Aspire One, One week on

Well I have had the Aspire One for a week now and the NetBook Remix is serving me well. I have added a few things to make life a little easier. The first and the one I am using right now is Drivel which is a great way to generate Blog entries off-line and then post them when completed. I have played with it before on the full laptop but for some reason I never really used it extensively as most of the time the laptop was connected to the net and I could post directly or I was using wordpy on the N800. The WordPress interface is a little un-responsive on the NetBook though so I think Drivel will see a bit more action.

The second useful addition is Unison which represents a massive improvement on my previous mobile backup regime of grsync by being truly bi-directional (actually in its current configuration it is tri-directional). GRSync has been great to ensure any content on my laptop or N800 has been backed up to the Linkstation but with the NetBook I wanted to be able to freely switch from working on the NetBook to working on the full size laptop so I started looking for bi-directional synchronisation. Unison makes use of the same SSH key-pairing I have used for setting up rsync so there was no major pain there. I have installed the GTK Unison package that is available from the Ubuntu repositories and I had to find a mipsel debian package to crowbar into the Linkstation. The GTK Unison package does an initial scan to determine what changes to make and presents a very easy interface to determine what needs to be synced and allow you to manually resolve conflicts.

The final solution now revolves around both the NetBook and the main Laptop synchronising with a directory on the Linkstation on-demand. All that is needed to get things onto the NetBook is to copy it into the Mobile folder and run Unison the run Unison again from the NetBook. It could all have been accomplished by SVN or CVS but I don’t really care about version control for this sort of thing (I do have a CVS server for code and web sites I maintain) and the GUI interface just makes the whole solution very easy to keep using which is 90% of the problem keeping things backed up.

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.