An uncle (just mistyped that as "unclue", oops!) of mine has bought an Aspire One and can't get his USB stick to work. Can anyone offer advice? His message below:
------------------- I've just bought an Acer "Aspire One" note book and it runs on Linux It's got 120Gb of memory which is useful and so I want use some of the space so I thought I'll use a memory stick. But I can't make it work........ having searched the Help files(under Using removable media" that "Thunar supports removable media if it is built with support for HAL"
My memory sticks are either Sandisk Cruzer or I have a Freecom "Toughdrive" neither seem to work. So had a look on the internet and it seems to be a common problem "Hal compatibility with memory sticks".
Is there anything you can recommend, Ideally I want to use this notebook as a secondary backup and at the moment it's looking a bit useless! -------------------
On Wed, 2009-02-04 at 08:45 +0000, Mark Rogers wrote:
An uncle (just mistyped that as "unclue", oops!) of mine has bought an Aspire One and can't get his USB stick to work. Can anyone offer advice? His message below:
Hmm...My Aspire is no longer running the stock linpus distro..but when it was I had no issue with memory sticks not working. The file manager should just show them on the left..or I think you get a pop up anyway.
These haven't been reformatted at some point by a Windows machine to NTFS have they ?
You could talk him through opening a terminal (alt-f2 and xterm in the run box) and get him to run dmesg after inserting the stick and then copy/paste you the last 20 lines or so...there is no /var/log/messages on the SSD version I have..although there might be on the Hard drive version.
Wayne Stallwood wrote:
Hmm...My Aspire is no longer running the stock linpus distro..but when it was I had no issue with memory sticks not working. The file manager should just show them on the left..or I think you get a pop up anyway.
How easy is the upgrade to a different distro, and which distro did you go with?
These haven't been reformatted at some point by a Windows machine to NTFS have they ?
I've asked, will report back when I know.
You could talk him through opening a terminal (alt-f2 and xterm in the run box) and get him to run dmesg after inserting the stick and then copy/paste you the last 20 lines or so...there is no /var/log/messages on the SSD version I have..although there might be on the Hard drive version.
OK, thanks.
What are they like as boxes? I'd been toying with the idea of getting one myself.
On Wed, 2009-02-04 at 15:07 +0000, Mark Rogers wrote:
Wayne Stallwood wrote:
Hmm...My Aspire is no longer running the stock linpus distro..but when it was I had no issue with memory sticks not working. The file manager should just show them on the left..or I think you get a pop up anyway.
How easy is the upgrade to a different distro, and which distro did you go with?
Mine now has Ubuntu 8.10 on it (not the Netbook remix version) there is a wiki page on the ubuntu wiki about how to do various tweaks (most of which are only super relevant to the SSD version)
Following those was an easy enough process and everything works now except a little bit of unreliability with suspend/resume..not that it matters to me because the thing is pretty darn fast at booting anyway so I tend to just shut it down.
Linpus in itself isn't that bad though..you can add the fedora repositories to Yum and drop the task based destkop menu..enable right click on xfce and you are pretty much set. The only reason I changed was because I decided I would like the same versions of everything as my desktop and little things like the Gnome Network manager working with my clients VPN's better than the connection manager linpus uses. I am sure I could have tweaked out the small issues I had with linpus with relative ease though.
What are they like as boxes? I'd been toying with the idea of getting one myself.
I love mine...it doesn't have the battery life of the later Asus machines but the keyboard is better and it is cheaper (if you can still find them..Acer have discontinued them now I hear). It has turned out to be one of the most useful computers I have owned getting me out of spots on various occasions whilst being small and cheap enough to leave in the glovebox of the car.
Last time I had a look pixmaina still had the 8GB SSD version (same as mine) for less than £200. If battery life is a concern then you can get an extended life battery for £40ish..stock it is about 2-3hours runtime.
Just a quick update on this (original post below for reference):
The problem turned out to be that the USB sticks were U3 devices. They *should* still be accessible under Linux but sometimes the U3 partition takes a long time to mount (or fail to mount) apparently delaying the data partition becoming available for anything up to a minute[1].
Removing U3 fixed the problem on the netbook (using the tools provided with the U3 device [2]). However it now doesn't seem to work in Windows..... Not solved that bit yet. (Given that it's purpose was transfering files between the Windows desktop and the netbook, that's a pretty big problem!)
[1] http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=196214 [2] http://www.u3.com/uninstall/
Mark Rogers
Mark Rogers wrote:
An uncle (just mistyped that as "unclue", oops!) of mine has bought an Aspire One and can't get his USB stick to work. Can anyone offer advice? His message below:
I've just bought an Acer "Aspire One" note book and it runs on Linux It's got 120Gb of memory which is useful and so I want use some of the space so I thought I'll use a memory stick. But I can't make it work........ having searched the Help files(under Using removable media" that "Thunar supports removable media if it is built with support for HAL"
My memory sticks are either Sandisk Cruzer or I have a Freecom "Toughdrive" neither seem to work. So had a look on the internet and it seems to be a common problem "Hal compatibility with memory sticks".
Is there anything you can recommend, Ideally I want to use this notebook as a secondary backup and at the moment it's looking a bit useless!
-
Mark Rogers -
Wayne Stallwood