Lisa was right, my first post in a long while would be a techie one about my new toy.  Sorry for having been so silent the last few months.  Lisa and I have been focused on riding our new tandem, and it’s been quite busy here at mooworld.

Dante is an Acer Aspire One netbook, one I picked up at Amazon for $325 with free shipping.  At first, I had trouble adapting to the built-in Linpus OS, because I wasn’t familiar with the package manager, yum.  Linpus Linux is a Fedora-based distro, thus making it an rpm package system, something I’m not familiar with.  Besides, the software availability for Fedora isn’t as broad as Ubuntu, so the choice to switch to the lightweight Xubuntu was not a real big debate.  However, I had some issues with the newest Intrepid Ibex, including wireless networking and such.  I decided to give Linpus some time after all, but after about 3-4 days, I had settled on getting Xubuntu to work, rather than to learn and live with yum.

Today, I run Xubuntu on this netbook, with a 16GB SDHC card mounted to ~/extra.  It’s adequate computing power for what I do: browse the web, watch .avi videos, listen to music, etc.  It does have some problem playing high definition matroska videos, and youtube feeds aren’t very smooth.  I believe that the youtube problem has more to do with Flash than the processor.

One bragging right I claim is the SSD that’s built into this netbook.  Other than the cooling fan, this computer is completely solid state.  Even though the SSD is 8GB, it’s adequate for what I need it for.  Plus the 2 expansion SD card slots help tremendously.

I have heard rumours of the internal microphone not functioning, but I haven’t had the chance to test that yet.  The built-in webcam is operational, as is wifi and sound.  Wifi is still a work in progress, as the kill switch works but provides no feedback, and indicator LEDs are inop.

All this in a 2 pound package isn’t bad.  I currently get about 2 hours of battery life.  Linpus used to get 2.5 hrs.  I think it’s a software issue, but I’m not too concerned.