Taking the plunge

Forum,
I am about to take the plunge on the Acer Aspire One with Linpus Lite. I notice that the price is about to drop and am watching the Local (Denver, USA) Circuit City for them to follow suit.

I want to run Linpus, I'm ok with OpenOffice, the small size, and even the short battery life.

A couple of questions. I saw on the Amazon user reviews they couldn't get wireless to work. This looks to be isolated as it doesn't appear in this forum. Also, I like to use an external mouse. Will a USB (micrsoft) mouse work ok?

Anything else I should be prepared for, including replacing all my Wintel O/S's with Linux direvatives?

Thanks,
Kent

 

I had no problems connecting w/ the Linpus OS, as it came out of the box, to my WPA2 (pre-shared key, aka personal) wireless access point. As for the USB mouse, even thought it has the word "Microsoft" on it, should not be an issue. I've been using a Microsoft USB mouse on my home desktop and a Logitech wireless on my work laptop for a while now. Both are running Fedora 8 and both mice worked without any additional steps, though I did some tweaks to get the extra buttons working on the Logitech.

You shouldn't have to "Wintel O/S's with Linux direvatives", as where I work is primarily Windows and Office 2003. Nobody has issues with the documents I produce (Word, Excel, and PowerPoint file formats). I had to loan my laptop to a co-worker during a class once, as we were doing small group activities to come up with a presentation, and she didn't have any issues using OpenOffice.org's Presenter and had never used it nor any derivative of Linux for desktop activities.

If you get stuck on something, just try a search as more than likely someone else has had the same question. If you can't find anything that really helps, just ask. Most of us don't bite.

 

The Amazon thing must be an isolated case, haven't seen many WiFi complaints here. I have used mine at home and with various public hotspots with no trouble at all. In fact, it seems to be incredibly sensitive, showing better received signal strength than my HP dv5000.

My One works fine with my $10 MS mouse.

O integrates just fine with MS Office. I use O all the time and regularly receive and send files to others who use Office. Sometimes, just for fun, I am tempted to ask them to send me a check for $450 so I can "buy a copy of Office so I can read their .doc file," but that joke would probably wear thin pretty quickly. :mrgreen:

 

Almost all usb mouses will work no probs.

Wifi works better than expected, fast to connect, great connection speeds (>12kbps download at speedtest.net on a 20kbps rated cable connection is pretty good)

 

Wifi range is also very good.