I admit the most interesting one coming from Acer AspireOne (or later I just called them AspireOne),just the form factor. It took weeks to browse everywhere, to find what the netbooks are and the brand played in this field. We certainly heard about the
Asus eee Series. But I have never got so much interest as when I browsed lots about AspireOne.
When I decided to buy a netbook, the candidates were Axioo Pico (the MSI Wind in different brand as I read) and the AspireOne. HP was just too expensive for Netbook, Dell Mini Inspiron is lack of support in Indonesia, and Lenovo S10 IdeaPad wouldn't be there at the Indonesia market until October 2008.
Axioo Pico gave us higher spec than AspireOne. With 10" of screen, 160GB and easier memory upgrade, were all suggesting a reasonable choice at that time. But beside the form factor I found AspireOne are coming more powerful with 6 cell battery, 3 USB port, 120GB Hardisk and the glossy casing. I was then back to form factor, when Pico were not just available only with 3 cell battery, but white color casing. I don't like white casing as I feel it's just good if It's Mac.
Then I was just happy to buy AspireOne. It has been two months since, and I still feel fine about it. Especially when the memory upgrade is free at the Acer Service Center. Well, I made sure the computer shop called on Acer Service Center to do it free of charge. So I got 1.5 GB RAM, eventually. Later when Lenovo S10 came, it had been late. Though the Lenove brand was better in my mind, I've been AspireOne happy user for quite some time. I feel fine.
LiveUSB
I had been browsing
pendrivelinux, there are some distros already been played as Live USB. There have been LiveCD like Knoppix, DSL, Slax, and my favorite one: PCLinuxOS. PCLinuxOS is one of the current most favorit distro for Linux desktop, together with Ubuntu and OpenSuse. Naturally Netbooks are not comming with cdrom drive. We must buy portable cdrom or just optimize the use of our usb flash. So Accidentally I am forced to use usb flash way. The first opportunity was coming from when I needed to update BIOS software. I found myself using freedos and install old DOS in new flavor of freedos. I will detail them later. But It felt just great to do everything from usb flash. Since most of my software choice is opensource way, then I definetly use
openoffice,
pdfcreator, and
portableapps.
LiveUSB is good, faster than liveCD and easier to get them (what I need)) installed. Finally I did DSL, Ubuntu 8.04, PcLinuxOS(PCLinuxOS 2007, MiniMe and TinyMe). First chance was
DSL. DSL is a tiny 50MB Linux distro which fast, easy to deploy on usb flash but comes with many useful software installed. The key factor when you prepare liveUSB in Windows is
syslinux. I've never thought it 's so easy now. Only few step preparation as:
- format usb flash
- get the iso
- extract iso to usb flash
- make usb flash bootable.
Well done. I think LiveUSB is the most important companion of Netbooks. Netbook is ligthter and cheaper than any notebooks. The Hype of Netbook even made Ubuntu announced a special project for Netbook called
Ubuntu Remix. And me? Finally I managed to install my favorit PCLinuxOS flavour (
TinyMe.2008) on my AspireOne. Feel just fuckin' great when everything run very well.