Friday, January 09, 2009

First day with the Acer Aspire One

Just as I was getting home this evening, Mr. FedEX showed up with the box from Buy.com. Inside was my blue Acer Aspire One. The shipping label showed the package to weigh only 6 pounds. A good start.

Upon opening the shipping box I found my first disappointment. The unit did not come with a 16GB SSD as the website indicated. It has an 8GB SSD drive and an 8GB SDHC card. Well it's still a good deal for $300. A trip to Fry's and two 16GB SDHC class 6 cards later and my plan is back on track. Unfortunately they didn't have any sort of case that really seemed to fit the AA1. I wonder how hard it is to sew neoprene?

For grins I went ahead and booted up the machine and activated my Windows XP license. As expected Windows XP really slowed down the system but it was reasonably usable. Earlier this week I had found a torrent of the Linux recovery disk and so I made the necessary USB drive and followed the text file instructions. Luckily I had a 16G USB stick but the file is only 2G so it was probably a little over kill. But 30 minutes later my Windows XP AA1 was turned into a Linpus AA1. No fuss, no muss.

My plan now is to keep the Linpus on the SSD for the time being. I'm going to load Windows XP on a 16GB SDHC card, and load Fedora 10 on another 16GB SDHC. Once that's done, I'll try loading OS X on the 8GB SDHC that came with the unit.

The keyboard feels cramped. The trackpad needs some getting used to. But I think I can get used to this for trips. Since Firefox comes installed I added Scribefire and Foxmarks, now I'm posting to this blog.

There's plenty of info out there about how to dual boot, triple boot, etc. None the less, I'll post what I do in the coming weeks.

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