SpiceWare's Blog - New Toy

RSS Bot · February 13, 2009

I have an old Thinkpad T22 that I used to run OS/2 on, though it's run the Linux distribution Ubuntu for the past few years. I use it as an internet laptop. I dropped it last week and it landed on it's side, jamming the PCMCIA Wireless Network Card into it. While the laptop still boots, it no longer recognizes anything plugged into either PCMCIA slot. Needless to say, an internet laptop that can't access the internet is pretty useless...

This week I was looking at the February Specials for MicroCenter and saw Acer's Aspire One. It's a Netbook with 8.9" 1024x600 display, 1.6 GHz Atom Processor, 1 GB RAM, 120 GB drive, webcam and WIFI. Thought that could be fun, but I don't care for Windows. Did some googling and found installing Ubuntu on the Aspire One.

I went to MicroCenter and checked it out. Liked what I saw (the blue case was a plus!) so I picked one up. The salesman tried to up sell me by saying it wouldn't be fast enough to do anything useful, but I told him it would be plenty fast enough as it was replacing a 900 MHz P3 system.

There's no CD/DVD drive in the Aspire One, so the installation is done by making a "Live CD" on a bootable USB stick (an external USB CD/DVD drive can also be used, but I don't have one). Had a couple hickups with the USB drive. First it wouldn't boot until I ran install-mbr against it. Then when I used 64-bit Ubuntu (via Parallels on my MacBook Pro) to make the USB Stick, it defaulted to installing the 64-bit ISO on the USB stick even though I'd browsed to the 32-bit ISO. Turns out browsing to the ISO just adds it to the list of available ISOs, the 64-bit ISO was still selected :roll: . Once I got the 32-bit ISO on everything installed w/out a problem. The default install doesn't recognize the WIFI card, but the ethernet port was active so I was able to download updated WIFI drivers.

The system is much snappier than the Thinkpad, plus the video is fast enough to support all the "special effects" (the

are interesting) and OpenGL that the Thinkpad didn't support.

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When I did the install I left XP and the hidden 15GB restore partition on the drive. I did so as I thought I'd need to use XP to do firmware updates. Turns out firmware updates are done via bootable USB drives using FreeDOS.

I'm going to redo the install and wipe out XP - but I want to do some research on