Tweak your Acer Aspire One laptop running Linpus Linux

Acer Aspire One is a fabulous netbook. A netbook, also called a sub-notebook, is a laptop with small dimensions. Its screen size is just 8.9 in and it is easy to carry around without any fuss. Acer Aspire One comes pre-loaded with the Linpus Linux OS which has been derived from Fedora 7. Linpus has been specially designed to be run on sub-notebooks such as Acer Aspire One.

Acer Aspire One

Here are a couple of ways in which you can tweak Linpus to get more bang out of your Acer Aspire One netbook and thus put it to even better use.

1. Run Live Update from the Acer Aspire One preferences screen.
2. Make a USB recovery disk. This disk will help you to load and run a utility which will allow you to restore your Acer Aspire One Linpus installation in the event it gets corrupted.
3. Enable the advanced menu. Linpus comes with a modified XFCE desktop. It is possible to get a Fluxbox like application menu when you right click on the desktop in XFCE. This is achieved by enabling “Show Desktop Menu on Right Click” option in the “Behavior” tab of the “Desktop preferences” XFCE dialog box.
4. Install Gimp – Linpus Linux distribution does not have GIMP – a versatile graphics software more or less in the same grade as Adobe Photoshop -  installed by default. But fortunately, Linpus comes bundled with Synaptic package manager even though this distribution is developed using a  Fedora 7 code base. It is a piece of cake to install GIMP on this distribution through Synaptic.
5. Install Skype -  Skype is a VOIP software which is very popular world wide and is used by millions of people to make phone calls to others from their computer. Acer Aspire One doesn’t come bundled with Skype but installing it will make your experience all the more rich.
6. Add Desktop Icons – Linpus sports a customized desktop by default. And at times when you install additional software, you will have a need to create a icon for your software on the desktop.  You can add additional icons by editing the following file /home/<username>/.config/xfce4/desktop/group-app.xml .
7. Install VLC which is a superior media player which plays almost all types of audio and video file formats.
8. Mount your NAS box which will allow you access to your network folders.
9. Tweak Linux for SSD usage – This can be achieved by appending the following  “elevator=noop” in the “kernel /boot/bzimage ...” line in the /boot/grub/menu.1st file so that Linux uses the solid state device (SSD) in a more efficient manner.
10. Install the latest version of Firefox – which as on this writing is version 3.

You can find a much more detailed explanation of the preceding 10 tips at reghardware.co.uk.

Acer which ranks as world’s  No. 2 vendor in Notebooks  manufactures the Netbook Acer Aspire One.

Related Posts

• $499 Asus EeePC 1002HA Laptop running Linux
• All Hardware related articles
• Sub $100 Laptop running Linux – Made in China
• Jolicloud – A Linux Distribution for Netbooks
• Linux Articles