tiny lappy

[solipsistnation]

I have a new tiny laptop.

It's an Acer Aspire One-- the 512MB (soon to be upgraded) 8GB SSD linux-based one. It's TINY! It weighs almost nothing! It's slightly faster (sigh) than my old Powerbook G4, but has a less useful OS and desktop interface! 

I've been installing things, though, so it's slowly becoming more useful. I'd like to be able to use this as a portable serial terminal (for when I'm stuck dealing with the one or two serial consoles I need to deal with) and email-reader and thing-to-use-in-meetings. And since my PBG4 is getting unreliable (with a loose power connector and a totally dead battery, if I bump it wrong it shuts off), this could take over for my reading-email-in-bed needs as well. I do need to figure out if there's a way to sync bookmarks between my work and home Safari browsers and Mozilla 3, but ssh is covered and if I can get it to play music from an iTunes library I'll be all set.

Overall? Pretty cool. I'm giving it a few weeks and a drive home to decide if it's worth using in the long run, and if it's not I'll sell it and upgrade to a MacBook (probably not a MB Pro, considering). If it is, though, I'll probably set up a home Mac media server for music and video and stuff and use this for everything I don't do on my game-playin' PC...

Comments

[stophittinyrslf.livejournal.com]

It is the cuuuuutest tiny little laptop ever. It looks like a scaled up DS.

FYI.

[friode.livejournal.com]

My brain took a little while to realize you actually didn't mean BGP4. 8-)

[solipsistnation.livejournal.com]

no, no, that has plenty of issues of its own. eesh.

[pir.livejournal.com]

I don't use my eeepc at home but for wandering around and travelling light the little laptops are great!

[sweh.livejournal.com]

Yup, I take my EEEpc travelling, but have much better machines for day to day use.

I worked out, last month, how to get my EEE to talk to my cellphone via bluetooth and use my data plan (and the bill didn't show extra charges), so I may finally have removed dependency from (US based) hotels charging for internet access :-)

[air-hadoken.livejournal.com]

Over thanksgiving I finally took my XO-1 traveling with me. It worked out pretty well, especially with the new firmware/system upgrade seeming to speed up Web browsing considerably. The free year of T-Mobile HotSpot that I got with it was finally useful, too.

[sauergeek.livejournal.com]

Ooh. An EEE is in my near future, and I have a Bluetooth-capable cellphone (Treo 700p) with an unlimited data plan available. Got pointers on how to make this work?

[sweh.livejournal.com]

The two links listed at http://wiki.eeeuser.com/howto:bluetoothdongles#connecting_to_a_mobile_phone were my best resource; in particular the Windows Mobile one. Never tried with PalmOS so dunno how easy that will be.

[z-gryphon.livejournal.com]

Have you ever noticed how the product named "Aspire" is always the little cheap one? Ford used to have a car by that name that was the same sort of thing. It's like the manufacturers are saying, "Aspire... to a real $PRODUCT, you cheap bastard!" I don't particularly like feeling like the manufacturers of my consumer goods are mocking me, that's all I'm saying.

[twwombat.livejournal.com]

I always think of it as "Ass Pyre" - as in "you'll get your butt burned if you use this product."

[ex-susumu64.livejournal.com]

Can you install Mac on it? A friend of mine has "fixed" an EEE and a Samsung NC10 so far.

[solipsistnation.livejournal.com]

Possibly, yes. I may do so as an experiment, although I only just got it set up usably as a linux thingy.

[awfief.livejournal.com]

you don't get all hand crampy from teeny tiny keyboard of DOOM? That's the only thing stopping me from getting one -- full size keyboard = important.

[solipsistnation.livejournal.com]

I don't know yet-- in a couple of hours of sitting on irc and trying to get various linuxy things to work I didn't run into it. The main problem I had was when I switched to my full-sized keyboard for a while-- it felt way too big!

But, that's something I'll be paying attention to, for sure.

[mrhiggsboson.livejournal.com]

Hi! I don't mean to stalk your journal, but I totally got that same Acer in the mail today!! I've been playing with it and love it so far! Let's be friends! haha

[solipsistnation.livejournal.com]

Did you get the Newegg black friday deal too? Whee!

I have, let's see... Installed a bunch of crap, including compilers and stuff, customized the icon display (because I am a unix user and by god I MUST have my shell window!) and I am now trying to build a version of mame that will work with the slightly wacky video hardware in there. I think I have it-- I just need to actually set up the mame.ini so it finds my massive collection of r0mz.

This is a decent collection of things to do:
http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2008/09/05/ten_aspire_one_tips/

Here are some other decently useful things to do:
http://philwiltux.blogspot.com/2008/09/my-perfect-linpus-on-aa1.html

Mostly linpus is based on fedora core 8, although the acer version has a bunch of custom libraries and things. Installing firefox 3 is a must, though. Here:
http://macles.blogspot.com/2008/07/installing-firefox-3-on-acer-aspire-one.html

(That guy's wget line doesn't work, but if you download ff3 from inside ff2, well, you know. It's not hard.)

Anyway, I hope you're up to linuxy hacking... I'm happy to help if you run into problems. The basic included applications are mostly okay, except for the ones that aren't. The AIM thing is lame, and seriously, hotmail? Does anyone still use hotmail?

But, yeah. It's a cute little lappy and a very cool toy.

[mrhiggsboson.livejournal.com]

Whoa! Lots of useful information here!

To be honest, I'd been wanting to get OpenBSD w/ xfce4 on here, but after reading that the kernel didn't support the wireless device or the webcam, I was instantly turned off to running it on here. De Raadt's daemon runs beautifully on my Toshiba Satellite, but likewise the wireless driver for the Asus I have is known to be busted... so epic fail on the obsd team for not supporting my asus and not supporting the atheros on the acer. :P

The keyboard is fine and I'm already getting used to it. The only challenge is entering my passwords, which has become muscle memory on a full-layout keyboard more than anything else.

In the long-run, I may just throw xubuntu on here, but so far I'm happy with the optimizations this Linpus business has going on. I would definitely like much greater control, but I think the resources you listed will help a lot! Simply getting an xterm window up was a huge sigh of relief. :D

[solipsistnation.livejournal.com]

The biggest thing with using the included OS is keeping all the hardware working. I had a ton of trouble getting my desktop's wireless card to work in ubuntu and finally gave up on it after a couple of hours of booting into Windows (which I use for the all-important purpose of playing games), downloading things, booting back into ubuntu, tried to install them, seeing that the wireless still didn't work, going back to Windows, etc etc etc. I'm a unix admin during the day so, honestly, if I have to mess around with something too much at home it gets tedious quickly. I mostly just want stuff to work. (That's why I prefer Macs, but, well, Half-Life 2 and so on.)

OpenBSD is cute, but not a lot of software supports it. I'd go for it for a server or firewall, though, for sure, and I did used to run it on an old Sony Vaio back when those were the awesome tiny laptops du jour.

I should be getting another 1GB RAM for the thing tomorrow which should fix the one issue I have with it. Running firefox and anything else at the same time makes it run painfully slowly. I just have to work up to opening the thing up and make sure I have steady hands...

[mrhiggsboson.livejournal.com]

I've run obsd on a few servers in the past and I've had nothing but success with the setups. That's pretty much why I considered it for a desktop setup too. If I'm doing minor simulations/calculations, it's pretty efficient too, which is why I fell in love from the beginning. Way less overheard than modern Linux distros too, imho, unless you're running something like CRUX or other bloody lightweight kids. Also, and probably most importantly, the minimal access to gaming on *nix systems has saved my GPA and probably kept me in school.

Keep me (and all your readers!) posted on how that RAM upgrade goes. I'd be interested in how you manage that on this creature. Happy hacking. :D

p.s. Yeah the NewEgg deal was awesome.

[solipsistnation.livejournal.com]

Yeh, the *BSDs are really nice and stable (as long as they support the hardware...), and work just fine until you need to run anything commercial... At that point, you run into the problem where nothing is supported but Solaris and Linux and sometimes Mac OS X (and usually HPUX and AIX, and maybe Irix and Tru64 if they're feeling old-school, or SCO if they're bastards or selling to telcos. and of course Windows). Take a look at what Matlab runs on, or Oracle. FreeBSD does a pretty good job with their linux compatibility layer, but then you end up installing a whole extra directory tree with linux libraries and a fake /proc and all kinds of junk and it rapidly becomes more trouble than it's worth, especially if you're, say, trying to get Oracle to run.

Heck, even if you're running open source software and building it yourself, there are a lot of packages that just assume that All The World's A Linux Box and won't build on anything that isn't Linux or real close to it. (And not even just debug utilities like valgrind or system tools... I've run into what seemed like pretty basic utilities that won't build without some linux-specific stuff.)

Oh, I installed the Intel C compiler on my AA1 today-- it seems pretty neat, although sdlmame doesn't build with it...