Re: Debian On Netbook

[ray carter]

On Sun, 10 Mar 2013 03:43:36 +0000, Wildman wrote:

> I have an Acer Aspire 1 model D257. It came with win7 and I would like
> to replace it with debian. Has anyone tried debian on a netbook? If
> so, I would appreciate any insights or advice.

I first installed Squeeze on my wife's Asus EEE netbook to replace the
brain-dmaged Linux which was pre-installed.

Since then, I installed Wheezy on my Aspire D257-1604. I simply reduced
the size of the MS partition and left it installed. As I recall, there is
Debian wiki for the Aspire. I did the 'net install' from a small flash
drive. The only issue I faced was that Squeeze did not support the
wireless chip, so I installed Wheezy which does. I booted a parted magic
flash drive to do the partitioning before the install. I seem to recall
that it's trivial to make the flash drive - simply 'dd' the iso image.

[Joe]

On Sun, 10 Mar 2013 02:43:36 GMT
Wildman <best...@yahoo.com> wrote:

> I have an Acer Aspire 1 model D257. It came with win7
> and I would like to replace it with debian. Has anyone
> tried debian on a netbook? If so, I would appreciate
> any insights or advice.

Another datum: I have one of the earliest Acer Aspire Ones, an AOA
110-AB with the appallingly slow 8GB SSD. It came with Linpus, much
criticised but actually a Fedora derivative. It wasn't too bad, but it
didn't have any vestige of iptables support, and at the time, I didn't
fancy compiling a kernel for possibly exotic hardware. I was intending
to use public wi-fi, and I wasn't doing that without iptables and a VPN.

So I put on a Ubuntu Netbook Remix, around 9 or 10, and that's what it
has now. There was no problem with that, not even with the wireless
networking. I finally got fed up with the drive speed and installed
Debian Sid on a small USB hard drive plugged into my 64-bit desktop
machine. The only thing I was careful about was not optimising the
kernel i.e. getting everything including the kitchen sink. I pretty
much cloned the 64-bit, using dpkg --get-selections/set-selections on
top of a network 32-bit 386 Squeeze installation and a dist-upgrade to
Sid. I've added Network Manager, which works now, and a few other bits
appropriate to a mobile machine.

The drive boots with no difficulty on the Aspire, is small enough to
carry easily in a pocket, and the whole thing runs dramatically quicker
than with the SSD. It runs a 3G dongle without even the trouble I had
with Ubuntu when the dongles were fairly new. Obviously the battery
life will be shorter than with the SSD, but I can live with that. The
bonus is that the drive boots on every PC I've tried it on so far, so if
I can borrow the use of a computer of pretty much any kind, I have a
portable copy of my main workstation at home. I may replace the Ubuntu
installation if I get the time, as I'm confident now that Sid runs the
netbook OK, but an up-to-date pocket-sized workstation is really quite
useful in other ways, and I may not bother.

What I would recommend is that you first get hold of the latest Knoppix,
and either use a USB CD drive or boot it on another machine and make a
USB stick installation with the built-in utility. Knoppix hardware
detection and driving is legendary, and if you do have trouble with
Debian later, Knoppix (yet another Debian derivative) should help sort
it out.

Obviously make a backup of the Windows installation first, or better
still if possible, buy another drive of the same physical size and keep
the new installation completely separate. Generally the netinstall
Squeeze or Wheezy is the way to go, adding whatever else you want
later. If you want to move up (?) to Sid, do the dist-upgrade just
after the netinstall so there's not much to upgrade.

--
Joe

[ray carter]

On Mon, 11 Mar 2013 00:59:33 +0000, Wildman wrote:

> Thanks for your input. I was planning to install Squeeze but that will
> depend on the wireless chip. I may need to go ahead and install Wheezy.
> What wireless chip does your Aspire have? The model I have is
> D257-13473 manufactured June 2011 and it has a Broadcom 802.11n wireless
> chip. At one time I had Ubuntu 10.04NE on it and the wireless worked
> fine. But, I don't remember the kernel version used so that may be a
> worthless comparison.

Mine has the Intel Centrino Wireless N-100.

I believe that you can find a Squeeze live media ISO. Another factor
might be that Wheezy is due to become 'stable' sometime in the next few
months. I has a lot of enhancements vice Squeeze and I've has zero
problems running it on several computers. Debian's 'testing' is more
stable that other's releases, IMHO.

[Weland]

I'm running squeeze on my Acer Aspire One D270. Other than a small
hickup with the wireless drivers and the backlight requiring some
setpci magic, everything is smooth. Let me know if I can help you
with anything related to it. I don't know how similar the two models
are, but I can give you a lspci/lsmod output.

On 2013-03-10, Wildman <best...@yahoo.com> wrote:
> I have an Acer Aspire 1 model D257. It came with win7
> and I would like to replace it with debian. Has anyone
> tried debian on a netbook? If so, I would appreciate
> any insights or advice.

--
Weland Treebark,
Wandering Philosopher and Engineer

[bad sector]

On 03/09/2013 09:43 PM, Wildman wrote:
> I have an Acer Aspire 1 model D257. It came with win7
> and I would like to replace it with debian. Has anyone
> tried debian on a netbook? If so, I would appreciate
> any insights or advice.

I have five or six linux distros including Debian plus two windows on my
asus eepc, first thing I did was install a 500gb drive and max ram but
those mods are not essential. If you're going to work with sound expect
it to be poor with skips and such or use an external soundcard.