Yesterday I got a new toy! A brand new Acer Aspire One. It's a neat little laptop. only a bit larger than a sheet of A4 paper, featuring an 8GiB SSD and Intel's new Atom N270.
Although the preinstalled Linpus Linux interface was nice, it wasn't made forr me. I spend most off my computing time in black terminal emulators. So I installed Debian on it. As the folks at Realraum are so nice to provide Debian installer images on pxeboot, that went nice and easy, even though the laptop has no CD drive.
Still there are some problems remaining. I didn't test all the hardware yet, but have alrady hit one I haven't got to work yet. The wifi card. I had previously assumed that it would be one made by Intel, as most of the other hardware, specifically Mainboard, Soundchip, and Graphics chip are fabricated by Intel. Well I've guessed wrong. It's an atheros AR242x chipset and I couldn't get it to work with any of the madwifi drivers yet. Neither the one provided by Debian nor svn snapshots from madwifi.org would wark. What I haven't tried yet is ath9k, the free driver by atheros themselves.
Another thing, I couldn't get to work, is avahi, which is a shame since I normally use mdns to connect my various machines with another. I'm not sure if this is an issue with the network driver or something else.
Otherwise it's a nice gadget though. But I still need to get used to typing on the keyboard, which is smaller than what I'm used to.
Update: It seems the folks at aspireoneuser.com got the wifi working on Ubuntu. So I think I will get it to work on Debian too.
Update 2: The reason why I didn't get the wifi card to work, was that I forgot to ...errm... reboot.
