LincolnBlogs

Oh boy. So what have I been doing since last we talked? Let me tell you…

I have been doing multiple Linux installations on my Acer Aspire One. That being said, this post is going to be more a rant that anything else.

Now don’t get me wrong, I really dig that little AAO netbook. I like it especially after getting the opportunity to mess around and check out many of the other netbook offerings that are available. I like physical size, the screen size and I really like the keyboard when contrasted with others like the EeePC. I DO NOT like the placement of the trackpad buttons on the sides of the trackpad instead of the bottom, but hey, ya can’t have everything right?

The most unfortunate part of owning the AAO, though, is it seems all the world has the EeePC. Oh, how do I always end up being the oddball? I don’t know.

Now, I draw this conclusion based upon the fact that it seems like every netbook linux distribution is built to cater to the EeePC. That, to me, means that either the Xandros install on the EeePC is really crap and the Linpus on the AAO is really ok, or nobody besides Allan and I have the AAO, so nobody cares that Linpus is crap.

To be fair, I used the Linpus install on my AAO for a long time and it works great as is. But that’s the problem. I needed things I couldn’t get on there, or at least not easily. I need things such as vpnc, so I can vpn into work, etc.. Allan mentioned he had a hard time with a USB headset driver (I think). There really should be a little more flexibility for these things with the Linpus install. I also started to develop an irritation with the playschool interface of the AAO. A bit too limited for me and when you start to change things up and go to a default xfce desktop, you find that other things you used to like are bound mysteriously to that Fisher-Price “My first netbook” interface they have going on. There was just no good way to work with the default Linpus, so I decided to try something different.

The first distro I tried was the EeeBuntu Net Book Remix 2.0. This one was not too bad. You really have to pay attention to the installer or you miss the place to change your default filesystem prefs to ext2. All my gear was detected, however, it still seemed a bit slower than Linpus. Nice interface though.

Next was Kuki Linux which left me with no wireless network. Plonk.

After that I tried Fedora 10. Beautiful is the word for Fedora’s interface. Unfortunately the default font set is gigantic and you sacrifice all your wants of speed for the pleasure of looking pretty. My bet is that someone could make f10 into a kickbutt netbook remix if they had the time to thin things down quite a bit. I know I’d use it if it were quicker for certain.

Next was Linux4One, which is an Italian distro made like EeeBuntu only based on Ubuntu 8.04 instead of 8.10. This distro was good looking and fast, but no wireless.

This led me to start checking out the howto’s for installing Debian on there. Check out the docs and you’ll come to the same conclusion I did about not just Debian, but Arch, Slackware, Gentoo and a host of others.

In short, nobody has taken the time to actually make a replacemnt netbook distribution that runs and runs “out of the box” as it were. Most big namers like Debian have this arm long document on how to tweak the OS to get the sound/SD cards/Screen resolution/Ethernet/Wifi/etc. working after the base OS install. That simply is not good enough in an age where I can get a regular laptop, slap in an Ubuntu disk and 20 minutes later have a perfect install. Come on people, at least write a friggin script to do the post install config or something. Nobody wants to read through 8 pages of sometimes intentionally confusing documentation to get Linux running on this fairly standard hardware. The other thing that infuriates me is none of these distributions are really optimized for “real netbooks”. You know, the kind with NO HARD DRIVE. Quit trying to install JOURNALING filesystems and SWAP partitions BY DEFAULT on my 8gb flash drive. For crying out loud…

So, what happened to my adventure? Well, I got a hold of Allan, who was nice enough to shoot me a restore copy of the original Linpus AAO install, should I want to use it again (for some reason you can hardly find it on the net anymore – what the heck Acer???) and I went back to EeeBuntu NBR 2. I have been playing with that a bit and am mostly happy with it except the previously mentioned irritations. At least my wifi works 🙂 There are, of course, a lot of improvements I would love to see happen in this distro, perhaps I will post a few in the forums if I get a chance and perhaps things will even get better for the lonely Acer Aspire One.