Acer Aspire ONE: WinXP vs UNR 9.04
I had been using Windows XP on my new-ish Acer Aspire ONE netbook until recently when Ubuntu released their 9.04 Netbook Remix (UNR). Thus far Windows XP was working OK but it was slow overall and outright lethargic at times, especially during bootup, AV startup and now that I really think about it, most anytime I tried to start any sort of application for the first time. Once things were loaded they did respond decently, especially Google Chrome with its ability to put each tab into it’s own memory space, very nice indeed.
I tried out Ubuntu’s 9.04 through their “Live CD” version, aka USB stick with a bootable flash image file from here and here. Everything was much faster and all components worked out of the box as promised as my Acer was on the list of approved hardware.
I went ahead and formatted the primary drive and installed UNR 9.04 and ran into some issues with getting it installed initially, but I started over and everything went smooth the second time around. The OS is snappy to boot and responds to my every command with ease. Updates are easy to maintain, customization options are a plenty and the community has some great extras to install like these and much more.
…all seemed to be copasetic.
That was until my wireless card ceased to work without warning or error, ugh. I quickly scoured the Ubuntu forums and found I wasn’t the only one having a similar problem. I ended up getting everything stable, at least for now, by doing the following:
Installed madwifi-tools
Added the following to /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf:
blacklist ath_pci
Added the following to /etc/rc.local:
modprobe ath5k
Shutdown and Powered On.
To me this is the last big barrier to gaining widespread adaptation of Linux by the SMBs and Home Users, installation and usability ease. If the hardware is recognized by the software then why do I have to go through these extra steps to get something as basic as wireless networking to function?
Thankfully I have the troubleshooting and Linux background required to get this relatively easy workaround in place, but this would be unacceptable if Windows and say Dell put even a small fraction of it’s client base into the same situation with a new hardware/software combo they released. Do I love Windows? No. Do I realize why they still maintain a 9:1 market share vs. Mac and 98:1 market share vs. Linux? Yes. Source here.
In conclusion, do I regret moving from XP to UNR 9.04? In the immortal words of John Bender, “Not even close bud.”
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