Is there a work-out-of-the-box Linux?

I'm wondering if there is a distribution that will pretty-much work "out of the box" without much work after installation on an Aspire One. Aside from minor tweaks for speed and such. I tried Ubuntu, but it needs a lot of work to get the wireless stuff to work. I did not try Fedora yet, but the Fedora web page for the Aspire One said that wireless doesn't work yet, but "works with new Atheros driver in 2.6.27 rawhide kernel". My Ubuntu desktop currently uses a 2.6.24 kernel, so will Fedora work as soon as the 2.6.27 kernel is released as stable?

 

There is an Ubuntu tailored for the AA1 in the works. However it's still in beta and not quite perfect yet.

http://onelinux.org/

 

http://onelinux.org/ ... OneLinux is Ubuntu customized for the One. It's in beta right now, but in my brief try from a live usb it seemed to work fine, including wi-fi (but I had to restart X before wi-fi started working). Also it didn't shut down properly, so I had to hold down the power button.

Also, I believe some of our friends over at Fedora are working on a spin for the One -- I'm not sure what the status is. Maybe when F10 comes out in a few weeks it will work.

I like Fedora and Ubuntu, but for the One I prefer an XFCE desktop since I only have 512 MB of RAM and I'm too chicken to take the thing apart and install more memory.

 

Very interesting. I have to try beta version. I would say it could be much better solution than installing full Ubuntu/Kubuntu/Xbuntu...

 

I have to say I agree with Jimk, xfce is the way to go for such a small system. It uses less resources, less power and maximizes the potential of the AA1. I installed Onelinux and found my biggest issue was the fact that it dramaticly cut the battery life of my aspire one. It went from 2hrs 50min to about 2 hrs. There are also a few other things that need to be ironed out with it as well. I'm probably going to go back to the Acer Limpus OS for now and just try to tweak a few things to work better for what I want to do with my AA1.

 

Yes, I also tried with both Fedora and Ubuntu (on the 512 MB RAM, 8 Gig SSD version.)

I wound up putting back Linpus. Fedora and Ubuntu were alright, as far as responsiveness of programs, but with apt or yum, upgrading was painfully slow. I might try a spin of Fedora 10 when it's finalized, but trying to fix various things in Rawhide simply took too long--the same with Ubuntu---when I went to try to upgrade to Intrepid, it started by saying it had an estimated time of 6 hours to install the updates--this went down to four hours about an hour later, but that's still too long.

 

I was thinking of installing openSUSE 11 on my One (WinXP 120 HDD GB 1.5 GB ram). Not interested in keeping XP just single booting Linux. Has any one done it yet? I guess I can try installing it on a USB drive and see what works and what doesn't.

 

Seems to me that SuSE has an Aspire One version

http://en.opensuse.org/OpenSUSE_on_the_Aspire_One

Seems more of a howto actually. I would think the only issue would be the wireless, which is easily fixed. (Explanations are given in the Ubuntu howto, basically, you have to install the MadWifi drivers. ) It's also possible that SuSE supports the card, as it strikes me as odd that he made no mention of it.

If I had the XP size machine, I would have probably changed the distribution--as I said, the biggest issue for me was that upgrading took too much time.

 

Thanks for the link.

 

I'm currrently dual-booting between Vista and Ubuntu 8.04.1, and it's not so bad. Getting all the devices to work under Ubuntu was a bit easier than for Vista, considering all the reboots to install the devices and perform windows updates. I was up and running on both systems on a very basic level within 15 minutes, but to get all the driver and updates installed, Ubuntu took an extra half hour or so of running System Updates and inputting command lines to get devices and drivers working, while Vista took about an hour and a half, and had far more driver issues. At least Ubuntu connected by LAN fresh out of install, so updates and drivers acquisition were easy - Vista and XP can't make heads or tails of the drivers OOB, so you need to have a second machine on hand to put drivers on a spare USB drive.

That said, Ubuntu is king of killing my battery. On Wireless with audio streaming through fire.fm, I get about 2 hours, maybe 2:40 or so if I turn it all off and dim the screen a bit. Vista is getting 10% or more above Ubuntu with similar programs and devices running. Very strange.

 

Much as I applaud the efforts of those attempting to tailor distros to work on the One, AFAICT none of them really works that well nor supports all the hardware.

Wifi is frequently a problem on laptops but this is easily fixed. However, there are issues with sound, SD card support, webcam, suspend/hibernate and probably other things as well. Also the other (ie not Linpus) distros tend to be pretty slow.

I played with Ubuntu and Xubuntu for about ten days but eventually (yesterday in fact) gave up. I love Ubuntu and have installed it on at least 10 different machines including desktops and laptops. I have never failed to get the hardware working before but I could not get either full sound support (including microphone - int and ext - and headphone cut-off switch) or reliable suspend with an inserted SD card on my Ubuntu One.

Linpus may be crippled in some ways but it's quick and it supports all the hardware. Consequently, I have decided that is my best bet and after a day of tweaking, it's not perfect but it is snappy, boots in 20s and everything works.

My Ubuntu installation looked great running Avant Window Navigator and Compiz but the numerous hardware problems wore me down in the end.

Perhaps Intrepid will support the hardware properly, but even then, it's not going to boot in 20s.

My only real concerns with Linpus (apart from the terrible name) are:
a) Acer is not going to support it forever
b) some new update is going to screw up all the changes I have made.

PS As a hardened Unix buff, I am sorry to say that XP runs better than all the Linux distros I have tried. Ideological reasons and a long-standing hatred of Windows prevents me from using XP though.

 

I have installed OneLinux.org distro on my 512mb 8gb SSD One. I like it more than Linpus. Stable so far, I have installed Celtxdacity & Open Office.

Im not too worried about losing some battery life, however I look forward to a non-beta release

My only picks on the distro so far is the headphone does not shut off the speakers and must have the SD cards in when booting to be recognized and built-in Mic is not working on sound recorder on Audacity.

 

OneLinux is in the very early stages...I've been following the progress on the IRC channel almost from the start and progress is being made daily. Another beta release is being uploaded right now actually.

Give it a bit of time, eventually all of these distros will have everything working easily, and OneLinux will make it all work out of the box. We just need to be a bit patient.

 

Yes, I have high hopes for OneLinux. I tried it yesterday, but as my wifi wouldn't work, I didn't spend too long with it.
Ian

 

I'm surprised wireless didn't work, as that wasn't even an issue for me. It's somewhat slower than Linpus, but I'm still in the process of playing with it. (I put it on last night).

For me both wireless and sound worked out of the box. This was using the beta-core (core-beta?) from the 8 Sept., 2008. I was rather impressed with it actually. Their roadmap mentions doing both an XFCE and possibly, Openbox version, both of which would be, IMHO better choices, especially on the 512 MB, 8 GB SSD ones.

 

When you say sound worked can you say exactly what you mean? When I installed Ubuntu it played sound fine but I wasn't able to get all of sound playback through the speakers, headphone socket and cut-off switch, internal and external mic working at the same time.

If all of that is working, that's a major advance for OneLinux.

Since the One is very portable, being able to use Skype on the move is a big draw but the sound problems (particularly the mic) stymied this.

 

Sorry, I only meant that I got sound--the only checking I did was to play a video in youtube.

Sorry for the false hopes.