Linpus Linux Lite Review
A few weeks ago I became the proud owner of an Acer Aspire One Linux edition (reviewed here). Out of the box, this little wonder comes with the relatively unknown Linux distribution Linpus Linux Lite, which has been customized somewhat by Acer to make the most of the hardware in the Aspire One. The screenshot above and many more pictures of Acer’s version of Linpus are available at Golem.de, or you can find captures of the vanilla Linpus Lite 9.4 here.
The installation is indeed very ‘Lite’, and brings up the desktop from suspend in less than 10 seconds, or from cold boot in around 20 seconds. Part of the reason for these amazing startup times is that Linpus doesn’t attempt to start up a fully blown integrated desktop environment like Gnome or KDE, and is in fact based on XFCE, including the XFCE’s Terminal and Thunar Filemanager.
A big selling point for Linpus is it’s support for Asian languages out of the box, and the Acer version is no exception: I was able to type Thai characters with the default setup, and there are additional smart input managers for Korean, Japanese and both Simplified Chinese and Traditional Chinese.
Under the hood, Linpus is actually based on Fedora Core 8, which betrays its age a little since Fedora itself left that release behind some time ago. That does, however, mean that with a little digging it’s possible to turn on the more advanced features we are used to seeing on a desktop class machine. Pressing ALT+F2 brings up a useful launch prompt, from which you can start the XFCE preference manager that Linpus doesn’t reveal by default — the so-called “Advanced Mode Hack. From here, all of XFCE’s options can be customized, including turning on the right-click desktop menu. Having done that, all of Fedora Core’s installed applications can be found inside this desktop menu, including the Fedora Package Manager.
In theory, the sky would be the limit here. Unfortunately it’s not entirely safe to add a bunch of Fedora 8 package repositories and let fly, since the patched Linpus packages are sometimes lagging behind the Fedora 8 versions. As I mentioned in my Aspire One review, if you accidentally update to a Fedora GTK+, then Linpus XFCE breaks. Even so, yum is your friend: With appropriate care, and judicious force installing of Fedora packages that might otherwise try to make unnecessary updates to Linpus, it’s not terribly difficult to add any application you might be missing. By now, I’ve updated to Firefox 3 and Open Office 2.4, and replaced the Acer media player with VLC, as well as added all the compiler tools so that I can compile things from source if necessary. Despite all that, the machine is still running as smoothly, if not smoother, than when I first took it out of the box.
Due to the very limited screen real estate of the Aspire One (1024×600 pixels) specifically, and netbooks in general, the Linpus desktop itself serves double duty as an application launcher. That is, once you’ve logged in, the desktop contains icons for the most commonly used (in Linpus’ opinion!) applications. This is perfect for casual users who just want to work on some office documents, or browse web and send some emails. Acer ships with an attractive Linpus desktop theme, splitting the screen into four zones (Connect, Fun, Work and Files), each with three launch icons and an arrow to ‘drill down’ into a subscreen dedicated to that zone that’s capable of showing up to another 9 icons (plus the original 3 from the main screen).
Another nice touch is the combined filesystem and internet search box included right on the desktop. The integration isn’t all it could be though, since the internet search merely launches Firefox to actually run the search. None-the-less, it’s quite nice to have it at your fingertips.
Acer ships a slightly out of date 2.6.25 kernel with the Aspire One, but they are sharing their patches, so there is no reason to avoid patching the Acer sources up to 2.6.26.5 and recompiling if you need newer kernel features such as reliable TrueCrypt support.
In the end, Linpus is a slightly outdated rpm distribution, and under any other circumstances I would certainly replace it with a modern debian distro myself. But, despite the fact that it is tuned for casual users, and that I’m not at all fond of rpms, I’m still happily using it 3 weeks later. Why haven’t I swapped it out for Ubuntu yet, you ask? Mostly because it is exceptionally well integrated with the Aspire One hardware. I can kill the wifi connection with a dedicated button and get feedback from the associated LED; the aufs overlay filesystem makes excellent use of the SD memory card slots; the webcam, soundcard and microphone work flawlessly for Skype calls; and not forgetting the fantastic 10 second wake-from-suspend. Linpus certainly isn’t a distribution I’d be eager to install on my own initiative, but there’s no doubt that with some love and attention from a netbook vendor, it can be an excellent operating system for making the most out of low-end hardware.
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“Pressing F2 brings up a useful launch prompt”
Isn’t it alt+f2, like most Linux distributions?
You also forgot to mention that there is no user account set up by default, or root password for that matter. In the store I was somewhat horrified when I opened up xterm and hit su only to find myself instantly greeted with a:
#
@L: yes, typo on my part — ALT+F2 it is.
@Sean: Oh, you’re right! Thanks. What you say is mostly true, but it was the first thing I fixed when I had the same shock once I got the machine home, so I forgot the wacky defaults! You are logged in as a regular user without root privileges by default (with the uninspiring user name ‘user’), and there is no root password! Adding ‘user’ to the sudoers file and then running ’sudo passwd’ fixes those problems. I’m still trying to figure out how to get it to prompt for a login password at bootup though :(
Fixed Typo. (ALT+F2)
Interesting that you chose to type in Thai. I rarely meet anyone who finds that a priority.
Nice article.. Any experience with installing a different distribution yet?
can the aspire one play .avi, divx, mp4 files out of the box? or do i need to install codecs ?
“You are logged in as a regular user without root privileges by default (with the uninspiring user name ‘user’), and there is no root password!”
Might there be differently configured Ace Aspire Ones? At least the one I bought to my wife forced an initial setup before first complete boot, including root password.
Another possibility is that some too curious staff at some shops have playing around with it. I don’t know the answer beside that I didn’t encounter this dangers.
My own plan though is to install the distro I usually use: Arch.
How did you enable videocalls in skype? Thats the only thing im missing on my aa1 (linuxversion)
If you get an AAO then ensure you make a restore disc because there have been reports that the restore disc supplied with the Linux AAO is faulty, including mine.
Although I have found some people like Linpus Lite I abhorred it, so I installed Fedora 9 on it. Unfortunately though the AAO died a couple of days ago so now it has to be fixed. I consider this quite bad as it is the first bit of equipment ever that I have bought that has never lasted a month. Actually it is the first bit that has never lasted a year!!
@Pavs: Much obliged :)
@Daeng Bo: I bought my AA1 in Bangkok, so it has Thai glyphs on the keys, and since I plan to go back for a few months next year, I’m learning to read and speak Thai. I haven’t seen another distro that puts the option to type in Thai right in front of me until now, so I amused myself for a few minutes in Linpus :)
@Yosh: Nope, I’m planning on sticking with Linpus until a debian based distro has 20 second boot times, and support for all the AA1 hardware.
@JM: Sadly, no. Many of my videos are encoded as divx or H264 in avi or mov containers respectively. Installing VLC is reasonably straight forward though.
@KimTjik: Now that you mention it, the Acer store staff booted the machine and went through the setup for me to show that everything was working before they let me leave with it. I guess they hared through the setup screen and set an empty root password that I couldn’t forget?!?
@Nils: Actually, I’ve only made video calls with Yahoo so far, I just assumed that Skype would work too. It would suck if they don’t :(
@Andy: Good advice. Buy a 2GB usb stick with the AA1, and make that your prerogative before you tinker with anything else!
With an 8 GB drive, how much space is left after the OS is installed?
How big is the footprint of Linpus and the Asian languages?
Looks like a fun laptop to have.
@B: The Acer flavour of Linpus takes up a little over 3GiB, plus another 1GiB for the swap partition (I’ll talk about how to turn that off in a future post). With rounding errors from GiB to GB, and file system overhead, that leaves around 3.5GiB for user files. But there are two SDHD slots which are used very cleverly… see my recent review of the AAO on this website for details :)
I recently bought an AA1 as well and I think it was one of the best purchases I ever made. I bought a 6 cell, 1 GB RAM Linux version (very limited stock, I took the last one they had) for $450 dollars…The overpriced battery is not the best deal but it allows me to have 6+ hours of battery life which to me is a killer feature.
But the Linux OS is disappointing since it makes something like changing the background image amazingly difficult (compared to real distros). I guess I was spoiled by Ubuntu. Nonetheless the 20 second boot time among other things is preventing me from moving on. Hopefully onelinux will allow me to make the switch in the coming weeks.
I installed Ubuntu on this thing no problem. I have the 120gig HD version which boots even faster with Linpus (around 15secs). With some tweaks to Ubuntu I could get it to boot almost as fast and the time from suspend to desktop is around the same. The Ubuntu Wiki has a good article on getting all the hardware to work (including kill-switch and LEDs).. Sound works good, too.. except for the integrated mic (with default alsa drivers you have to chose between working mic or working sound after suspend).
Oh.. and that crap you read about a too loud fan in reviews is bogus. It is a bug in the Bios and since you are using Linux it is easy to have a script running in background that adjusts fan-speed to cpu-temp. In real-life usage the fan usually stay completely off for almost an hour until turns back on to cool down the Atom-CPU. The temp never goes higher than 70C.
All in all a great deal you get, for that little money. I use this as a complete notebook replacement.
Hey!
How straightforward is installing VLC?
since I read linpus is based on fedora core 8 I tried this:
$> su -
#> rpm -ivh http://rpm.livna.org/livna-release-8.rpm
#> yum install vlc
didn’t work though, it gave me these errors:
Error: Missing Dependency: libpulse.so.0(PULSE_0) is needed by package vlc
Error: Missing Dependency: libopendaap.so.0 is needed by package vlc-core
Error: Missing Dependency: libdvdnav.so.4 is needed by package vlc-core
I don’t know much about installing stuff on linux so does anyone know what to do with this?
I wish I had kept better notes, wvv. I had to track down at least 1 RPM install package and install them.
First go to sites like http://rpm.pbone.net & RPMfind.net and look for versions of the missing files for the i386 version of Fedora 8. Download them and install them by opening a terminal (like xterm) in the download directory, changing to root user account with the comand ’su’ (without the ’s) and installing the RPMs.
# rpm -Uvh libdvdnav-4.1.2-2.fc8.i386.rpm
I believe these were the three missing RPMs.
http://rpm.pbone.net/index.php3?stat=26&dist=54&size=52046&name=libopendaap-0.4.0-4.fc8.i386.rpm
http://rpm.pbone.net/index.php3?stat=26&dist=54&size=137077&name=pulseaudio-libs-0.9.8-5.fc8.i386.rpm
http://rpm.pbone.net/index.php3/stat/4/idpl/8866902/com/libdvdnav-4.1.2-2.fc8.i386.rpm.html
If you have them downloaded in the same directory you can install them with the command:
rpm -Uvh *.rpm
Then try installing vlc with pirut (the Package Manager).
I have to say, I’ve had more dependency hell in a few days of having the Acer Aspire One than with the last few years of Debian/Ubuntu/Sidux use, but I’ve finally beat it into to reasonable shape. I’ll be happy with it until OneLinux/Ubuntu Netbook/Mandriva Whatever work out the wrinkles with the One’s hardware.
Goran, if you want to change the background have a look at this thread and install the referenced RPM.
http://www.aspireoneuser.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=39&t=1612
Most of the dependency problems, like breaking GTK, can actually be resolved, i found solutions here: http://macles.blogspot.com/2008/08/dependency-problems-on-acer-aspire-one.html
Also two minor corrections. Linpus is 9.6, as can be seen when you repeatedly press TAB to get into the GRUB menu. And the kernel is 2.6.23, otherwise TrueCrypt wouldn’t be complaining.
thanks praxis!
but I’m not there yet..
after
rpm -Uvh *.rpm
I got
warning: libdvdnav-4.1.2-2.fc8.i386.rpm: Header V3 DSA signature: NOKEY, key ID 6df2196f
error: Failed dependencies:
libdvdread.so.3 is needed by libdvdnav-4.1.2-2.fc8.i386
what to do next? sorry for filling this page with my VLC linpus problems.. I’m kind of new to installing stuff on linux systems.
A solution for VLC is also available at #5 in the post i linked in the previous post.
how do oyu add a desktop pager/switcher to the panel?
Okay i am sorry if this sounds stupid to most of you…keep in mind i very new to the linux world. I have two questions the first one being can you use itunes on linux the second one being if you were to log into abc.com or fox.com or whatever can you watch the tv shows on the acer like you can on any of the windows pc?
I’ve one of these and want to know whether it would be possible to install SpiderOak backup software (which has multi-platform support including Linux).
SpiderOak offer Ubuntu and Debian versions of Linux. Is there any likelihood Linpus will run one of these?
(I tried SpiderOak support but they suggested I tried it myself; it’s not officially supported on other platforms; and before trying I’d like to know my chances!).
Many thanks for any ideas
Pete
You say the AA1 runs flawlessy for SKYPE….yet I cant seem to get this thing installed and running appropriately…not only am I new to AA1/Linux but to computer operations/functions as well. I m a traveling English teacher abroad for 8 years now and want to update myself with technology for staying touch back home as i am never sure when i will get back.
Can you instruct–or direct me…for installing skype on the AOA110 (the SSD, smaller battery and memory one)?
Cheers!
Skype works for me. With video.
I followed the instructions in the “top 10 tweaks” article on the very useful aspireoneuser.com website.
http://www.aspireoneuser.com/2008/09/05/ten-tweaks-for-a-new-acer-aspire-one/
Pete
I also (importantly) found that my AA1’s (120GB models) were both affected by the 193 Load_Cycle_Count bug when I installed Ubuntu 8.0.4-1. Basically it may well kill your hard disk within a year…. See http://ubuntudemon.wordpress.com/2007/10/30/ubuntu-is-not-causing-aggressive-power-management/ for example. There are workarounds out there also.
Great review and notes. Cheers!
How to install windows XP and keep Linpus installed (in other words “Dual Boot”)?
Thanks
With this version of Linux, how can programs be added and removed? (I am new to Linux)
Also, must webmail be used, or can I use an email program?
Thanks
The acer messenger keeps crashing and re-starting. I have already tried to remove all logins and again.
Skype works perfectly well.
Any solutions?
i have just bought an aspire one…and i cannot get it to connect via wireless plz help x
I have the Windows version of AA1. Is it possible to get the Acer version of Linpus Lite and install it alongside Windows on the HD? If so, how?
Thanks,
Hans-Göran
I am a linux newcomer. Just bought an EEEPC 701 but what shocked me is that the linux is in chinese. Is there any way to change it to English version without reinstallation just like we change language in mobile phones ? Thanks
I am thinking of purchasing the AA1 120GB model - the reason behind this is that I am going to Cuba in January and rather drag my 4 year old heavy laptop with me I was thinking of taking one of these babies. My passion is photography and I take the laptop with me so I can review the pictures that I have taken - will the AA1 be up to the job? Is the photo browser included with Linux Lite any good? I would be grateful for any advice.
Tony
You can download Google’s ‘Picasa’. This works very well and handles RAW photo’s.
I have not worked out how to put and Icon on the desktop yet so I run Picasa from the ‘Run’ command (just type in Picasa)
Hope this helps
Paul
P.S. If anyone knows how to put an Icon on the desk top to run a program please let me know.
Many thanks Paul,
I took the plunge and ordered the AA1 120 GB Linux model yesterday - I have also heard that Gimp is also a good photo programme - I will have a play when it arrives and let you know how I get on!