[ubuntu-za] Creating a stir

[Gustav H Meyer]

Hi,

I must confess that I was doubtful of this device until I was asked to help
a friend who bought the cheap R1,999 Acer Aspire One A110 for his daughters
this weekend. He also bought an HP laser printer with it. The printer was
detected correctly but it would not print anything.

Knowing others on http://floss.pro/ who own the netbook I suggested that we
install Ubuntu Netbook Remix (UNR) 9.04 on it. After getting a bootable USB
image from a friend we had a fully working Ubuntu based system optimised for
the small screen installed in less than an hour complete with all the
software that you may ever need. We also installed the driver for the
printer and everything is in perfect working condition at this stage.

The only issue we really struggled with was to force a stable GPRS
connection in an area with poor mobile coverage, but this issue is a Ubuntu
9.04 / GNOME network manager issue not being flexible enough, hopefully
something that will be fixed in the latest release. The mobile device, an
old HUWAI E220 USB modem from Vodacom was detected in modern plug and play
fashion, a real breeze.

For increased peformance I would suggest getting a netbook with a faster and
perhaps also a more traditional hard disk drive rather than the solid state
disk and I would also increase the RAM to at least 1GB. I'm still wondering
about the lifetime of the solid state disk with applications that do a lot
of writing to disk, eg. Firefox.

Other than that this device is a real good buy. In fact I think this friend
of mine is underestimating the value of what he just bought and he should
rather have bought it for himself.

REAL VALUE FOR MONEY!!! That's my humble opinion.

Thanks for all the help from the guys on IRC at #ubuntu-za and on floss.pro.

Regards,
Gustav
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