First Steps To Acer Aspire One Perfection

Before you do some of these, you should make a USB recovery disc. You will need a laptop or PC with a CD drive. In your box there should be a recovery cd for factory settings, but, as you can see, there is no cd drive on these laptops. There's a manual of how to make the recovery USB stick If you go out and buy a USB memory stick then make sure you read the packaging of it because some only work with Windows or Mac. If you can't make a recovery USB stick then only do the ones without a # infront of it.If you make a mistake these ones then your system could crash completely, so I wouldn't risk it. But if you have a recovery USB stick and you make an important mistake then when you boot up your computer press F12 when it goes the the BIOS. The press down until you highlighting the one that says USB in it. Make sure you don't plug anything else in though while your doing it.

Your Acer Aspire One is not fullly updated. To update it you will need to run Live Update. But first it's best you only make the wireless connection that you're using (unless you're using a wired network.) because when you finish live update it deletes your wireless networks.  There are two ways to do this. Either click the Settings Button on your desktop, then click live update. Or the other way is to hit alt and F2. Then type in onlineupdate. Some updates may fail, but they usually work second time after you reboot.

Your AA1's desktop shows a lot of your applications but not all. The right-click menu shows every application that you have. The right-click menu is a desktop menu that you get on right click of your desktop. To enable this menu hit alt and F2 and type xfce-setting-show and click Desktop. On the behaviour tab make sure the box is ticked that says "Show desktop menu on right click"

Your AA1 automatically logs on to the user "user" when you log on without asking for a password which leaves you with very low security. Of course, you can use a BIOS password, but if you forget that that then you're screwed. But if you do choose to use a BIOS password, don't forget that it automatically change your password to capital letters and you can have a maximum of eight letters. But if you go with disabling autologin then make sure yu have set ypur password. If you haven't then hit alt and F2 then type terminal. Then type sudo passwd user and type your passwd. Then you have to hit alt and F2, then type "sudo mousepad /etc/rc.d/rc.S" and hit enter. Search for the line that says /usr/bin/xinit -- -br>/dev/null 2>&1 & and change it to #/usr/bin/xinit -- -br>/dev/null 2>&1 &. Also take away the spaces before the line. Then make a new line (under the one you've just edited) and type /usr/sbin/gdm" Restart your AA1 it should have a box saying user on the left. You probably would rather that you username is your name rather than user. Don't loo up on the internet on how to change your username, because when some people have chve had to flash the Bios. (Including me)anged their username they have had to flash the Bios. (Including me). So instead hit alt and F2 and type userinfo, where it says full name type whatever name you want to appear as your user. Then click close and type your password.

On the right click menu, click the terminal link, and type "sudo useradd -G wheel newuser" minus the speech marks and replace the newuser with the username that you want it to have for the new user. Then you have to set a password for the new user, otherwise you can't loggon with it. to do this type "sudo passwd newuser" minus the brackets and change newuser to the username. then type the password for the user.

Your AA1 comes with a web browser called Mozilla Firefox. But It's a very old version. The latest version currently is Firefox 3. To get this version you have get the remi repository. To get this repository open the terminal through the right click desktop menu. Here are the comands you need to type.

sudo wget http://rpms.famillecollet.com/remi-release-8.rpm

sudo rpm -Uhv remi-release-8.rpm

sudo mousepad /etc/yum.repos.d/remi.repo

In this text file make sure the enabled value is set to 1 on the first line that says enabled=. Then close the window and save it. Now in your terminal window insert these commands.

sudo rpm -e --nodeps firefox

sudo yum -y install firefox

Now you should have Firefox 3.

On your AA1 it already has some imaging software installed. But Gimp is far more superior than Acer Photo Master and gThumb Image Viewer. In the terminal. Type in these commands.

sudo yum -y install fedora-release

sudo yum install gimp

You now have the best image editing software for linux. Enjoy!

The AA1 has a built-in microphone, but it has no applications that are designed to record sound, leaving the microphone useless. But you can get a sound recorder with one simple command into the terminal.

sudo yum -y install audacity

Audacity is also used for editing sound and adding effects. So, have fun.

Your AA1 has optimizations that slow down your read/write performance. These optimizations don't matter and might as well be disabled. To do this hit alt and F2 and type

sudo mousepad /boot/grub/grub.conf

Now on the line that begins with kernel add to the end "elevator=noop" minus the speech marks. Make sure you don't mistype otherwise your system might not start up properly.

Reboot and your read and write performance should have increase.

The desktop of an AA1 is controlled by a single text file. Open this file by hitting alt and F2 and typing "sudo mousepad /home/user/.config/xfce4/desktop/group-app.xml" minus the speech marks. Now you can probably tell which sections represent which. Anyway, when adding a link to the desktop all the applications you need will be in /usr/share/applications. First, in the paragraph for the section that you choose,

1. make a new line after the last line with <app in the paragraph for the section you want.
2. Press tab then space and type <app
   
3. (optional for if you want a specific icon) (space) icon="filepath" all icons you need are in /usr/share/pixmaps. Copy and paste one from there to replace filepath, but leave the speech marks, but change it so it doesn't show file://, leave one slash, and so it's not on a new line.
4. (optional if you want a specific name) (space) name="name" but replace name in the speech marks with what you want it to be called and leave the speech marks.
5. (space) sequence="Number"> But replace number with a number e.g sequence="6"> But make sure that it's one number higher than the highest sequence number on the lines in the paragraph. But don't count the lines that have <!-- at the start or --> at the end.
6. Now no space, go to the /usr/share/applications folder but keep the other window open, find the application that you want and copy and paste next to the > after the sequence number. Edit it so it's not on a new line, and remove the file:// at the start so theres only one slash.
7. Finally, add </app> to the end with no spaces, close, save, and reboot and your new icon should be there.

To delete an icon, just delete the line that's for that icon, but don't leave a gap, and you also might have to change the sequence number or you'll get a random gap inbetween your icons.

To change the colours of the sections is also fairly simple. Just change every colour in the file blue, red, green or yellow, you choose. But when you get to the settings paragraph it doesnt say colours, it says gray or settings, but just change them to what you want.

If you changed the colours, you might want a background to go with it. So once you've got one save it into the destop folder in your home folder. Then on the desktop menu go to settings, then desktop settings. Click the little Picture of a folder and find the image in your desktop folder. But the image has to be on a scale of 1024x600.

To change the titles of the sections hit alt and F2 and type sudo mousepad. Open the folder /usr/share/desktop-directories and select the on named as the on that you want to change. Once you've opened it where it says "name=" after that write what you want it to be changed to. Save it, close it and reboot bute make sure there's no space between the name= and the new name.

If you've changed the desktop background then you'll know what i mean when i say the search bar doesn't look right. You can get rid of it with one terminal command.

sudo rpm -e --nodeps acer-search-bar

Problem solved

Your Acer Aspire One already has media players installed, but no movie makers. Pitivi is an easy to use movie maker and again, one simple command will get this software for you. Enter this into the terminal.

sudo yum -y install pitivi.

See, easy!

Thanks for looking at my hub. Please comment if you have a problem. Also, don't try this on an Aspire One with Windows on it

As you may already know, your AA1 has Linpus Linux Lite V1.0.9.E installed. So you can't get all your favourite windows apps. But now there is an emulator called wine which will install windows programs that you want. To get wine enter in the terminal:

sudo yum -y install wine

But if you haven't done audacity then make sure you type in first:

sudo yum -y install fedora-release.

If you don't, then you will get a very old version of wine.

How To Use Wine

Now in your desktop menu, in the "others" section, click wine configuration. In the Audio tab, make sure that Alsa is unselected and OSS is selected. Click ok. Next you need to downoad a windows app from the internet. Here's a good website to get windows apps from. http://www.filehippo.com/. Then save it into your /home/user/.wine/drive_c/Windows/system32. You might not be able to see these folders so right-click, then "show hidden files". If your .wine folder still isn't there, you may need to reboot and then it will be there. Once you've savid it in the right folder, hit alt and F2 and type "wine filename" but replace filename with the filname or you application you downloaded. Also, get rid of the speech marks. Some apps don't work on wine, so to find out which ones do, go to http://www.winehq.org/ and search for your app.