Everthing Working Fine...??

now, please dont take this as a 'bragging' post, but its really just to say how things are going with my little Acer Aspire one (8gig 512 ram Linpus Lite) which i have had for two weeks now and having a quick read through some of the recent post christmas questions that have appeared on here the last few days, i think its pretty safe to assume a lot of people got one in their stocking, or bought one as a present.

i think for those of us who have been used to Windows based machines over the years, like myself, getting hold of the AAO and starting it up for the first time might have been a slight culture shock to learn of the slight differences involved in installing software and general tweaks etc, but i must admit, to get a machine straight out the box that can do the following is pretty good in my book:

a fully working office suite which, lets face it, isnt really any different to MS Office in layout and functionability
a basic email programme, which apart from putting in email address and password works fine
a basic messenger programme which again, as above involves very little effort to get working
a basic media player for MP3's etc
and various games etc

now, as i said, this is in no way a bragging post, but as soon as mine came out the box, and did its 'Live Update' (granted, took an hour or two) and re-booted, all seemed to be working fine.
i then read a few posts on here and after installing the 'right click' advanced desktop took about to instal a few extras, namely Audacity and the 'GIMP' everything seemed to be ok.
next up was a better MP3 player in the name of 'Songbird', a nice programme that bears an uncanny resemblence to iTunes in all but name (how do they get away with that??).
and finally the VLC media player for vids, which did take a few goes installing, but after a few reads of the various excellent 'How To..' posts on this forum was installed and working correctly.
the moral of the above for all us newbies to the wonderful world of Linux is that it can be quite a powerful little machine if thought of in just a slightly different way to what we expect from Windows.

i now have a laptop that i can write letters, do spreadsheets for work on the hoof, watch vids, play MP3's, surf the net and send/recive emails without really doing any major changes since it come out the box and all this with a start up time of under 15 secs, my bloated, Vista laptop is currently taking 3 mins, and i havent even really got a lot of stuff on it. all this in a size less than a decent hard backed book and cost under 170 quid. :shock:

sure, the opening of a Terminal and typing in commands may appear strange at first (MS DOS anyone?) but really, if you give it a bit of time and a careful read through of this forum, it can open up a wonderful world to you.
anyways, as i said, hope whis isnt a brag, just my thoughts on hows things are going, take a bit of time, use the Search box at the top and can guarantee 99% of your questions will have been raised before and excellent solutions or pointers given on here. :mrgreen:

Hope you all had a wonderful Christmas and a happy and peacefull new year

 

I think you are right about most things desite the fact I had to return my unit for a replacement due to a hardware problem...

Now.. about those games... they mostly appear to want you to pay for them after the first level or after so long in use by registering. Bit of a con really when the games were on demonstation in the store where it was purchased. Now what about some actual free games (anyone?) and maybe some that do not discriminate against colour blind users like myself.

 

There are hundreds of games listed in the add/remove software program. For detailed instructions, see this thread: I've used specific examples there but the process applies to loads of software!