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Getting started with the Acer Aspire One

I just picked up a Acer Aspire One Linux edition with the 8Gb SSD. It a great little portable netbook. I chose the Linux version over the XP edition for a number of reasons. Mainly the price; I picked mine up for just $299, plus because I got display model they through in the 2 year extended warranty for free. Secondly I have enough XP and Vista computers and laptop the deal with already, and I didn't want the hassle of installing firewalls and virus scanners and spyware detectors, plus I'd inevitably end up installing many many other apps which over time begin to bog down the windows registry and general slow windows to a crawl. In general I just want my netbook to be as hassle free as possible.

The Linux Linpus OS on the Aspire One has "almost" everything I need out of the box to use as light weight cloud computing platform. Browsing around the net there are a number of "hacks" and enhancements for the AA1. Here's my recommended list the optimize the AA1 usability
  1. Run a complete system update. Get all of the latest OS patches using the Live Update under the Settings section. It took a few attempts for me to get all of the updates installed.

  2. Update the BIOS. At the time of writing the latest BIOS version is v3.305. Details on how to update the bios are here. You will need a spare USB thumb drive to perform the update.

  3. Expand the memory. The AA1 has a very easy way to expand storeage beyond the 8Gb internal SSD. Just insert a SD card in the storeage expansion slot and the AA1 will automatically use the new disk space as an extension to the built in drive. I added a 8Gb SD card I picked up at the local store for just $20.

  4. Enabled the desktop right click menu. You can access morelinux apps from a right click on the on the desktop, but you hae to turn it one. See the following steps

  5. Update the installed apps to the latest versions. The AA1 comes with OpenOffice 2, Firefox 2, Flash 9, Java 1.5. these are all great, but the Live Update does not update them the the latest release. the following links provide details on updating the the latest releases:

    • Update Firefox to version 3.01, or even the latest Firefox 3.1 Beta. I've installed 3.1 and enabled the tracemonkey javascript compiler for improved performance.
    • Update Flash to version 10. I had to run sudo yum remove flash-plugin prior to running the Flash 10 installer to get it to work.
    • Update OpenOffice to version 3.0
    • Update Java to 1.6 update 10. Note: the post details installing update 6. I recommend getting the latest update which has some major improvments to applet performance. Just go to java.com and download the latest JRE for Linux

  6. Install Extra Applicaitons. Acer make available a few extra applications that can be downloaded and installed on the AA1. The list of apps and how to install them can be found here. My goal is to keep the number of installed applications to a minimum so I just installed Skype, FileZilla and VideoLAN.

  7. Apply the noisy fan fix. Follow the details in the following post to reduce the fan noise. The original wiki page appears to be down referened in the post appears to be down. If you wish to change the default settings I found a description of the autofand.conf file here

  8. Tweak Linux for SSD usage. See the following post
Many thanks to the macles* blog for all of the informative posts, as well as all the other sites and posts linked above.
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