Acer Aspire One complete newbie

Only recently received my 8meg SSD version, though spent half the time back with Acer resolving a dud battery problem. I have to say they were excellent though.

Anyway I have a list of questions, I'm sure the answers are somewhere in the site, but I either cannot find them or am confused by the answers, so would be grateful if someone can help.

Firstly I want to upgrade from 8G to 16G. I'm told that if I put an 8Gig SD card in the left slot, the Aspire will see it as a 16Gig drive. Is that so and if so do I need a particular class or speed of SD card ?

I want to make it dual boot such that I use Linplus most of the time for surfing etc, but also having XP ( I have the software ) for when I use software or hardware not supported by Linplus. Is this easy to do ?

I tried to play an AVI file, but media master reported "cannot find codec matching selected -vo and video format". Is it simply a matter of downloading a codec from somewhere, or do I need to do anything else ?

I'm completely new to Linux, so any advice welcome.

Thanks
Dave.

 

Hi davesch

You said,

Firstly I want to upgrade from 8G to 16G. I'm told that if I put an 8Gig SD card in the left slot, the Aspire will see it as a 16Gig drive. Is that so and if so do I need a particular class or speed of SD card ?

The Acer will report that you have approximately 16GB but you will not have a 16GB drive.

The following may help you understand what happens to the directory structure when an SD card is inserted into the LH slot.

When you mount an SD card there are 3 data directories as follows;

home -------- My Disk/// ------- /mnt/home --------(virtual directory)
SD/MMC Drive (LH slot) ------ Removable Disk------- /media/disk --------(SD physical disk)
SSD ------- Fixed Disk ------- /home/user -------(SSD physical disk)

The virtual directory home is created by merging the data stored on the SSD and SD/MMC physical drives. This is a software created merge by an application called Aufs and home is set to be displayed to the user rather than have them looking in two different directories. It also gives a greater impression that the SD card is added to the SSD. When the SD card is removed its data disappears from the home directory but leaves any data on the SSD /home/user directory. If you have no SD in LH slot the home directory replicates the SSD /home/user directory.
If you mount an SD in the RH slot it is not replicated in home, you will not see it reported as 16Gb but you will have 8GB of extra storage just as you have when mounted in the LH slot.

I use a Transcend 16GB SDHC and I have had no problems with it.

Best wishes.

 

Assuming you do not use more than 8gb of space on the SSD, does any system, downloaded or created files etc ever get moved to the expansion card SD? In other words, is the expansion card slot only used in a temporary fashion when powered up, provided you do not reduce your free space (disk) to less than the 8gb of the Acer SSD?

 

Hi RPZ

There is an explanation of what happens to files when an SD card is used in the LH Storage Expansion slot in Macles Blog under the following link.

http://macles.blogspot.com/search?updat ... -results=7

The SD card is not used in a temporary fashion as any data written to it is held by it. If anything is temporary it is the virtual directory /mnt/home. If you have data on SD it will show in /mnt/home but if you remove/unmount the card any data on it will no longer appear in /mnt/home unless of course you have it replicated in /home/user (SSD).

I use my SD card to store data files such as Music, Photo's and Open Office documents. I try to keep the SSD for applications.

 

So in other words, don't have an SD card installed as expansion when adding anything or changing anything important to the OS, hardware and software etc.

Thanks

 

The 8g SSD card finally arrived today and on power up, Aspire gave message re succesful expansion upgrade.

However, if I select advanced mode, file manager immediately reboots and then shows the two drives seperate. Changing back to standard mode gives the message again re expansion upgarde, is this correct ?

Is this going to cause a problem if I wish to partition the drives to dual boot with XP ?

- Dave

 

Hi davesch

What you see with the SSD and SD card is normal, they never form one drive. They do form a virtual directory as I said before and this gives the impression they have merged.

I have never tried dual booting but I understand you will enable this on the SSD and have the SD card for data.

 

Hi there,

I wonder if you can help me... What can you do if the 'virtual directory' (My Disk///) is not a merge of the data on the fixed disk (/home/user) as is the case with my laptop at the moment! On mine, the My Disk directories are empty, although all my files can be found in /home/user/...

Any ideas would be hugely appreciated!

Thanks,
James