New to the Aspire One

Hi I am going to be grabbing me one of blue Aspire One XP units next week and would like a little clarification or help with a few things I've been reading up on here on this site.

First a little howdy do and some background:

My last gadget was a Nokia N800 Internet Tablet, I had it for close to 2 years and it really is a great device but to me it's still not a device for everyone as you need quite abit of Linux knowledge to make it do what you want it to do, the linux ver on that is called Maemo and I'd gotten great help from the community at Internet Tablet Talk.

I've been waiting and watching the emerging UMPC/Netbook market and I think it's all finally starting to get off the ground as the prices are finally getting alot better, I was all gung ho to get a eeePC for sometime but I still think they are priced quite high for what you get, I've been looking real hard at the new Dell E, and Lenovo S10 but it now seems the Dell is much further out and may cost more then originally (reported) anticipated and the Lenovo is abit more then the One and still at least a month or more from shipping. So as it stands now with the new price point on the One I don't see how anybody could go wrong.

The major things that I'm wanting/needing with the One is a quick load/boot/resume time to be able to access websites, email and IM as I've already got an XP and a Vista mach to do all the heavy loads.

1-I'm gonna be ditching XP right off the bat, (as I've just had it with MS after the disaster that Vista is) I've DL the One.linpus Iso image and other files that were avail for DL on the Downloads Section.

2-If for some odd reason one would want to how hard would it be to set it up as a dual boot mach ?

3-At boot-up or start can you or will it let you boot from either the Card reader or USB Thumb drive as long as the file is in an ISO image ?

4-I've got some Linux knowledge enough to get me in trouble I suppose, but once I've got Linpus on there is it fairly easy to install new apps, and are all the third party software apps required to be in a .deb file ?

5-Is there a app already to be able to do Netflix's "Watch it now" on the One in Linpus ?

6-How is the overall look and feel of the browser, do tabs work well and is it fairly speedy ? On sites like IMDB or Coming Soon does it play all the trailers ok ? (browser(s) avail on the NIT we're pathetic to say the least, very sluggish and extremely limited)

7-How is the default media player (linpus ver) at playing various divx, xvid, avi's, and wmv files ? Must you re-encode the files before they look or play right ? (as you had to do with many of the media files with the NIT)

8-How is Linpus with drivers ? For instance I've got a Genius Traveler 350 USB mouse, does one need a "special" driver or will the system just recognize it as a default pointing device ? I've also aTargus PAUM008U dual mode USB mouse as well.

Thank you very much for your time and tips and especially for this forum and website and I look forward to alot of use with my new gadget and the continued reading of these forums.

 

It's quite possible to configure GRUB to handle a Linpus/Windows dual boot. You'd need to muck about with grub.conf though.

Card reader, no, USB stick, yes. Though it will need to be specially prepared to be bootable with a program like UNetbootin.

Deb files are for Debian Linux (and it derivatives, like Ubuntu). Linpus is based on Red Hat/Fedora, which uses .rpm files instead. And no, they are not required, many programs have generic installation instructions, but they do make things a lot easier.

It's Firefox, works well enough. I've switched to Opera though. Haven't tried IMDB's trailers, but the upgraded mplayer has been pretty good at playing online videos so far.

Not that great. But if you look around you can find guides on hown to add vlc or upgrade mplayer to support them with the livna repositories.

I think that will vary considerably depending on what device you want to attach. I can't foresee it having any problems with USB mice though.

 

Thank you very much for the info BlackLagoon, great info and certainly clears some things up.

I have some exprience with Mplayer as it was also used on NIT so that's great to know and VLC is certainly a great choice as it plays nearly everything under the sun.

Thanks again for the info, greatly appreciated.

 

Please don't let a bad Vista experience sour you on XP until you've used it a while. There's a reason so many content XP users have fought Vista, and why you can see way too many flame wars about "Vista vs. XP" all over the place. I've made the mistake of getting in the middle of those sometimes - now I just keep my mouth shut.

I'm happy MS is keeping XP available for netbooks, and I've got a few things I can't run on my 64-bit Vista install at home that I hope to be able to use on my AO.