Acer Aspire One
 

Hi, my sons notebook/netbook just stopped working. He was using it one minute , the next it just turned itself off and when we tried to reconnect to the Internet nothing happened. The Internet icon (2 monitors with a cross), usually at the bottom , right hand corner has disappeared! We have tried everything to get it back to no avail! Also, if we unplug the power cord the laptop turns itself off!

Does anyone have any ideas?

We tried the other instructions which seemed to help everyone else but us!!!

Sounds like network-manager died.
I would recommend this:

1) Start terminal (usually under accessories, depending on OS)
2) Run: sudo service network-manager restart
3) If that doesn't restart it, run: dmesg |tail
4) Post the results of step 3 if needed, there maybe something that shows up.

Is it using the default Linpus OS?

You might want to consider switching to a "real" Linux operating system, not the dumbed-down OS that came with it that's made to use like an appliance.

Ubuntu and Mint are generally good if you're new to Linux.

Ubuntu runs incredibly well on my wife's Acer Aspire One - but installing that might be beyond the scope of the thread ;)

I run both Fedora and Ubuntu on my Apsire One AOA150. The advantage of Fedora is that the left SD card slot is recognized by default. Ubuntu (at least through 10.10) requires
[code]pciehp.pciehp_force=1[code] on the kernel line in menu.lst (or the equivalent place in grub.cfg if using grub2) to recognize a card inserted into the left slot on the AOA110 and AOA150 after booting. Other distros I've tried that have worked well include Linux Mint, Mandriva, Puppy, Crunchbang, PCLinuxOS, and probably a few others I'm not recalling at the moment.