Well, I now have my new toy - an Acer Aspire One D255 with N550 Dual core Atom processor. I went for new, fast & cheap rather than my normal slightly older, better quality. Think I made the right call. It's great fun. Loved watching TV via web browser/iPlayer when I was back in the UK.
Good - pretty quick. A definite improvement over my last netbook - a EEE PC702 that I managed to lose.
Bad - Feels a bit 'plastic' and flimsy. Windows 7 - Ugh. That Google Android thing. Ugh too.
Reduced the partitions right down & installed Ubuntu Netbook and Meego.
Ubuntu just works and you know what you get. Everything that I need seems to work out of the box. Don't really like the NBR desktop - it's a bit slow. Meego does it MUCH MUCH better. So I just use the standard desktop which works fine.
Meego. I love it (apart from some of the graphics). BUT there is no mention that version 1.1 is still Beta. Go here for some screen shots - http://meego.com/devices/netbook/netbook-screenshots
Needs more work. The most frustrating part is the almost total lack of support for USB modems currently. I understand the newer versions of some packages will include this. I managed to hack usb_modeswitch, wvdial & pppd together to make it work without trashing the native network management, but it shouldn't be necessary in this day & age. It was more MeeNotGo. Alternative apps are few & far between and difficult to come by, particularly as they use their own system that doesn't work to well with RH/FC packages. They've also changed to zypper which took some time to get used too.
I don't really like single screen apps and tabbing between them normally, but I got in to it soon enough. It's quick and easy to use. All the things that you want to work are at your finger tips. However, I fear that other things will pass it by if they develop as slowly as they seem to be doing.
If you use Thunderbird like I usually do instead of the installed Evolution, it's a bit of a swine with some of the screens - alt/move doesn't seem to want to move them off the top of the screen and so I can't accept the SSL certificates.
Anyway, I'll figure it out.
Overall, a great little machine if you forget the overbloat of Windows and out something usable on it. 3 days in the UK using wireless & dongles and it was brilliant.
Well done Acer.
Thanks. I'm looking at buying an Acer with the N550 processor, but trying to get away from Windows. A friend with much more knowledge recommended Linux, but I wasn't sure it would run on the machine I want. Your post is very reassuring :)
ReplyDeleteGlad you found it useful. My wife is on her second trip with it. She has never been a Linux user before but said she was impressed with how easy it all was, especially the networking, what with dongles, wireless et al.
ReplyDeleteIt just works, without all those silly bloody 'helper' apps that do nothing but look pretty and hog resources.
The trick is to slowly swap your Windows programs to open source versions - e.g. use Firefox for web browsing, Thunderbird for email, OpenOffice for docs etc. Then when you swap OS they barely notice the difference.