Lockwoods Blog

Ubuntu 8.04.1 on my Aspire One

I’ve been a bit unhappy with my pre-installed linpus linux, so I decided to install Ubuntu on my Aspire One. Ubuntu is one of the best GNU/Linux distributions out there with a great community.

Firstly I tried to boot the Ubuntu 8.04 liveCD, but it it didn’t work for me. After some reading in the Aspireoneuser forum, I discovered that some people had the same problems and tried Ubuntu 8.04.1 which works. (so remember: never download the x.x version but the x.x.1 one )

All the installing went fine and I followed this tutorial to install some hardware and configure the SSD:

Help@Ubuntu

There are some good things about installing Ubuntu:

You can now write and read Windows partitions
You can access Windows networks
More installable packages (like conky for example)
Up to Date packages (OpenOffice, FF3, 3D drivers)
Login security

And of course the bad things:

Crappy flash framerates and no sound
All the hardware installing
SSD performs slower (I have the Intel SSD)
Startup times slower

August 23, 2008 at 9:41 am 6 comments

Aspire One – Conky

To start Conky on your Aspire One, you first need to disable the Acer desktop:

(or follow this tutorial to shut your Acer desktop permanent off: here , but I do not recommend using it because there are some problems with it)

kill the process xfdesktop2 (Ctrl+Alt+Del)

Then open your terminal and type:

xfdesktop-xfce

Your xfce desktop will now appear on your screen with some icons. Now start up:

System -> Add/Remove Software (in advanced menu)
Search for “conky” and install the fedora 8 package.

Now you need to place your .conkyrc configuration file in your homefolder called:

/home/user/

Then open your terminal and type:

conky

Conky should now run.

NOTE: After reboot everything will be resetted

(I still need to figure out how to start conky from script)

August 11, 2008 at 2:51 pm 1 comment

Acer Aspire One, the beginning…

The next 4 years of my life I need to travel 100km a day per train from Amsterdam to Almere for my study. The Aspire One is a great netbook for traveling, so I bought this machine last Saturday. It cost me 299 euros and it came without it’s bag .