Linux Mint 6 - works well

Just a quick post to say that I have Linux Mint 6 working very well on my aspire one.

The wireless driver supplied does not appear to work, but if you disable that through the Administration menu, you can then use the windows driver, again via the Administration menu "Windows Drivers", and it then works fine after a reboot.

For newbies there is no command line work invloved, as all is done via the menus.

Sound works fine, and after 30 mins I had VLC, Opera, Google Earth, Picasa, Skype & a few Games all installed very easily, again through the menu software portal.

Haven't had a chance to test the card slots yet.

Only minor bug I have found is that the system takes a few minutes to shut down for some reason.

On my A150 I now have XP, Linpus (thanks to mercado79) and Mint all installed and working well on a Tri-Boot Grub system.

Hope this is of interest.

 

thank you for the post, much appreciated info

 

I am currently using it as well. Great stuff slightly better battery life compared to Fedora 10 (of course not as high as Linpus but I am getting a bit over 4 hours out of my 6 cell,SSD with the default kernel and settings...except for installing as ext 2, no swap)

If you use the SSD version of the AA1 during the partioning phase of the install make sure you choose manual install and set up a ext 2 partition. (it will warn you about not having a swap partion but you can ignore that). This gives you the full 8GB of your SSD and will slow the degradation of your SSD.



Again make sure you put the Windows driver on the USB stick as well or else have another way to get it on your machine without wifi.

1)Download drivers from: http://download2.dvd-driver.cz/atheros/ ... 0.3.85.zip

2)Move it to your AA1 with a method of your choosing.

3)Unzip those drivers.

4)Use the "Windows Wireless Drivers" tool under preferences and find the net5416.inf file, and install it.

Linux Mint is great because it is fully compatible with Ubuntu packages and most Ubuntu instructions.

 

Thanks for the post spasykes & Elllipsis,

I think I'm gonna give mint a try,

Just one question how have you partitioned your drive? I'm looking to triple boot also Linpus/Mint/a windows OS(at a later date). I just wondering how you've managed the 3 OS's

 

I find it funny that so many people worry about ssd degradation like it is some kind of plague. You do realise you would have to constantanly rewrite 4gb for 4 years 24/7 to even have an impact on the ssd. So even if you used it 12 hours a day it would last 8 years 6 hours 16 years yada yada yada. At which point a magnetic spinning disk would probably have failed due to the bearings anyway!! And the chip has a smart wear leveling feature also. By all means disable swap to increase speed (ssd writes slow) but not because of the dreaded degradation!

 

@ Elllipsis
Nice theme, how do you set that up?

First post!

 

I read about this when considering purchasing my AA1. Nonetheless, I rather be safe, you never know when the zombie apocalypse might happen. Moreover, some custom kernels are only shipping with Ext 2 support and swap partitions are not really needed. So it might be best to get people to use ext 2 and no swap...

It is actually not that impressive...finding the right wallpaper is what is really important and I was lucky to find this one.

All the theme components were downloaded from: http://www.gnome-look.org/

Wallpaper: http://www.gnome-look.org/content/show. ... tent=95153
Icons: http://www.gnome-look.org/content/show. ... tent=93010

The GTK/Metacity stuff is eluding my searching right now and I won't bother because you can probably find a better GTK/metacity theme to use in place my choice.

AWN is not my prefered dock (I like Cairo dock a lot more for it's customization options but AWN is simple and pretty stable.
To install it in Mint (or other Ubuntu based distro):

Code:

 sudo apt-get install avant-window-navigator

As for the specifics of customization in GNOME for anyone new to the experience:
(skip down to the "Installation/How To " part...note it is a little dated but the process hasn't changed in anyway apparent to me right now)
http://tuxenclave.wordpress.com/2007/11 ... -guide-v2/

 

To ryanc021

Re how I partitioned my drive.

I have an external cd drive that works, so it was very easy to partition the drive using the Mandriva live CD's partitioning tool. You could just as easily use the gparted tool found in Knoppix.

If wanting to install the Linpus image provided by mercado79, follow his partitioning layout .

Once done install Windows first (in the first partition).

I then installed Linpus, followed by Linux Mint.

If you do install mercado79's Linpus image, the tricky part is configuring the bootloader. Fortunately, if you intend to then install Linux Mint this problem goes away , as Mint's Grub configuration picks up the Linpus image and includes it in your boot menu.

Hope this helps.

 

Oddly, it seems like this distro is a bit... slow on the AAO1 as browsing through Firefox gets noticeable lag when scrolling down pages, especially youtube. Compatibility with Firefox, the flash player, or just overall an extremely taxing OS?

 

Thanks for this, it was my main concern, would it see the linpus partition. I've put mint on a usb currently running it now(with ethernet cable), I like how complete apart from the wireless drivers it is. You really don't need to add much to make it complete.

Thanks for the reply pasykes.

 

It is a "full" OS meaning it is intended for semi-modern desktops. I have 1GB of RAM and that probably accounts for the fact that for me it seems to run quite well. There is a XFCE edition of Linux Mint but it still isn't ready for Felicia (the latest release of Mint). Thus I suggest for anyone with 512mb of RAM wait for the XFCE edition or the Fluxbox edition .

Try turning off the desktop effects which Mint ships with on. (Under Appearance --> Visual Effects change it to "None"). It might help a little but it is unlikely too fix everything.

 

So, Gnome (default on Mint) is slow you say? Lag in Firefox? I'm going to get my AA1 in 3 days and am preparing.

 

1gb of ram as well here, with all background/special effects off. Still finding it to be too taxing, and so I ended up switching distros. Simply couldn't stand it compared to XP, which it could handle just fine. YMMV :cry:.

 

Just a quick post to say that Mint is nice and fast on my system. I've noticed no lag at all and Firefox is very quick. Maybe the poster who has experienced problems should consider trying a reinstall, and see if that helps? Also the initial problem I had with the system taking a long time to shut down has disappeared following a system update.
Anyway that's enough re Mint from me as I sound like a Mint evangelist which I'm not - I'll probably have the latest Mepis installed as soon as its out of Beta!

 

@pasykes
Just reinstalled per your advice. It seems that even with a fresh install, youtube seems to be a bit too much on the One, hence why scrolling through the page of youtube results in severe choppiness.

Strangely though, the wireless LED and speakers/headphone jack work right out of the box this time around. Perhaps it saved the previous settings? Anyways just my two cents. Anyways downloading only the Firefox update to see if it makes any difference.

Its not exactly massive lagging of any sorts, rather its more so being nitpicky as it just look nasty as it tries to catch up with the frames.

 

Loving mint so far but am having issues with wireless.

I have installed the driver as mentioned above using the windows wireless drivers. It sees the wlan0 under ifconfig, and it is running however I cannot see it under network manager and thus cannot connect to any access points. Anyone have any suggestions?

Thanks kindly!

 

It is not really a worry, but SSDs are also a bit slower. And some of the optimizations make sense on normal harddrives also. Like swithing off "do a write for every read" (noatime option). Keeping swap to a minimum is something that does not hurt either. With a lot of logs in tempfs, my SSD does not degrade in the sense that I have to clean it up. And again, it should speed things up.

 

Just wanted to say, I did get wireless working using the windows driver...also, the LED works!

 

after spending the weekend trial installing several flavours of linux including Mint, ubuntu, linpus and easypeasy linux (which is basically ubuntu with some netbook mods), I decided to go with mint linux. it was easy to install from usb and the only mod i needed was the wifi driver which was easy to handle using mint's inbuilt windows driver utility. the hibernate and sleep functions work and the desktop is easy to customise.
i am quite new to linux but felt at ease with this distro.

if you are looking for a very capable operating system which requires less technical know how to get up and running than some of the other distro's then mint is a good all round performer.

 

I have install Linux Mint on my AA1. First I installed it and uset my left slot as /home and swap and I then experienced the same problem as in Ubuntu. It won't work after some reboots and I have now decided to skip the left slot and only use the original SD until some fix work for real. Except that everything works perfect out of the box, the wifi was easy to get to work with the guide above.

I have used Ubuntu for a while but I think that Mint is kicking it so far : )