Robi’s blog

I recently got a Acer Aspire One (AAO) for Christmas and have been very impressed with it.  It is very light, has a good battery life, and actually fits in the pocket of several of my jackets. The AAO also has a decent screen size and keyboard although I find the track pad highly annoying in prolonged use and suggest a wireless mouse if you plan to work with it often. When I bought the AAO, after discounts, I got it for almost 250 dollars although it now seems a like the average price on Amazon is 359.00 you should be able to find it cheaper at places like Walmart or even Best Buy.

I have now started to even use my AAO for work when I travel since a large amount of my work is, email, Power Point, and work with Word and so lots of times the AAO is sufficient for my needs and on two business meetings I traveled with the AAO inside my < a href=”http://www.scottevest.com/”>Scottevest jacket pocket. For someone with a bad back who hates lugging around a desktop replacement like Laptop (although I still love my Lenovo T61p and I still own like 4 Thinkpads) the AAO can be a god send as long as you are using it in for simple things.

At the same time one thing that annoys me about the AAO is how poorly windows XP responds. The AAO has a decent processor, 1.6 Mhz Atom, and decent amount of memory, 1 gig, but for some reason when you open a browser or open more than one tab it seems to lock everything till that one process is finished. Its very annoying so I decided I wanted to install Ubuntu on the netbook (I am also thinking of getting another one to put OSX on it). So I did some googling to figure out what it would take to install Ubuntu on the AAO and at first I was a little concerned and most blog posts seem to imply that you would need another Ubuntu machine to create a bootable USB thumb drive. After some research though I found a great site called Pendrive which has a wealth of information on creating bootable USB Drive images of various flavors of Linux. In fact to get Ubuntu on the machine all I did was follow this link, USB Ubuntu 8.10 install from Windows (non Persistent), which walks you through how to make a bootable version of Ubuntu 10.8 on your thumbdrive. Since I was new to Ubuntu I also found this tutorial, Installing a Dual-Boot with Windows and Ubuntu, very useful.

Finally there are a few things you need to do to make your AAO wireless work after boot up. I found this great guide, Install Ubuntu Intrepid Ibex 8.10 on the Acer Aspire One , from the Ubuntu community which helped a lot. I would suggest though that unless you have a wired Internet connection handy that you down load Atheros-based driver for the wireless from the Madwifi project from http://snapshots.madwifi-project.org/ before your start and put it on a USB drive so when you follow the above guide you have the driver ready.

This whole process was pretty fast and now my netbook is really fun. I am able to do more than one thing at once in it now and still watch Hulu making me one happy camper.