Acer Aspire One

I've had this Acer netbook for a couple of weeks now and fiddled about with it and so it's probably time to review where I am with it. To be precise this is an Acer Aspire One D250. It came with a 160GB hard drive, 1GB of RAM, 1024x600 video, and has WiFi but no bluetooth¹. It came with Windows XP and Android installed on it and the bigger six cell "six hour" battery.

You'll not be surprised to hear that I have installed Linux on it and the executive summary is that it works very well, the small screen is (just) big enough, battery life is superb and overall I'm pretty pleased with it thus far.

I've set it to dual boot and I allocated half the disk to Windows and the other half to Linux. I've been using Ubuntu 9.10 (aka "Karmic Koala") plus Medibuntu for the extras and I've tried various flavours of Ubuntu including their "Netbook Remix" (which I didn't get on with) and Xubuntu which was better.

Screen "real estate" wasn't a big issue once I'd pushed the window manager navigation into the left hand side rather than wasting the precious 600 pixels of vertical space with two navigation bars as favoured by both Ubuntu and Xubuntu. I also discovered the delights of pressing F11 which for many applications, especially web browsers, makes them use the entire screen.

The only real problem was that NetworkManager would lose the wireless connection after a while but this was solved by replacing it with wicd.

However I was disappointed with graphics performance (I did try installing some other drivers but borked it completely and had to start over). Anyway the bottom line was that I could only play BBC iPlayer with it plugged into the mains or by turning off all the power management stuff.

Bit disappointing but everything else about it worked pretty well so I was still quite pleased with it.

But the real revelation was installing KDE3.5 on it², which I mainly did for Beth's benefit ... or so I thought. And it turn out that KDE (or rather, I suspect, KDM) improves graphics performance so iPlayer now plays fine on batteries while not compromising battery life.

Talking of battery life I was getting around 5.5 hours but after installing and running powertop I've added the following to /etc/rc.local and I'm getting over six hours:

Finally a couple of other little tweaks.

I don't get on with glidepoint mice so I turned it off by adding 'rmmod psmouse' to /etc/rc.local.

I also didn't like Home and End only being accessible by pressing Fn+PgUp and Fn+PgDn which is a pain if you're browsing a document using the keyboard, especialy as Fn is on the other side of the keyboard.

However the keyboard includes a "Windows" key between Fn and Alt to the left of the space bar and a "Menu" key between Alt Gr and Ctrl to the right of the space bar so I've mapped these two keys to Home and End via ~/.Xmodmap. A bit of a cludge but better than nothing. (I also mapped Caps Lock to Tab while I was at it but I always do that.)

1. As far as I can make out none of the D250s have it, it looks like Acer have dropped it from the spec - it was included on some other models - to keep the price down so I'm going to have to use a bluetooth USB dongle.
2. See this page for how to install KDE3.5 on a Karmic but it really is as simple as adding a couple of repositories and then doing 'apt-get install kubuntu-desktop-kde3'. Make sure you (re-)install wicd afterwards though as this mix of KDE3.5 uses NetworkManager.