[GRLUG] Laptop Fondling

[peyeps at iserv.net]

Well, my resistance finally failed me and I picked up an Acer Aspire.

Searching the Ubuntu forums indicated that there were only a couple of minor
glitches with Ubuntu remix with the machine, and  the price was the same
at Office Max, Target and Walmart.  Target you could not touch the
keyboards on the display units, there was a plastic cover over them.  
Office Max I was able to check out.
The HP only had 8 gig used, as opposed to 11 on the Acer.  Machine speed,
memory, disk size were the same on all the netbooks Office Max had out. 
Had an opportunity to see a side by side comparison between XP and Vista. 
Vista was about twenty bucks more expensive, used twice as much disk space
and ran slower when opening the control panel.  That's my 3 minute
evaluation of Vista.  (Vista Basic is what comes installed on the
machine.)  Needless to say I picked up the cheaper XP machine.

Found that the easiest way to create the USB Live memory stick was to
download the .ISO image on another machine with a CD burner and usb port. 
Burn the live CD to disk and load the live CD.  While running the live CD,
there is a command line program usb-creator, that makes it easy to burn
the boot USB drive, using the currently running live CD.

Had trouble getting the Ubuntu remix to work.  It is downloaded as a .img
file, and usb-create doesn't work with that.  There is a
unetbootin-linux-356.bin that will create a boot stick, but it only comes
up with a console screen, and I couldn't find in the commands listed the
one for starting X.  I probably overlooked something.   However the 9.04
live CD worked so well, decided to go with that, and not mess around any
longer trying to get remix to work.

Haven't booted the XP yet.  Want to make sure I have all the protections
available to lock the thing down before I do that.  Discovered during the
repartition exercise that Acer installed a Windows Vista boot, partition
taking 7 gig, presumably for the restore OS.  I left it there.

By the way, this Ubuntu has all the patches since the .ISO was created. 
No WGA necessary to do that.