Eneris Solutions » Acer Aspire One

Impressions:

• Nice kit. Get yourself the 1 gig. You need it, but it is a bitch to install if you do it yourself. Take a picture of each layer before you start unscrewing!

• Stuff loads fast. I can't believe how fast openoffice and eclipse open up.

• Try to pretend your fingers are smaller. The keyboard is a squeeze but you will get used to it. And I can 10 finger type on it.

• The 1024 display meets my minimum requirements for reasonable surfing. All the sites like yahoo and stuff look great.

• Good default apps. Except maybe I prefer thunderbird to the acer mail, whatever that is. Really cool that they have flash and everything ready to go. And the ice java is pretty good as long as you are not running servers, or really complex java things. Also VLC is much better than the default media player.

• Who the heck is ericwang. Seems that when they made the image they forgot to clear the root shell history. Too funny. You can see the last command made in linux before the linpus image was made. Just open shell, do a su, and press the up arrow. Lets see, he installed the yahoo plugin, and grepped for his own name to make sure it was removed from everywhere ;)

<About the memory upgrade>

On the back the last two mystery screws are under the rubber pads.

To get the keyboard off, you should understand that the clips are just hooked on the top rim of the keyboard plate. So you must first pry them up first, then lift the handle end of the screwdriver to pop the clip off the rim, and just keep rotating the screwdriver until it starts to pry up the entire plate. It doesn't take much force, just a very very small screwdriver. A diagram would be useful.

Yes, you have to disconnect the keyboard cable, vga cable, etc. The quick connector work very easily be lifting the black part. It is a simple hinged locking mechanism.

<About the operating system>

One essential thing understand: the aspire one runs FEDORA 8. So if you want to know how to do something, just check for fedora 8 instructions. Similarly, always use fedora 8 repros (that's where programs come from) or fedora 8 rpms (the ready packages for download).

On ubuntu you do this: sudo apt-get install vlc

On fedora you do this: yum install vlc

<Cool things to do with a big USB stick>

Get yourself a 8GB USB stick. Run unison to synchronize your notes folder with the datastick. Cool, never need to worry about that again. Then you can go back and forth to other machines. Run unison on the other machine also. Hey - get your DRUNKEN BOXER onto the thing, and watch the movie! 

<TOP 10 Applications to Run on Aspire One>

The Top 10 things to run on you One.

1. Freemind – In my opinion one of the best notes tool out there. It is awesome. Someday the mass population will wake up and realize how useful this program is. Download fedora 8 rpm and it works (ignore the warning about 'this might not work' – it does work on ice java)

2. Dia runs fine from repos. Yum install dia

3. Eclipse works.. really! Yum install eclipse

4. VLC Player! For heck sake get yourself VLC. It is the absolute best. Follow instructions about Fedora 8. You will need to add the fedora 8 extras repro. But it works !!! GREAT !!! Now divx and videos really work.

5. SSH. Why is ssh not pre-installed i do not know. Fix it with yum install open-ssh*

Get a terminal:

alt-f2 and type terminal

then do a 'su -'

Also tested:

subversion : ok from repro

openssh: ok from repros. Yum install open-ssh* (you need the clients)

other fun things:

netstat -tulnap Check what is running on ports

So hey, fire up tomcat 5 with /etc/init.d/tomcat5 start. Instant web server ready to go.

1. start tomcat5

2. Go to /usr/share/tomcat5/webapps

3. create a directory, mkdir app

4. make a file vi index.html, and write hello world

5. point your browser to localhost:8080/app and there you have it.