Beginner with broken OS - distro advice please

For a horrible heartbreaking week I have owned an Aspire One, 16G SSD.

Bought secondhand with Linpus Lite, without a restore disk. At first it worked.

I bought it to do my work with, but after wasting 100 hours trying to get it working, in the end had to buy a second laptop as things were desperate.

I need wireless, 3g, browser, email, and Open Office.

I installed Firefox 3. Wifi ntworking broke, 3G packed in (it would dial and send SMS but not connect to DNS or show up in Networking). OS seemed to be corrupt as I had one un-deletable, un-editable networking confg file (I have worked out how to change owndership, permissions and to edit everhing else). So I bought an external CD drive and installed Linpus Lite 9.4. Now it is worse.

The only consolation is that has been crash course in Linux.

What now? Options are:
1. Throw it away and accept it was a mistake.
2. Pay for Windows, which normally seems to work out of the box.
3. Try to download an image of the original restore disk and use that.
4. Try some other Linux distro (perhaps one of those dedicated to Aspire One).
5. Try an OS other than Windows or Linux.

Any advice from people with more experience would be appreciated. I have read the Linux distro thread, but it does not entirely answer my question as most of the posters seem to have better Linux knowledge than me, and more patience for tweaking.

Thanks,

John

 

PS I emailed Acer. They said they could only help via a premium rate phone line.

 

I don't know about getting 3G to work as I never tried it but everything else you want works out of the box with Mandriva 2009.1 Spring Gnome version. I have it working well on an 8G SSD.

 

Hi there,

Sorry to hear that your fist experience with Linux has been a bad one - please don't let Linpus give you the impression that all distros are anything like it.

Looking at this logically for a moment, i think that your best, perhaps only step is to install some sort of Linux distro. If you decided to throw the AAO away (and i presume by this you mean sell it, else please send it my way! ) you will get considerably more coin for it if it actually works. I would say install a new distro, try it and then either revert to Windows after a month or so, or sell it (or whatever you want!).

I would recommend you install Ubuntu Jaunty onto your laptop via either a USB flash drive (not USB-HDD if possible) or an external CD-ROM drive. I don't know how confident you are at doing this, but its quite easy really. If you tell me what you already know i can fill in the gaps.

Although Linux may seem strange and difficult at first, time spent learning it is time and money saved later on in my opinion. I no longer have to pay for software or spend time restoring data and removing viruses, as i have done many times with Windows.

Cheers!

 

Thanks. Does it need to be a netbook remix? I noticed a magazine is for sale with a Ububntu 9.0.4 disk on the cover, so downloading and burning would be one less problem

In the '90s I worked at a firm using Sun Unix, so the concept is not totally new. But Linux does not have the priority in my life to put in hundreds of hours learning and setting up the OS! It wipes out the financial advantage free software.

Somthing which works 'out of the box' (inlcuding wifi and 3g) would suit me best.

I look forward to the day when anyone can use Linux, (even someone who does not know what a command line is) just like Windows is now. If Micrsoft are giving Windows 7 free, they must fear that day is not far off...

John

 

Hi John,

I agree that Linux needs to be command-line free if is is to gain momentum in the home-user market, but feel that not having a command line would restrict me from doing a lot of things. With a GUI you can only modify what the GUI will allow you to modify, hence its more restrictive. Anyway, enough of all that.

The netbook remix is essentially standard desktop Ubuntu with a Linpus-ish UI. I believe that you can flick between this and a normal desktop if you install remix, whereas the standard edition just features a standard desktop. It's totally down to preference.

You can download either of these from the Ubuntu website for free, then either use a program called unetbootin to write the ISO to a freshly FAT32 formatted flash drive, or burn it to a CD and boot using an external CD-ROM drive. The OS will load from the removable media into a "live" environment, not modifying anything on your disk and allowing you to test it out first. Please understand that it will be a lot slower and some thing may not work quite correctly in live mode. Follow the link on the desktop to the installer and you're away. If you have an SSD ensure to use the ext2 filesystem, else use ext3.

If you need to write the ISO to a USB drive you would be quicker downloading the image anyway, but if you have a USB CD-ROM lying about then yes, you could just buy the magazine. I understand that you may not want to put the time in, so Ubuntu Jaunty should include pretty much everything that you need and work right out of the box. Just hit reply as soon as you get stuck with anything.

Cheers.

 

Thanks. I will try it later in the week (when I will have access to unlimited broadband), or maybe buy the disk. A slow netbook would be far better than one which does not work at all!

I bought an external CD drive because booting from USB was another problem. Formatted USB stick as vfat and ext3, both times got 'kernel panic, cannot find live CD' (when I finally found out how to get behind the frozen splash window), and researched (but did not try) how to write a boot table manually. Unetbootin was one of the many things in Llinux and / or Aspire One which simply did not work for me.

Anyway I am grateful with the advice you have given, and note the point about ext2. Will give it a try, unless another poster persuades me Mint or Linux4One or something would be easier.

Had I not managed to get a corrupt, unwritable confg file I would still be happily working with the native Linpus. Its limitations and bugginess were obvious, but it did the job while it worked.

John

 

John,

Do you have a Windows machine that you can use to prepare your boot media, as this would give you less headaches than trying to do it through a broken Linpus install.

Cheers.

 

Yes, the Unetbootin was run on the new Vista laptop I am using now. I made the USB stick on Vista (several times). But it did not work. Just got 'could not find live CD'. I tried with the files extracted to the USB stick. I tried with the files extracted to a folder on the SSD in /mnt. I tried with the iso image on USB stick. I tried with iso image in a folder on SSD. I tried reformatting the 4GB USB stick several times, formatting both under Linux and Windows. I tried finding the USB stick in /dev and mounting it manually with command prompt (usually said 'already mounted'). The USB stick made with Unetbootin simply does not work.

The USB showed up as a boot device in Aspire One bios but did not work. Whereas the external CD drive does NOT show up in BIOS in the list of boot devices, but it did install Linpus after the Aspire One Bios had D2D restore enabled.

I am really tempted to have a go with the new Open Solaris mentioned in the other thread, notwithstanding being, like you, short on RAM.

John

 

I'd say just drop Ubuntu on there, it's easy peasy and has a pretty massive user base for when things don't work as expected.

 

update on which distro thread