More Obervations on the AOD250

Expanding on recent posts [1] [2], today I inspected the underside and found three easily accessible compartments:

1. Hard drive
2. Memory
3. Mini-PCI

I have no inclination to chance the HDD unless SSD becomes rediculously cheap.  This has a 5400 RPM drive in it which trades performance for energy savings.  Given what I plan to be doing with it, a 5400 RPM drive is just fine.

The memory is 1GB.  Again, that is just fine for what I plan to be doing, but if I ever have $30 burning a hole in my pocket, I can take this to 2GB.  Given that I run Linux on this, that is more attractive than if I ran Windows because Linux seems to do phenomenaly better at using memory to load the core parts.  … I feel like I am talking myself into this upgrade.  I know that sounds a little crazy to say because more memory with Windows is always better; but I always feel like I am feeding a bad plan when I concede to Windows’ need for memory.  Windows needs it, Linux uses it.

The Mini-PCI port is the most interesting piece.  There is so much I could do with this:  broadband (I think…), SSD, Wireless-N, toothpick storage… the possibilities are endless!  Or not.  But it is expandable.  That is very nice.  The thought of having an SSD primary drive with a HDD as my data location has a certain appeal.  Though, this would not be any kind of near-term upgrade.

Acer Aspire One AOD250 Wired Network Fix

As an amendment to this post, I did find one technical issue.  Amusingly wireless networking worked immediately, but wired did not.  It is almost always the other way around for me.  However, there is a really great amount of documentation that exists for this:  http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1206649.  I am going to repeat the pertinent parts here:

• Go to this webpage:  http://partner.atheros.com/Drivers.aspx
• The driver appears to have moved to Google Code. (Updated 2012-03-22)
• Download the “AR81Family Linux Driver”
• Put the file in a directory where it is okay to uncompress it and run the following commands:

tar -xvzf AR81Family-linux-v1.0.0.10.tar.gz
cd src
make
sudo make install
sudo modprobe atl1e

I received an error from the tar command, but I kept going and that worked exactly perfectly for me.  In fact, my wired network registered as connected immediately after running the last command.

Not only did I contribute a bug report, but got the joy of updating the Hardware wiki:  https://wiki.ubuntu.com/HardwareSupport/Machines/Netbooks#Acer%20Aspire%20One.

Initial Netbook Impressions

In newegg’s infamous delivery speed, I received my AOD250 today.  My first impressions are quite good.

• solid seating of power plug
• tolerable keyboard –touchtyping is relatively easy (I just typed a few pages in a story I am working on, and my typing suffered very little)
• nice display
• Kubuntu 9.04 installed beautifully with no more hitches than normal — better than my old HP laptop
• quiet
• pretty
• touchpad buttons are not as hard to press as some reviews claimed — but I like the resistance
• wireless networking worked instantly (under Kubuntu, that is)
• bluetooth is toggled by a hardware button … very nice (and KDE 4.3 nicely picks up on that and displays the BT system tray icon when BT is enabled)
• Comes with1GB of RAM — and I’m not sure why people are instantly upgrading to 2GB as this works nicely for me.  However, it is only $30 …

I have a few instant nits though:

• “End” is Fn+PgDn, “Home” is Fn+PgUp — I use these two keys a lot; these two things are becoming the top annoyance (but not enough to say not to buy one of these)
• USB ports don’t seem to hold things squarely, but I seldom use them
• hardware switch to shutoff touchpad would be nice — Fn+F7 toggles the touchpad; not as convenient as a hardware switch, but tolerably serves the purpose (updated 2009-09-06)
• wired networking isn’t working right now (see this post)
• the glossy screen is tolerable, but I can imagine it being intolerable if I were backlit or sitting outdoors (hmm…)
• the touchpad can be a little fussy about the “touch click” — but it appears to err on the side of less sensitivity; I would prefer it erring in that direction

Overall, the install of Kubuntu was easy, and this is working exactly as I expected. In my first few hours of owning it, I liked it!  As if it isn’t already apparent, I plan to keep updating this post.  I will ultimately post a review on Newegg.