The Gaytriot's Journal: Writing from the new laptop

I tracked my order for the new Acer Aspire One notebook from Newegg and saw that it had arrived late this morning. I contemplated leaving work early so I could get home and play with it right away, but I was too busy and needed to make sure I got some stuff done.

Once I did get home, though, I immediately opened the box to check out the computer. I was slightly disappointed after unpacking the laptop box from the shipping one, the laptop in the picture was a black one while I had ordered it thinking it was white. But once I opened that up I saw that it was, in fact, the white one.

Anyways, the box contained the restore CD for the Linpus Lite Linux distro, some license crap, a manual, and a nice sleeve to protect the laptop during transport. Oh, and the battery and power supply. Holding the notebook it really hit me how small the thing is, especially in my hands. Its tiny and light and feels very solid. The first thing I did was pop the battery in and turn it on, after going through a quick setup I rebooted and stood up to grab the sleeve from the box. By the time I turned back around, the OS had booted up and was ready to go.

I looked through all the apps that were included, it has most of the core stuff I need for school. I'm trying to load vpython on there for my physics class because we use this in our labs. I haven't had luck yet, but I'm also a relative newbie when it comes to Linux. I'm pretty sure more Linux distro must include python, I just need the IDE.

Anyways, I messed with it for about 2:30 hours w/ wifi enabled before the battery got low. Setting up the wifi on my home network was simple, installing the network printer was also easy but I had to download the linux driver for HP printers. I'm still needing to hook up to my network drives on my server, but I haven't been able to yet. I read through a guide and it looked somewhat involved to do, so I'll wait 'til I have more time and try it.

I was switching between the Acer and my desktop, so the keyboard on this thing felt pretty cramped; but, now that I'm typing on just the Acer, I've easily adjusted and have no problem touch typing.

Overall I'm extremely happy with this laptop and I think I'll stick with the Linpus Lite for a while and then maybe take a shot at installing Ubuntu or another full featured, light distro. The only problem I really have is that the 8Gb SSD could be more of a problem should I use Ubuntu. The nice thing about Linpus is that I can stick in an SD card into a specific slot and merge that memory with my SSD memory to make a bigger, unified drive. I bet I could do the same with Ubuntu, I'll have to look into it.

So I think I'll be carrying this around me for a while, it's not quite pocket sized but as far as school and work go I have no trouble making space for the computer in my backpack.