[nylug-talk] Acer Laptop and Linux

[phantom21 at mindspring.com]

The day after Thanksgiving I took advantage of a great sale at Circuit City (I 
was on one line or another for 6 hours, starting from 4:30 AM) and bought my 
first new laptop in a long time.

I did my research and found this system to have the best combination of what I 
wanted, and the price was great (worth the 6 hours on line).

Acer model 5102-WLMI, AMD Turion 64 bit X2 CPU (TL-50), 1 GB DDR2 RAM, 120 GB 
HD, DVD+R dual layer writer/DVD+-RW/CDRW, 15.4" display (ATI graphics chip 
set), built in web cam, ethernet, and 802.11b/g wifi, and, sadly, Windows 
Media Center 2005.

The price was $699 plus tax, minus an expected $100 rebate.

Of course I made copies of the setup disks onto DVD-R disks, and changed the 
partition struction, which was kind of odd.

There were 3 partitions of the hard drive.  HDA1 is around 10 GB, FAT32.  I 
presume this to be the recovery partition.  The system came with appropriate 
licenses for the software on it, but no disks.  I left this partition alone.

The other two partitions were of equal size, 53 GB each, and formatted FAT32.  
I thought they would be NTFS, but no.

I made copies of the files on the Windows drive D: and removed the partitioni.  
I then resized the C: drive to 30 GB and combined the remaining free space 
with this.

I then downloaded Linux Mint, an offshoot of Ubuntu Edgy Eft, and burned that 
to a CD.  Booted that and partitioned the remaining space to use Linux and 
installed Linux Mint.

The install process was smooth and it was excellent to watch it find the dual 
cores of the CPU, showing them as CPU0 and CPU1, and 64 bit mode.  It came up 
with the Gnome desktop, which I don't like but explored a bit  before using 
Synaptic GUI to download and install KDE.

This also went smoothly and let me tell you, it's a great looking desktop.  
The system found the built in ehternet which I configured manually for my 
internal network, and, when I started the wireless applet, it found the 
atho/wifi and even showed some open routers nearby, which I told it to 
connect to, which it did.

I haven't tried to use the web cam or burn CD/DVD with it yet, but with the 
smoothness by which it's working and found all the other stuff, I'm sure it 
will.

This laptop is perfect for Linux users.  You may not get the same deal I got 
for a while, but this model laptop could have come with Linux pre-loaded and 
fully configured and anyone could have used it as such right out of the box.

Mark