Elonex ONEt

I've bought myself an Elonex ONEt recently. Actually it was a ONE when I bought it, but they've taken so long shipping it that I got a free upgrade to the latest model. It's quite slow to start applications, and you can't run many at a time (it self limits to 3), but once it's going it's not too bad. The lack of Flash is a disappointment as it means stuff like You Tube won't run (which is a bit of an unexpected bonus). eBay works fine, as does GMail albeit slowly, and for sitting in the living room doing a bit of browsing away from the desktop it's actually pretty cool. Build quality seems to be quite high, although the interface could have done with a bit more quality control as there are tons of grammar and spelling mistakes in the dialog boxes. The WiFi didn't work out of the box as it needed a wired update to find my LiveBox,but that aside it's now up and running perfectly

Acer Aspire One Update

I broke the AA1 yesterday, sound and networking wouldn't start, no matter what I did. I knew that the AA1 came with a recovery dvd, but I don't have a usb odd, so I had to resort to the usb stick method. Put the dvd in the drive of my pc, add the memory stick and reboot. Hey presto! Nothing happens ... consult forums ... lucky that it didn't trash my second hdd. Tried it on work's laptop, no result it just installs the os to the memory stick and I can't get it to boot on the AA1. Spend about 3 hours fiddling around with a combination of Thunar and Run Application as I can 't get a terminal to open up and respond, and I finally fixed it. It reboots, connects to the network and plays sound. Yay!

This morning I have a bit of a brainwave, and I figure out how to properly create the usb recovery stick

Plug in USB stick

Open up a terminal

dmesg

find device node, [sdc in my case]

sudo su

zcat aa1_usb_recovery_image.gz > /dev/sdc

Turns out I'd forgotten the sudo su.

What an idiot, and it all works propely now.

Acer Aspire One

We've been on the look out for a new laptop for a while, the old one being a chronically slow Thinkpad 366 Celeron. I've had my eye on an Eee pc (unsurprisingly) but we did a bit of poking around and finally settled on a Acer Aspire One. We picked it up from Curry's today, and I'm using it to write this blog now. The set up was a doddle, turn it on, enter a password, configure the wireless, select the live update option and let it run. There are a couple of broken dependencies when I've selected some other programs, but I'll take a look at those later as it pretty much does everything we need straight out of the box.