Ubuntu remix: great on the Acer Aspire One
Just a quick note for anyone with an Acer Aspire One netbook: the latest Ubuntu Netbook Remix works great. Replacing the “Linpus Lite” Linux provided by Acer with this special edition of Ubuntu is mostly painless and everything works well.
I have an orginal Acer Aspire One 110L… the one with the 8GB flash drive and 512MB memory. It came pre-installed with “Linpus Lite”… a modified version of Fedora 8 Linux.
While the provided version of Linux is usable… it can run current versions of Firefox, Thunderbird, OpenOffice and Skype, installing anything else was very difficult, mostly due to the age of the underlying version of Fedora. The macles blog is a lifesaver for hacking the original OS, but it’s very inflexible.
Last year Canonical put out a netbook remix of Ubuntu Desktop, mostly aimed at the Asus line of netbooks. It could work with the Aspire One, but had issues with sound, MMC cards, and other things.
With the release of Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty comes a new release of the netbook remix. Now the Acer Aspire One is officially supported and it works great.
Installation of the remix from a USB key is painless following Ubuntu’s instructions. Once installed I encountered only a few issues:
- Wireless didn’t work out of the box. Had to install linux-backports-modules-jaunty as covered in the AspireOne Community Documentation
- Sound also needs to be adjusted as noted.
Recording audio from the internal mic is the biggest issue so far… the right device and mixer settings is proving to be elusive.
Other than recording, everything works well. As expected, battery life is a less than with Linpus, but that’s likely due to all the baggage Gnome runs in the background. The lighter Xfce-based Xubuntu variant would have been a better choice for the remix, IMHO.
The remix desktop with applications on the left side and directories on the right is very functional with the small screen. A daemon named “maximus” automatically maximizes applications which usually is a good idea, but annoying for things like VLC (it’s possible to disable it for some apps, but you have to muck around in gconf).
In all, Ubuntu’s netbook remix greatly improves the Aspire One. After kicking the tires on it for a week I think it’s a keeper.
Let’s hope it gains enough traction with netbook users for Canonical to continue developing the remix.
8 Responses to “Ubuntu remix: great on the Acer Aspire One”:
May 8th, 2009 at 10:59 pm
Bugs Don’t switch to classic desktop mode. I try to reboot in classic desktop mode and ubuntu loaded an empty desktop with no icon or menus.
May 9th, 2009 at 10:57 am
@jim:
Thanks for pointing that out. Clearly Canonical has lots more work to do on the Remix. I saw the option to switch desktops in the menu but haven’t tried it… I’m very pleased with how productive the default default desktop is for small screen devices.
May 10th, 2009 at 3:40 am
[...] Ubuntu remix: Great on the Acer Aspire One has a great review on the latest release of Ubuntu and how it works well on Acer Aspire One hardware. I have yet to personally try it on my netbook but work has kept me busy so I haven’t been able to do so. I am on Ubuntu UMPC, so I am not sure how different it is. [...]
May 12th, 2009 at 1:33 pm
UNR is great on my Aspire One! I use vlc as my default player and noticed quite some improvement when I open it without GUI and fullscreen. So in terminal (or in my case at preferred applications) type ‘cvlc -f –mouse-hide-timeout 0′
Also check out vlc –help for more options. Hope this helps you out
May 12th, 2009 at 1:36 pm
… just one more thing – shift+arrows will help you scroll through your movies without vlc controlpanel
May 12th, 2009 at 2:18 pm
@Weevil:
Thanks very much for the tip. I’ve never tried running VLC from the command line.
May 25th, 2009 at 5:34 am
I also have in a test account switched to the classic desktop mode and after a reboot appears only the file manager without any windows manager….
May 26th, 2009 at 3:08 pm
Thanks for the comment. Yes, that feature should be avoided for now. It looks like it’s being tracked as Bug #349519, and a fix seems to have been developed.