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smoker · 03-21-2011, 03:45 PM

I just got this netbook in the hope of running netbeans on it.
Windows 7 Starter isn't too bad, but the Android is dire.
I booted from a Fedora 13 live USB stick (which was previously configured on a high spec desktop) and was pleasantly surprised that compiz ran pretty flawlessly, the WiFi picked up my access point and when I tried to connect it asked for my password and remembered it.

As I want to use this while out and about, I needed a 3G connection. So I plugged my HTC Trinity in via a usb port, and Fedora picked up an eth2. I started internet connection sharing on the HTC, Fedora obtained an ip address and I was online.

Neat.
So i installed F13 to disk.

Battery life has been pretty good, although 8 hours would mean no video and miserly power settings. I get 6 routinely though, with a mixture of web browsing, video, programming and the like.

Overall, it's pretty good.

It has no bluetooth, but personally that doesn't matter as I would only use it to connect to the HTC anyway. At least with the usb my phone gets charged too !
Sound is what you would expect for small speakers but quite clear.
The webcam works (in Cheese anyway) but the microphone was a bit more difficult.

I installed the PulseAudio device chooser and the PulseAudio volume control, just to get an idea of what was going on. I could see the level meter for the microphone moving but it was only just moving a fraction. After using alsamixer -c0 to set the mike levels higher, the level was still not responding. Eventually I discovered that if I unlinked the left and right channels of the mike in PulseAudio volume control I got a much better deflection. The left channel seems to be the best, so I turned the right channel down to zero. Recording seems haphazard though, but I think I can blame that on Cheese !

P.S.
WIndows 7 is quite picky over which SD cards it will recognise.

Big tip !
If you want to shrink the win7 partition to install linux, then do it from inside win7. Then use the free space during the install.
I didn't (the first time) and had to use the Acer factory reset option from the recovery partition. This takes hours.

Also, during the install, leave your bootloader on the windows drive, it avoids issues with the recovery partition and the android partition and allows you to run all 3 OS's happily together.

Code:

[root@smoker-PC ~]# top -n 5

top - 21:05:40 up  1:06,  2 users,  load average: 0.12, 0.09, 0.09
Tasks: 204 total,   1 running, 203 sleeping,   0 stopped,   0 zombie
Cpu0  :  0.7%us,  1.0%sy,  0.0%ni, 98.4%id,  0.0%wa,  0.0%hi,  0.0%si,  0.0%st
Cpu1  :  1.0%us,  0.3%sy,  0.0%ni, 98.7%id,  0.0%wa,  0.0%hi,  0.0%si,  0.0%st
Cpu2  :  0.3%us,  0.3%sy,  0.0%ni, 99.3%id,  0.0%wa,  0.0%hi,  0.0%si,  0.0%st
Cpu3  :  0.7%us,  0.7%sy,  0.0%ni, 98.7%id,  0.0%wa,  0.0%hi,  0.0%si,  0.0%st
Mem:   1016280k total,   628900k used,   387380k free,    31796k buffers
Swap:  2031612k total,        0k used,  2031612k free,   351996k cached

  PID USER      PR  NI  VIRT  RES  SHR S %CPU %MEM    TIME+  COMMAND            
 1876 smoker    20   0 59396  24m 7212 S  1.6  2.5   6:19.42 compiz             
 1578 root      20   0 35520  15m 7792 S  1.3  1.5   7:48.32 Xorg               
 2491 root      20   0  2740 1120  824 R  1.0  0.1   0:00.25 top                
 2235 smoker    20   0  391m  66m  26m S  0.7  6.7   8:36.22 firefox            
 1162 root      20   0     0    0    0 S  0.3  0.0   0:01.99 kondemand/3        
    1 root      20   0  2872 1392 1184 S  0.0  0.1   0:02.67 init               
    2 root      20   0     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.02 kthreadd           
    3 root      RT   0     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.06 migration/0        
    4 root      20   0     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.16 ksoftirqd/0        
    5 root      RT   0     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.00 watchdog/0         
    6 root      RT   0     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.01 migration/1        
    7 root      20   0     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.06 ksoftirqd/1        
    8 root      RT   0     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.00 watchdog/1         
    9 root      RT   0     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.01 migration/2

jwhiz · 06-19-2011, 07:52 PM

Hi Smoker,

I cam here via a question in PC Review (UK computer forum).
I also have this netbook (although I paid less than $200 CDN for it new).

I notice that you said something about Windows 7 being fussy about SD cards. I have (I think) a Core Micro 8 GB card, was hoping to boot Linux from it (don't want to dump the Win install for now, although the XP USB boot looks interesting too).

I've enabled the boot menu in the BIOS, and pushed all the USB options over the native hard drive (I believe the system would see a USB flash drive as a USB HDD?). Anyway, no dice, no USB options come up in boot menu. Could you recommend specific SD cards that this system would recognize?

It's not that big a deal to try a stick instead, I just like the idea of the low profile of a card sticking out the side!

error_401 · 05-19-2012, 10:11 AM

Installed via USB Stick using unpacked iso and complete iso of 1 CD-ROM Distro on USB Stick. Kind of 1 CD-ROM install with Netinstall ;)

Repartitioning done in Linux whith the consequences described in smokers thread. Had to re-setup windows from recovery partition.

I've installed GRUB which in turn found the recovery partition and is able to boot that one as well. After WIN re-install had to re-run "update-grub" to have the new WIN installation in the boot menu as well.

Else running fine from the beginning. Will look forward using it next week when travelling. Then I'll be able to add a bit about battery life etc.