linpus impressions from linux user

Hi,

I just bought an aspire one the other day, and had to call off all appointments for the next 48 hours .. was really delighted with it and all the advice in these forums.

I had heard that Linpus was a stripped down version with a bunch of things disabled. So, I couldn't believe it would be so easy to just "yum install" everything.

Actually I'm not a Fedora user either ... but the impression I'm getting is that: I can use Linpus as if it were Fedora v8. But .. that can't be true, can it?

 

No, it's not true.

It is lacking the ability to easily add multiple users (fairly trivial fix) textmode boot, complete yum updates and various other things that Fedora has.

Most packages, however, (though not all) can be individually upgraded with yum without a problem--it's when you start trying to do yum -y update, to update all packages where you start running into problems.

If you're used to any more or less standard distribution, you'll begin to see the differences as you play with it a little more. That doesn't mean it's bad for what it is--it seems as they were doing their best to make an easy changeover for MS users.

 

Hi Scottro,

Thanks for the friendly reply. I understand, those are good points.

Tweaking, then ... will get you close to Fedora I take it, but major obstacles will always stand.

I guess that explains why people bother to actually scrub Linpus and install pure Fedora on it, though that seems like a large amount of work.

 

Hrm, not *that* much work.

Remember I'm basically a Fedora/CentOS user, and part of my job is running CentOS and RH servers. You say you've used Linux for several years, there's a good chance that people using the distribution of your choice have tried it on the Aspire One.

For what it's worth, I had the easiest time of it with Fedora 10 and Ubuntu Ibex. Both are in beta, but both support the wireless out of the box, which was the most important thing for me. Interestingly enough, in trying to put the Intrepid Netbook Remix on, I somehow managed to mess up wireless--I'm not quite sure what happened, but as I wasn't all that impressed with the difference in appearance, I just wiped it and did a fresh Intrepid installation. (This is on the 160 gig version that ships with XP).
Out of curiosity, I downloaded linpus lite (though not specifically for the one) from the linpus website, but it never got past the initial boot screen.

CentOS core dumped loading the r8169 driver. Those are about the only ones I've tried on this so far.

 

I've installed a bunch of things, and I'm trying to stop it now, cos it's really time consuming. I suppose I give in easily, cos I alwyas had trouble with Anaconda, so therefore I have no Fedora/RH installation experience (have used it plenty though).

Actually after 48 hours I am starting to run into some problems with all my tweaking. Right now I have a full system hang when trying to altr keybaord shortcuts while plugging in an IPOD. I need to be more careful, and remember Linpus is porbably more fragile than other distros

 

Ah, I should have mentioned that. A lot of us found, when we used Linpus, that seemingly small tweaks would break things and we'd have to do fresh reinstalls. (There are various methods around the forum for making a backup of a current system to avoid having to reinstall from scratch.

Especially if running the 8 GB SSD version, I would stick with Linpus if it's doing everything you need.