Acer Aspire One: Linpus Lite
 

I just rcently purchased an Acer Aspire One due to the affordability and the simple fact that it offered Linux. I foolishly didn't research Linpus Lite before the purchase, and I'm currently trapped in this dilemma...

I personally feel as though the modified setup of Linpus is absolutely dreadful, but hearing that it's a Fedora based distribution has me curious.

Can I cut away the fat, so to speak, and have a basic Fedora 8 setup on the computer?

The SDD is in FAT32 format, and my efforts to reformat the SDD to NTFS have been nothing short of futile. At the moment, my external is not recognized on the machine. I have the Ubuntu Live Disk information saved on it, and if it isn't possible to manipulate Linpus the way I need to, my backup plan is to install Kubuntu.

Help in any way possible would be greatly appreciated.

These "netbooks" are not intended as general-purpose computers. This said, it is possible to install other OSes. Do some searches here and on Google---there has been a lot of traffic on this subject.

Is the SDD your external drive? Why do you want NTFS?

I'm full aware that this netbook craze is meant to do the bare minimum. Howerver, I've been searching for a solution via google and I just haven't come up with an answer. I'll fish around this site and see what else I can come up with.

To answer your questions; my SDD is internal and my reasoning for NTFS is so I can work from home.

There is an Aspire One Forum.
I have seen discussions about tweaking Linpus.
Linux installed to FAT32? That seems odd but I really haven't seen anyone say before.

There is something missing here......What does NTFS have to do with working from home? The only reason I can imaging for needing NTFS at all is to install Windows.

My external harddrives and flash drives are all NTFS format. The computers at work are Windows computers in NTFS format. In order for me to transfer such quantities of information back and forth, my personal machines need to be formatted in NTFS as well, just to alleviate any issues.

Sorry, I don't get it. Any modern Linux will read and write NTFS reasonably well. But, even if there are glitches, how would it be helped by also having the Linux OS on NTFS? (I'm not even sure this is possible.)

If for some reason you could not access an NTFS drive, you could always transfer files using a thumbdrive (typically formatted FAT-32)

Even better, use an of the various network protocols to simply log in the computer in question.

Ditto.

I can't confirm Linpus is or isn't really installed to FAT 32 since I do not have an Aspire One or find posts confirming or denying the FAT32 filesystem for Linpus. I also do not follow why it is necessary to format the SSD with NTFS and wonder if this has been attempted with an already formatted drive with an operating system already installed.

I can only suggest the previously mentioned Aspire One forum where they will at least know how Linpus is installed by default.

with a very small amount of work it can be configured to work like almost any other linux desktop.

I found these useful:

Download this program to enable an icon to switch between the Acer desktop and more or less the default XFCE desktop
http://www.iphpbb3.com/forum/downloa...6nx21895&id=11

Instructions to use that are here:
http://www.aspireoneuser.com/forum/v...hp?f=13&t=1612

After you have done this you can access the menu and settings to change things. for 3d desktop effect go settings/window manager tweaks/compositor
Compiz is already installed by default!

tips and tricks
http://jorge.ulver.no/2008/08/06/ace...ps-and-tricks/

Reclaiming disk space
http://macles.blogspot.com/2008/07/r...er-aspire.html

General information, hacks
http://www.aspireoneuser.com/forum/v...3af7dfbf7a4526

SICKBOY: thanks for the input. That definitely helped a lot.

Acer with Linpus???
 

Easy fix that...

Download Puppy Linux 4.12, put it on a memory stick and boot it from there or install it. Runs great on Fat format. Not necessary to delete the Linpus either.

Go to Puppy.com for info.

It's the cat's meow... Fact!!

I love it.

Hi all,

I'm quite satisfied with the FC8 install that underlies Linplus on my AAO 110, but I'm stuck on one thing: I need to upgrade the kernel to something like 2.6.27 or newer, but the sources posted by Acer appear to be customized heavily enough that trying to update by using diff to identify the modified bits seems like it would be a giant pain.

I can look in livna (or rather, a mirror -- the main repository is still having DNS issues at the moment), but the installed kernel I have here (uname -a gives "2.6.23.9lw #105 SMP PREEMPT") isn't in RPM form, so I'm not sure that would even work. So, can anyone point me to some hints about how to upgrade the kernel without messing up the entire system? Or is it just simpler to cleanly install an entire distro?

Sorry if this is an obvious or noob question, and thanks in advance for any suggestions.

Cheers,

/HJ

What you should do is use unetbootin to copy fedora 10, not 11, 11 has too many bugs, to a flash drive and install it. As far as NTFS goes, you don't need it. Ext2fsd lets you read and write linux partitions in windows. It uninstalls well too. Windows can read FAT, you know. Hope this helps.

Maybe off topic - if so, sorry
 

I've discovered that Linpus doesn't seem to actually have a user community nor a forum.

However, for what it's worth, I've done various forms of testing on I think 4 versions of Linux (some proprietory) and PC-BSD Unix.

I've downloaded the v9.4lite (I think) live/installation CD and am rather impressed with the product run live on a bunch of computers. It won't work on really old ones.

I've installed it to three computers with IDE HDDs (it installs to ext2FS) and also to a 4Gb "Transcend" very narrow width flash USB pendive which was its usual FAT-32 as bought and which became ext (according to GParted and also PartitionMagic).

Ghost2003 (the copy I have) will make a .gho image which when extracted will run.

It comes with a difficult to customise Grub that has no menu/lst and my attempts to edit it caused a disaster <grin>

It can have the hostname changed, but you have to go to the more traditional desktop and open the console, switch user by typing su (there is no root password set by default) and changing the name on both /ext/hostname and /ext/HOSTNAME files... otherwise it comes back to LINPUS as a computer name on the LAN.

It can also have the hosts file reconstructed to use on a LAN which serves domains (or psuedo-domains) - this is the only way LAN machines can reliably see what is hosted. Unfortunately at reboot the original hosts file reappears - even if you delete every version you can find. I have a suspicion that on reboot the entire system is recreated from an image as looking from a file system running live over an installed version of LinpusLite no filesystem tree appears to exist.

All up, I think it is brilliant and well suited to a project I'm thinking of setting up, a sort of cafe-environment, of several P3 vintage machines.

I'd be very interested to hear anyone else's thoughts. I am also considering using PuppyLinux as an alternative if I can't resolve some of my issues.

Best regards,

Richard in
Adelaide, South Australia,
Where the crows fly backwards to keep the dust out of their eyes!

This is actually a fallacy, I've heard it before, and I suspect it may well be promoted as fact by those Windows techs who have never seen another system, and it gets passed down the line having supposedly originated from "someone who knows what they are talking about".

Harsh? Not really, they are to be found all over the place, and they have accepted what someone else has told them as being factually accurate. Reminds me of "The Bellman" in "The Jaberwock" whose favorite saying was "What I tell you three times is true" :)

One advantage of using FAT-16 for external drives under 2Gb, and FAT-32 for external drives over 2Gb, is that if you have WINE installed on your system, you can use the Windows PortableApps defragmenting utility to keep it nice and unfragmented. Not all of their apps will work in WINE but that and ClamAV anti-virus (and a bunch of others) will.

I use an external laptop 40Gb IDE HDD in a portable enclosure which runs off an USB-1 port almost as well as an USB-2 port, as well as many 2, 4, and 8 Gb thumbdrives, all formatted to the FAT standard, and which can be read and written to on the two types of Unix I have (BSD and Solaris) as well as numerous Linuxes. Unix does not like NTFS and nor do some Linuxes.

Hope this is useful ameONE :)