Sep 21, 2008

Acer Aspire One

Made myself a present yesterday - yet another one device running Linux.
Played a bit with it this morning. Actually if you look closer at Linpus OS installed on Acer Aspire One, you'll see that it's just rebuilt FC8 with a lot of patches. It's being fast (boots ~ 5 sec), easy to customize (unfortunately in order to be able to work normally on Aspire One you've to modify a rather large amount of config files to remove Acer's customization, that's clearly has been made to be the OS Windows-like, which is completely not our choise :) ).
Despite Acer Aspire One is a new, there're many articles and howtos on how to hack it, I'm not going to write a new one, just sharing my thoughts on this notebook.
As for howtos, I like this one most. The only thing I'd like to add currently is: after you change russian UTF locale to the english one (in /etc/syconfig/i18n), there is no way to switch keyboard layout to russian, modifying xorg.conf is useless (it's being rewritten on every system startup), GUI tools do not bring much success: it's possible to change switch layouts now, but:
a) with ctrl+space (I guess this is easy fixable)
b) russian layout is _not_ QWERTY ! (do not see a quick way to fix this).
To solve the described issue I had to look to init scripts and find the reason of overwriting xorg.conf. Found. Linpus has xkb_plugin_set_xorg.sh script in /usr/bin, which is changes xorg on every bootup (do not ask me why!), so I saved original xkb_plugin_set_xorg.sh for backup purposes and erased the script, modified xorg.conf and rebooted (there is no way just to restart X, I'll fix it on the next step :) ). Now I can type in russian as well as in English :)
TODO:
a) Increase RAM size. Currently it has 512Mb, but it's possible to install one more module (one is not removable), so will buy and install 1GB module.
b) Change internal flash card to a real hard driver bigger size, think it should be possible.
c) will see....

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