I bought the other day an Acer Aspire One for my mom. She’s not a very technical person and in fact is more or less only using her current machine to write emails to me. My prime reason to replace her old machine is that I want to do video telephony as well and I also hope to boost her Internet usage a little bit.
The AA1 comes preinstalled already with the important set of tools. The missing bits from my end were:
- Skype (for video telephony)
- Huwaei E220 support (for the Internet)
- Google Earth (to show where my next hiking takes place)
- openssh server (for remote administration by me)
- dyndns update when going online (again for remote administration)
I found a wide range of places for support in a number of places. First there is the support site for the Aspire One. It contains among other thingsdownload links for additional packages including Skype and a Huwaei driver. To get them, click on “DRIVERS AND SUPPORT” on the bottom left on the site after choosing the color of your device.
There is also a Aspire One User Forum, where I first found the very important hint to press ALT+F2 in the main window to be able to start any application and second, there are several threads on how to install additional software from the ancestral Fedora Linux distribution. The command for installing openssh was:
sudo yum install openssh-server
For Google Earth there was someone hinting at a video tutorial at YouTube. What the tutorial also shows is the speed you can expect. And unfortunately since Google Earth has got rid of some of the tuning options with version 5 as it seems, none of the performance tuning tips I found on the forum can be applied.
To make the E220 to work you have to fiddle a bit. Huawei provides some drivers for the Windows folks on a mass storage device and this prevents the serial modem to be discovered by the kernel. http://oozie.fm.interia.pl/pro/huawei-e220/ provides some files to fix this using udev rules. Their rules block the loading of the storage driver for the Huwaei and instead issue a modprobe on the usbserial driver with parameters suggesting to attach to a particular device. This works only the first time you plug the device into your machine, however, since the second time the usbserial device driver will already have been loaded and modprobe will ignore the request.
I see my mom going online by plugging in the E220. Nothing more. If she wants to go offline she should just unplug the E220.
When you look at the open ports on the machine, you will see the opensshd port opened earlier, the ports Skype opened and the port 631 from cups. http://www.aspireoneuser.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=905&p=6179 has some comments on how to make both the cups and the X11 port disappear.
My mom will occasionally have my brothers kids at home and they will want to play a game or two. So I installed gnome-games with:
yum install gnome-games
To make the games appear in the menu and to rearrange the icons on the desktop a little bit, Ten tweaks for a new Acer Aspire One has instructions on how to do this with point 6. Adding the gnome-games was especially easy, because they already came with .desktop files:
[user@localhost ~]$ rpm -ql gnome-games|grep desktop
/usr/share/applications/gnome-blackjack.desktop
/usr/share/applications/gnome-freecell.desktop
/usr/share/applications/gnome-glchess.desktop
/usr/share/applications/gnome-glines.desktop
/usr/share/applications/gnome-gnect.desktop
/usr/share/applications/gnome-gnibbles.desktop
/usr/share/applications/gnome-gnobots2.desktop
/usr/share/applications/gnome-gnomine.desktop
/usr/share/applications/gnome-gnotravex.desktop
/usr/share/applications/gnome-gnotski.desktop
/usr/share/applications/gnome-gtali.desktop
/usr/share/applications/gnome-iagno.desktop
/usr/share/applications/gnome-mahjongg.desktop
/usr/share/applications/gnome-same-gnome.desktop
/usr/share/applications/gnome-sol.desktop
/usr/share/applications/gnome-sudoku.desktop
/usr/share/applications/gnometris.desktop
A dynamic DNS name is useful if I’m to find the machine out there in the wild when maintenance is due and I’ve chosen DynDNS mainly for historic reasons. The client recommended for Linux is the ddclient and as usual it’s easily installed by help of yum. The configuration file for ddclient can be automatically generated at their website. In my case the machine will predominantly go online through a HSDPA modem, so I hooked ddclient in via the ip-up.local script coming with the package.