Installing Windows 7 RC on an Acer Aspire One D150.....

Ok. I'm more than a little invested in Linux - I think it's an amazing alternative to MS Windows and has recently upped it's game to deliver something that is as easy to use and install as Windows XP (and takes considerably less time fixing once it has been installed).

Fedora 11 is due out in a few days and it's my plan to review it soon after it is release, so I thought I'd take the next rew days to check out how well an old favourite, OpenSuse 11.1 worked on my nice new Acer Aspire One D150. Well, long story short, not that well ... install was easy enough, but no WLan after the install, so plugged in a cable an opted to install all the updates that were listed as pending. This didn't fix the WLan and nuked the X config - meaning I couldn't boot the machine and was faced with having to pick it apart and fix it. I have this Windows 7 RC disk hanging around so I thought I'd give it a go...

The install is as easy as you could hope for ... answer the questions and wait. All over and done with in about 30-40 minutes and it was good to see everything working from first boot ... all the aero effects work, WLan, Lan, Audio, Webcam ... even the pesky light on the front that shows WLan connection status. Very good.

So I start by installing the obvious applications (Firefox 3, Thunderbird 2, Open Office 3 + JRE, Skype and AVG Free) which all goes smoothly and performance is good. This is an (as yet) un modified netbook so it only has 1GB of RAM, but I haven't really seen it swapping to disk yet.

Boot times are OK ... not Linux fast but at about 1 minute 30 seconds to get to a working desktop are tolerable, and about 25 seconds to shut down is a good time.

I decided to take things a little further and tried Blender - works fine - and Second Life which promptly refused to believe that there was ebough 3D support to run. I find this a little odd, as the netbook has plenty of power to be able to run this. A little web research finds me this video review including the AAOD150 running Second Life. This led me to think that it's a Windows version compatibility problem and switching to running the application in XP compatibility mode as the administrator would solve the problem. For some reason that's not the case. I neede to download the original intel driver and install that (downgrading the one that came with Win 7 RC (build 7100). But that coupled with running as admin in compatibility mode *did* work.

I have a three.co.uk 3G USB dongle that works very well on a Windows Vista laptop that I use but this refused to work under Windows 7. This is down to how this particular device works. Rather than ship a separate disk of drivers, the USB device is dual mode and presents both the modem device and a data partition from which the drivers can be installed. It seems that he problem with Windows 7 is in switching modes - from data to modem - and the device consistently presents as a data device even after the drivers are installed. I'm working on an answer for this and will let you know when I find it ...

So far, I'm very happy with Windows 7. Easy, reasonably fast, works ... just need to change that screen resoultion thing and get my 3G modem working and I'll be happy!

Acer Aspire One D150 - Mini-review and Ubuntu 9.04 install

I've had an AAO D150 for 5 days now and I have to say that I'm entirely happy with it - my only complaint is that I wish I'd had more time to spend on it!

The unit itself comes put of the box with the usual manuals but does expect you to burn the reinsallation and drivers disks yourself. I've always though that this is a rather mean policy when you're selling a device that doesn't include an optical drive, but maybe that's just me.

The Aspire One is also not available as a Linux option - it's only available as Windows XP. If you're read my other blog posts, you'll already know that I'm not a fan and it won't suprise you to know that Windows XP didn't last 24 hours before I wiped it and installed Ubuntu 9.04 - my current favourite operating system.

OK. Other things worth knowing about the unit: the D150 comes with a 6 cell Li Ion battery that gives up to 6 hour use, the keyboard has a full right-hand shift key and (unlike my old EeePC 900) has proper page-up and page-down keys rather than function key combinations. The screen is nice and clear and bright, and the unit has all the expected ports 3xUSB, audio in/out and SD card. One nice touch is that the bios supports an additional function (you press F12 at boot up) that allows you to choose the boot device. Makes installing from CD or booting from a USB very easy...

... about as easy as installing Ubuntu 9.04. It really was as simple as: download the ISO, burn a disk (I have a USB DVD RAM drive), boot the disk, choose install, provide user info and select the simple options for everything else. Long story short - it just worked. Audio, USB, SD Cards, Wifi, Lan all seem to be working. The Wifi light on the front doesn't, but my experiences with an A110 lead me to believe that installing the backports will fix that - I'll post the results. The only untested things are the Mic and the WebCam.

As far as applications go, I'm running Firefox, Thunderbird, Skype, OpenOffice 3, Gimp, Inkscape and Blender as linux native. Blender is the only one that has issues and it looks like patchy 3D drivers, but I'll let you know when I find out more. In addition, I have installed Wine, and on top of that have Flash 8, Dreamweaver 8 and Photoshop CS2 all installed and running fine, which is very cool!

My next tasks are to sort out my Three network 3G USB dongle and install and test the Second Life client. I'll let you know.

My over-all impressions of the unit are that is is well built, well spec'ed and very smooth to use. Exactly what I was looking for!