New Toy

I have decided to resurrect my blog, partly due to the acquisition of a new toy, and partly to try and get back to writing some more interesting entries.

Firstly on to my new toy, it’s an Acer Aspire One. Just the 8.9 inch SD powered one that initially came with the Linpus Linux distribution. As a piece of hardware the device is very compact, feels very solid and is actually surprisingly easy to type on (when I don’t tap the touch pad). I read many reviews before deciding which one, of the ever growing stream of Netbooks, to buy and it came down to the Acer or the Dell, predominantly due to the keyboard. A recent round of price drops was the clincher though as the Acer came in at £165 in the end which is almost half the price that I found the Dell at. It’s even cheaper than the Asus EeePC 701s that I bought for the kids about 18 months ago which I found just a bit too small for my fingers but the kids are very happy with.

Linpus was very easy  to use and very quick but little niggles like the keyboard mapping in xterm and the outdated versions of Open Office and Firefox annoyed me a little too much. As a result I ended up installing the Ubuntu NetBook Re-Mix within two days of purchase. Having used it for a couple of days now it is definitely here to stay. Everything worked straight from the install (apart from hot-plug detection of SD cards if one isn’t inserted on boot which has a workaround of an additional boot option to the grub menu BUG). All te software versions, unsurprisingly, match the full Ubuntu install on my main laptop so I should have no worries about document interchange. So far I have even stuck with the Re-Mixed interface as it really does make it easier to use on the small screen.

On the negative side there has been some loss of speed compared to the Linpus installation but I think that is partly a consequence of the updated software stack. The boot option to fix the SD card issue also makes the start-up look messy and  takes longer which is a minor annoyance (which I hope will be fixed sometime soon).

The full library of Ubuntu software is also at my disposal now which had been a minor annoyance with Linpus when I tried to add things which conflicted with custom packages from Acer. I will have to try and be more selective than I have been on the main laptop though in order to preserve as much of the 16GB SD for some actual work. So far I have only added pyroom to provide some distraction free editing (after thinking it might be interesting to try from seeing a review of JDarkroom on lifehacker.com). I am sure I will add more as the days wear on but the intention is to try and keep this as clean as possible so that I can actually work on some ideas when time allows and not get distracted.