By default you can not browse samba shares in Linpus being based of XFCE there is no XFCE file browser that support samba, you can still doing it using a hack and fuse smb. ok so everything is done in command line so start with Alt+ F2 then type in xterm to get our command line. sudo yum install fuse-smb
We then need to add our linpus user “user” to the fuse group sudo usermod -a -G fuse user
We can check that this command worked with “id user”
Create a new folder in our home directory mkdir samba
Mount fuse to our new directory you will also need to run this code every time you reboot. fuse /home/user/samba
cd into the samba folder or open up thunar and navigate to the /home/user/samba folder and there should be your samba network.
I gave a talk on the OLPC XO and sugar. Main point is that sugar is now available on Ubuntu/Debian/Fedora after my talk William talked to the group about bidding for the open source developers conference (OSDC) to take place in Newcastle.
I did struggle at the end of the meeting to explain to a linux newbie that he doesn’t really want to install a program from source… as he told me linux isn’t as easy as they say it is… I also no nothing about Mandrivia. We also discussed the Linux.conf.au inner circle and that too many of the LCA talks are repeats!
The guys at Kuki Linux, have released a deb package of a slightly more custom kernel (latest wireless added etc..) than the vanilla ubuntu and debian kernel.
Christmas was very good to Gabz, he scored Wii controllers, remote control helicopters and of course what this post is about, a new netbook, namely a Acer Aspire One, Linpus 512 Mb Ram 8 Gb SSD.
Impressive Parts
Size, Weight and Keyboard.
It’s small like you would expect but the keyboard is easier to type on that the XO olpc which is the only other netbook sort of thing I’ve gotten to play with. It’s really light weight and the battery is giving me 2.5 hours.
Boot time – Linpus got one thing right 14 second boot time from cold boot it also does hibernate but that isn’t really any slower than a cold boot.
3G Modem support. If your 3G modem is made by Huawei (Optus, Vodafone or 3 ) then your in luck once you download the software from the acer site the Huawei modems work great. They even use the same software as you would under windows so you can still send those SMS messages. only extra step is making a new profile for your modem.
Mobile Partner
If the 8 Gb SSD Isn’t enough for you, you can expand with a SD Card they even merge the 2 drives together to appear as a single drive.
Also the webcam is builtin, the Mic is placed well and once you download Skype from the acer website it works great.
If you brought the extra USB DVD-RW like I was given you be pleased to know that under Linux you have DVD playback out of the box. Also the DVD-RW DL powers just from the USB port so no extra cables needed.
Unimpressive Parts
LINPUS ! – For starters it’s based on Red Hat (Fedora) being a Debian guy I find this to be a negative.
Limited Range of Software, Acer isn’t supporting much they have an Acer game installed which is trial ware. Not really impressed that the full range of linux software isn’t easily available on this distro.
Security ok when you start linpus for the first time, you set the root password. Ok fair enough but there is no User password. Which is ok by it self. But guess what the user has no password but has Full SUDO rights ?! So if you ever want to change the root password on any linpus Acer try “sudo passwd”
Root Password changing
Basically I’m very happy with this Netbook, and most of my problems will be solved in the coming weeks when I get Ubuntu on to this netbook. Though I would love a way to decrease the Ubuntu boot to the 15 second range.
