Linpus Lite Blows!!!

Hi all,

First of all great forum, the best I've found so far for the Aspire One.
Bought one today for my wife, she's a school teacher already using hardy heron and had to lug a 15" heavy as hell Asus with her everyday, so I bought her the Aspire. It's a great little machine but my god, Linpus blows dog balls... It's not that the interface isn't usable or anything like that it's the damn stone age version of the apps included... Firefox 2.x, OO 2.3, a crappy messenger clone (don't even know what the hell is that one).
Then the horror stories of the most brave amongst you that have tried to install other distros, specially the mic and suspend don't work part...
Thankfully for me she didn't mind on account of "it being so cute"... Woot
I really hope some nix gurus can figure this one out fast, just get something debian based working on this thing, hell, I wouldn't even mind runnign Mandriva on it... anything except this Linpus freak of nature...

Rant over... just hope anyone out there can get ubuntu working on this very affordable and very efficient piece of hardware so we can all enjoy a true productive machine...and not a reallt nice piece of harware with an OS done by Fisher Price.

Best of luck to all of you and keep up the great work in this forum.

 

Hi,

First of all, the included Version aren't that old as you wrote!

You are able to upgrade/install applications after you have activated the advanced mode:
Activate advanced mode

So unless you switch to another distribution you should be able to install your favorite apps.

gr33tz,
Tybor

 

It seems that the Linpus distribution is based on Fedora 8 and that you can add the livna repositories to get up to date version of multimedia software etc...

Code:

#> su -
#> rpm -ivh [url]http://rpm.livna.org/livna-release-8.rpm[/url]

Then you should be able to install software with the add remove program or the YUM command. Some of the packages there have been updated this month, so I suppose it is possible to update some of your software to very recent versions (I can't test because I am impatiently waiting for the HHD version of the aspire one before ordering one).

 

Hi guys,

Tks for the replies.
I'm glad that all the packages aren't that outdated but as far as Firefox and OO go they are... And the differences between the versions of these 2 softwares and the ones currently available are pretty significant.
The possibility to add newer rpm's is great but I've read elsewhere in this forum that someone updated Firefox and it broke the mail client...Can anyone confirm this? Or can I just go ahead and install newer versions?
The livna repositories seem promising but again I'm afraid of breakage, as anyone tried them?

tks again for the feedback guys.

cheers

 

I think I will have to install Ubuntu at some point too. The Linpus kernel is missing Tun/Tap driver support, I can't load FUSE to integrate the graphical filesystem tools with Samba, and without the kernel sources, some things just can't be made to work.

From a connectivity point of view, Linpus has no visible way to get to network files. While I have the commandline smarts to do it myself, the EeePC is way ahead in this regard. I did manage to get my shared laser on a windows box set up on the Aspire, but the lack of smb file connectivity is a really big hole.

I booted up on eeeXubuntu 7.10.3 and it worked great off the live cd - the wireless drivers even worked. Once installed to the 8G SSD I found that the wireless did not come up and other drivers needed attention, so I'm back to Linpus for now until either I get the time and inclination to do it or someone comes out with aspireoneXubuntu.

 

It's pretty funny that you're freakin' out that OOo 2.3 and Firefox 2.x are "old" considering that the current versions are OOo 2.4 and Firefox 3.0 was only released a few weeks ago and previous to that release 2.0.0.14 (or maybe .15) was the latest version.

Your definition of "stone age" is like a few months ago? ... weird.

Having these slightly older versions will barely affect the usability of the those apps. OOo 2.3 works pretty much just as well and Firefox 2.0 browses the Internet and web pages display pretty much identically to 3.0. 3.0 is a bit faster and uses some less memory so yes, it is more advantageous to use but I'm just sayin... chill out a bit, and if these next versions are so insanely essential, spend a small amount of time to simply upgrade them. Probably a lot less time than it would take to format it and install Ubuntu *only* for a few upgraded applications...

 

Wow wow wow wow wow. Are you saying that i can't get onto my Windows network to access my shared files wih this?

I was always confused as to why Acer chose the Linpus OS - it would seem that they have one for prettyness over functionality. Has anyone installed apps and experienced any problems?

Thanks.

 

If you install an Ubuntu or one of it's derivatives just use openlikewise, it will let you join a Windows domain with minimum fuss...

cheers

 

Well, you *can* get to your windows network, just not with the supplied GUI tools, so it's wonky at best. Smbclient is there and acts like an ftp client. smbget gets files from the commandline. Unfortunately, smbmount is not there and mount-t smbfs doesn't work because the smb filesystem module is nowhere to be seen.

 

Wow - this is pretty dissapointing, i'm really suprised by this Linpus OS.

 

I've managed to use mount to access windows shares, without installing any adicional packages, though i can't remember right now if i used mount -t smbfs or mount -t cifs. But you're right about the wonky part.

 

I hated it too, but once I figured out how to add programs and edit the desktop I really see no need to put on another linux distro or xp. The only thing that is really out of date is firefox, and thats because ff3 doesn't run on fc8 apparently. I don't really know what you're trying to do with it, but I was able to add VLC, a usenet client, remove the mail client and put thunderbird in its place, and all reflected on the desktop with new icons. The messenger also isnt that bad and can access most protocols.