Would you pay $10 for a *perfectly* working Fedora / Ubuntu

What do you think it would cost to hire some Unix wizards to make either Fedora or Ubuntu work perfectly on the AAI, and package it as an easy-to-install download?

Let me make a guess here: a month of work, maybe split between two or three people. $50 an hour, for a total of $8000. We might be able to get it done for a ton less than that, but that depends on both the difficulty of the problems, and the price of the hackers. Acer sold seven million units in 2008 and is shooting for 15 million in 2009.*

So if we used something like Fundable (http://www.fundable.com/) to set up a pool, we could find an appropriate team to make all the hardware work, sort out the power management issues, make the fan control safe and reliable, make it possible to record sound and video off the web cam, mount the SD cards properly and everything else. If we got 800 people - and out of 7 million that's not that many - it would be $10 each. If some people throw in a bit more to get the pot started, so much the better.

What do you think? Could we do this? Which distro would we start with, and how would we identify a credible team to do the work?

I'd really like a known-perfect Fedora or Ubuntu (pref Ubuntu) for the AA1, but I can't see how we're going to get it without hiring somebody to make it happen. But I think there are enough of us that it could be a few bucks each, we'd support some great open source development work, and maybe encourage other communities to get Linux customized for their hardware too.

Win-win-win. Who's with me?

Vinay

* http://www.pcadvisor.co.uk/news/index.cfm?newsid=13264

 

Why you start two identical threads?? viewtopic.php?f=28&t=9065&p=58480#p58480

 

I figured a lot of the Ubuntu / Fedora people wouldn't read the main board.

 

I don't care. You doing the mess in this forum with your "business" offer...

 

Are you a moderator, melhiore?

 

This is not a business offer. I'm an Aspire user, and I'd quite like to be able to reliably read HFS+ volumes, use USB audio devices and various other things I could do with a working Fedora or Ubuntu. But from what I can see, we're not going to get all that stuff done without getting some actual dedicated programming resources on this - the progress being made is slow and item by item, the documentation is a bit vague, and there are confounding factors like different cameras on different machines, with no drivers, and the same with wifi hardware.

What I'm proposing is that as a user community we could get this sorted out, at reasonable cost, if we wanted to. But I'm not looking for any piece of that action, I'm simply pointing out that it's possible and - if we want stuff to work - we could club together to pay people to do it for us.

Clearer?

 

Would not be if you do this for free. Since you ask someone to pay for your services it's a business...

 

I'm not asking anybody for any money. Here is what I was proposing.

1> We could all through $10 or so into a pool.

2> We could use that money to hire programmers to fix problems like hardware compatibility for distros like Ubuntu or Fedora.

I'd be one of the people throwing my $10 into the pot. I'm not a programmer, and I don't have time to organize this. The only benefit I'd get out of it is if somebody else picks up the ball and runs with it and I can throw in my $10 and get a working distro at the end of the day.

I don't know where you thought I was trying to make money from this. I'm not.

 

No, he is not.

But what he is, is a long time active member of this forum who knows the ways of this place and who often guides people on how to act here and get the best response.

Oh, and I deleted the other 2 threads on this issue. We still don't want more than one thread per every issue here.


regards,

janss

 

Huh. I've seen quite the rash of cranky mods here, and his tone fit the pattern. :?

 

In answer to the original post I would pay $10 for a fully working version of fedora. But as with all these projects they are flawed. Such is the nature of linux that it is always a step behind when it comes to hardware support. There a lots of people trying to create custom distros but in my opinion is a waste of time as development is no small task and by the time they finish the main distros will work oob anyway. I am running fedora 10 on mine and I have everything working (it took some tweaking ok maybe alot of tweaking) Ill just wait until all my the tweaking is part of the distro.

6 months ago the wifi light and card reader did not work on my dell laptop under any distro I had to fiddle around to get them working. And so with alot of other things like the brightness and volume keys on the keyboard. That was fedora 9 but now I run fedora 10 everything works oob. I think we just have to be patient and wait for the linux community to catch up with the rapid influx of new hardware (not 14 months ago the eee had only just appeared on the scene).

 

I don't know why people are being so nasty to the guy - he's made an interesting point... yes, linux is free but despite being a member since last October and looking in nearly every day I have yet to hear of any one-stop downloadable linpus alternative that supports hardware fully in the same way as linpus does.
So there's a need out there. The AAO is now selling more than the EEE and yet doesn't seem to be as well supported by other distros. Yes, we can all get a perfectly working Ubuntu installation if we're prepared to trawl through forum threads and learn how to tweak things, but the VAST majority of AAO owners don't want to do this.
So yes, I'd pay a tenner for a fully working alternative, without hesitation.
The sad thing is that Acer themselves should be looking into this - they have a massive head start in terms of hardware driving so why don't they offer a sexy upgrade for £10?

 

I don't know why the big boys like Mandriva, Suse, Buntu, and Fedora etc. have not jumped on the AA1 bandwagon. They all want to make money but do not seem to recognise opportunity when they see it. They have the people and resources to do it.

Yes.I would gladly pay 10 dollars.

 

Because melhiore is trying to be a net-nanny without taking 10 seconds to read what the guy was talking about and instead making assumptions, thus making himself look like a total ass as well as the mod that was backing him up. *deep breath*

Now on topic: It's a good idea and one I think a few people would throw money at. In my opinion here's the problems:
- You'll eat up a lot of time trying to get 800 people to chip in.
- Finding a credible team to do it
- When is a reasonable amount of time to complete the project? Before a freely distributed disro does it first I'd hope but they're fairly close already.
- Does this fee include support, security updates, etc after the distro is complete? Or would it just feed off of it's parent distro, only come out of the box totally good-to-rock on the AAO?

The pros:
- This should be somewhat easy and quick for a team to do, as a couple distros almost have it down pat. If the team picked up one of these and threw a few mods in they'd be sitting pretty. However if I was the dev of whatever distro they build on top of and they're getting paid for a few tweaks I'd be pretty pissed. And it might even violate open source licenses.

 

That's a good idea...

But we should be asking acer for support instead since they have already done the work in Linpus. It should be easier for them to tweak other distro..

 

I would pay $10 to get a 1-click install, 100% working with all the AAO hardware, version of a major linux distro, preferably Ubuntu, but Fedora would be cool...

There is a genuine business opportunity for a tech type to make decent $$$ from providing hardware upgrades and OS installations for netbook owners...

This is a genuine business concept that someone will turn into a decent business...

 

I have tried various Linux distributions on my A110 with varying degrees of success. At the moment I have settled on an nLite'd and tweaked XP Home installation on the 8GB SSD. Its far from perfect due to the poor SSD write performance and XP's frequent need to write to disk, but for me this platform currently provides the best combination of hardware and application support, stability and update support.

I did try a UNR image, based on Ubuntu 8.04. I really liked this. It had support for a wide range of up to date applications, a very slick UI that even novices could quickly get to grips with and that also made good use of the 1024x600 LCD. The deal-killer for me was the protracted cold boot times and issues with suspend/resume. I am sure that with a bit more effort this could be made to work in a very satisfactory fashion.

I am very reluctant to pay up front for any Linux distribution - it goes against the principles of free software. I would however gladly pay for ongoing support for a UNR distribution that proved to work perfectly on an SSD equipped AAO. I'd like to see full support for the AAO hardware and a kernel and device drivers compiled and optimised for the Atom processor. It should be possible to eek out almost 3-hours runtime from the crappy 2200mAH 3-cell battery with the backlight turned down and light wifi use.

There is a great degree of commonality amongst the current crop of Atom N270 based netbooks. I am satisfied that the user base for these devices is sufficiently large to justify development of a Linux distribution that has been optimized for N270-based netbooks.

There is already a project by a bunch of developers based in Italy for a UNR distribution specifically for the Acer Aspire One. I believe if anyone should receive funding to develop and support a decent Linux distribution for the AAO then the Linux4One guys are prime candidates.

http://www.linux4one.it if anyone is interested. I have no association with this organisation.

 

I find this a great idea, in principle. I am ready to pay for an after sales service, which helps me to fix a problem on the AA1 instead of reading through all the various fora.
The "How to " advices are already a good starting point. However I would prefer to have there not a gratuit service but a service to be paid so that I can rely on it to get a speedy reply when asking a question.
We should devide between ideas to further develop the applications of the AA1, where the aspireoneuser.com fora are excellent and topics, where the performance is in question and could be improved by speedy professional advice. I consider macles as a good starting point for that und would be ready to pay for an abonnement.
But first of all I believe that Acer having thrown several 100000 AA1 on the market should offer such an after sales service in the first place.

Winfried

 

Fair comment. If Acer could provide an update service with high availability and updated Linpus to run a more up to date version of the kernel and major applications such as FireFox 3 and Open Office 3, then I would gladly switch back to Linpus.

 

Great idea. I would pay for support. Again like the other comments don't want to see open source software to be paid for but would donate to anyone good enough to get a distribution working properly with a forward upgrade path looked after too.

Don't be put off suggesting good ideas like this in the future by over zealous 'old timers' or mods. Good ideas often come from left field.