ways than one, but yes, I am one. Probably in both ways!
What’s the point in having linux if you’re not going to fiddle with it, that’s what I say? And besides, the default Linpus Configuration does suck like an industrial vacuum…
Having said that, I’ve only been exposed to the acer one at work, so I’ve had no chance to fiddle with it and install other distros on it, although I do know that it is possible to turn it into a hackintosh which sounds mighty exciting! See this url: http://www.insanelymac.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=129774
My favourite thing about the acer one though is the OS install disk that comes with it. The idea is that you boot from it on a computer that has an optical drive, then you follow the instructions to create an installer on your USB stick. However, if you are not paying attention, it times out after 15 seconds, and starts writing Linpus to your primary hard disk!
Genius!
Glad to see you’ve got a new blog btw – bookmarked
!b
Hey up fella:)
Didn’t know about the timing out issue! Thankfully, I had no problems with it. I can’t imagine buggering up my main box as well.
That might have turned me back to Windows God forbid
I haven’t had that problem with corrupted files on Ubuntu yet. I might let the battery run down and see what happens. After all, a re-install will fix it.
The Recovery CD that the Aspire One came with though was a pain, it erased the MBR for my second hard disk on my Windows PC, fortunately, a free trial of a disk recovery program I can’t remember the name of (I tried about 10 before I found one that worked) got it back for me. In the end I made my recovery USB disk by borrowing an external CD drive and doing it on my Aspire One, I figured that they would have got it working with that if no other PC, and sure enough it worked first time.
Hi there John,
Wow, seems I’ve been very lucky when using the Recovery CD!
I wonder how many more people have had problems with that?
Definitely let me know if you have the corrupted files issue. Can’t just be me, can it?
Well I let the battery run down and Ubuntu just shut down before it got below 2% so I haven’t had a problem. I have even had the hibernate feature working so I think the power management works quite well.
Did you turn power management off so the battery went completely flat or something?
Thanks for that John.
I didn’t turn off the power management as far as I’m aware.
I did play about with it when the netbook kept failing to reboot properly but perhaps I messed something up?
Maybe I should try Netbook Remix again
Just as a very belated update, I’ve now been using Crunchbang on my Acer Aspire One for the last 6 months and absolutely love it!
Nice minimalistic desktop and lightweight openbox window manager make it ideal for a netbook. If you haven’t tried it out yet, I definitely recommend you do