… and the sky is ultra-gray. Not very fun ;/

On the other hand some things are shaping up. As I mentioned previously, my 3G USB-stick is proving to be very competent and useful. Even works in a stone cellar below ground with just one Window (Café Gråmunken, Old town, Stockholm)

The best thing about the stick is that it works out of the box on my Aspire One, as it is detected as “Option 3G”. That is, the unit’s networking software detects it as the 3G option that will be shipped with newer Aspire models. Very nice indeed.

For those interested, this is how it looks:

My provider is Bredbandsbolaget (Telenor), and the make & model of the stick is Qualcomm 3G CDMA GI0225.

Cheers,

… including their internal IP-numbers, usernames and passwords.

I sent an e-mail three days ago to marketing@linpus.com (only contact adress on their website), info@acercomputer.se (listed as Swedish contact on Acers site), support@acercomputer.se and security@acer.com about this advicing them to change their passwords and take other necessary steps that might be needed to secure their environment.

All bounced except marketing@linpus.com from which I have yet to receive an answer.

Not so nice for them but it’s funny reading.

From the beginning of the file:

ls -a
rm .AME/ .bash_history .cache/ .dbus/ .gsynaptics/ .lftp/ .PIMDS/ .update-notifier/ -rf
ls

Yeah… doing that do not remove the current sessions history. Sorry guys

Out of 982 lines in the file, 423 are “ls” variants and 51 “lftp”:

¤¤¤¤¤¤¤@¤¤¤:~/$ wc -l linpus_roots_bash_history.txt
982 linpus_roots_bash_history.txt
¤¤¤¤¤¤¤@¤¤¤:~/$ grep ls linpus_roots_bash_history.txt | wc -l
423
¤¤¤¤¤¤¤@¤¤¤:~/$ grep ftp linpus_roots_bash_history.txt | wc -l
51

I found this after doing a restore of the unit so it might be that this file is only on the restore image. I have no way of checking this, so if anyone that has not restored their unit feels like checking this please do so and then give me your results in the comments section.

Also, if someone has the official security contact for Acer I would appreciate that.

Cheers,

Got to try out the restore features of the Aspire today as I f*cked up editing the /etc/fstab file

I added several tmpfs entries (to disable logging to SSD and so on) and after that it would not boot. My immediate suspicion is that the kernel had not been compiled with tmpfs support, but this assumption failed after the restore when I reviewed the supported FS’s. Anyhow, I’m gonna dig into just why it failed later on.

You live, you learn hehe

Anyways, the restore CD that shipped with the unit can be used in two ways:

1. Boot using an external CD-reader and restore

2. Boot and create a bootable USB-stick (minimum 2GB), from which you can then boot and restore

I chose the latter and the stick creation was smooth. I used an HP-laptop to boot on the CD and it detected my stick immediately after chosing mode of operation (1 or 2 above). The process of copying data and making the stick bootable was finished in under 10 minutes, but this might vary between host computers and USB-hubs.

Then I shut down the Aspire, which was hanging in a semi-booted mode, and inserted the stick. During boot (BIOS) I pressed F12 and chose to boot from USB.

The actual restore vent fine and took about 15-16 minutes.

So now I got a spanking clean Linpus installation again

Loveliness Got the Aspire One in my hands today.

What I did first was to just browse the web, and believe it or not, everything worked. Webradio and everything. Haven’t looked into it that much but it seems like flashplayer and all the usual plugins are already installed upon shipment… It’ll be interesting to investigate the versions of installed software later.

The system creates a non-root user for you with the self-explanatory name “user”. This is a normal user account with no special priv’s and it boots directly into this ID. During first-start install you are also allowed to set the root user password. This can later be used when su’ing to install applications and supporting libraries.

As you might have read erlier this unit ships with Linpus Linux which is a Fedora 8 clone optimized for UMPC’s. This means that it is also optimized for SSD harddrives (minimize wear, maximize performance) and it should perform OK at least. Hard to pinpoint if something feels like a bottleneck in the system right now, as I’m still quite new to it.

The Linpus menu interface is bright, shiny and intuitive but it is very clear that it is not for users that have above average linux skills. I have yet to change the window manager on this one as “Alt+F2″ goes a long way. As mentioned in previous posts I might also turn to the Ubuntu UMPC package once that is out and kicking.

Another thing I mentioned in an earlier post is that I bought an additional memory module (1GB) and that it looked like a pretty advanced manoeuvre… And it really really was.

Oh my god who builds hardware that you have to upgrade like this:

And finally:

I mean… I’m not worthless at hardware but give me a break… The only thing I did not have to do was to solder the god damned module to the motherboard… Ah well… It was an experience at least. Hardest part was to know what to pull and what flip if that makes sense for anyone Maybe I’ll write a more verbose guide than the ones that exist now at a later time.

Moving on, now when the memory module was installed was the A1 any faster? Very much so, actually. Boot time had drastic improvements and I had a less tormenting time browsing Aftonbladet.se (which is filled with all kinds of crappy flash adverts). I also had an easier time handling my gimp as it can be quite hungry sometimes.

And when it comes to gimp and other applications remember that the OS really is Fedora 8 and as such it is very easy to get all base applications installed. Just press “Alt+F2″ and type in “xterm” and press enter and install what you need through yum (remember to “su” first though). The first app to go was of course Fyodor’s NMAP:

# yum install nmap

Yummie… and that’s how hard it is. Another example can then be FileZilla:

# yum install filezilla

Of course you wont see filezilla in the menu so you’ll have to launch it through “Alt+F2″ -> “filezilla” -> [Enter].

Both wired and wireless networking worked fine out of the box (verified wireless on my neighbours WLAN) and the only thing I have to note here is that the user controls for the networking is a bit hard to work with. Not that the functions doesn’t exist or that it is hard to find, but it feels sluggish and the shortcut applet behaves weird sometimes (but I have quite large fingers so it might be that).

The biggest plus though goes to the keyboard that manages to, even though it’s really small, work for my large and ogrish hands. Second gold-star goes to the screen that performs excellent both on AC and off. Played some Tetris on the bus home and it worked fine even though it was quite bright outside.

Ok, that’s all for now More on this wonderful toy later…

And yeah, this is my first blogpost written on the A1!

A1 References:
- Memory upgrade
- User forum
- Hardware forum
- How to ruin a perfectly good Aspire One