Linux Format forums

Hammeh · Joined: Sun Mar 04, 2012 12:43 am Posts: 7

Hey guys!!

First post ever on your lovely forums!
Basically, I am a Computer Systems Engineering student in the UK. I have been an avid linux user for the past few years, and recently, someone donated their old Acer Aspire One D255 netbook to me. It came with windows 7 starter on it but it is ridiculously slow.
I am wondering what you guys think would be the best distro to pop on it? I want something thats lightweight and fast, but also very easy to configure and MUST support 802.1x network authentication, since all the connections here use it.

Many thanks,
Peter

bobthebob1234 · Posted: Sun Mar 04, 2012 12:52 am Post subject:

I know ubuntu supports 802.1x out of the box so you could try that and see how slow it is.
Although to be honest I would assume pretty much any linux distro would talk to a 802.1x with the right prodding. I even got a linksys router to do it last year (with openwrt). wpa supplicant has something to do with it if I remember correctly
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wyliecoyoteuk · Posted: Sun Mar 04, 2012 10:13 am Post subject:

I use Ubuntu 11.10 on an Acer aspire A100L
It is fine for surfing etc, although I have upgraded the memory to 1.5Gb, the SSD to a faster one, and the network card to an 802.11n.
The d255 has a dual core Atom, so should be nice and fast.
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heiowge · Posted: Sun Mar 04, 2012 10:20 am Post subject:

I use Linux Mint 11 on both my netbooks - the one I'm typing this on (mentioned in my signature) and my older eeepc 904ha. They are certainly fast enough for me and work fine out of the box.
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AMD PHENOM II X6, 14 GB DDR3, 500 GB hd, 1GB nVidia card, running Linux Mint 14 KDE / Win 7. Damn thing keeps breaking.

eeepc 1015PX, 1.66 Ghz Intel atom processor, 2 GB DDR3, 320 GB hd running Mint 14 MATE. Running great.

pjroutledge · Posted: Sun Mar 04, 2012 10:58 am Post subject: Re: Best Linux OS for Netbook

Hammeh · Joined: Sun Mar 04, 2012 12:43 am Posts: 7

Thank you very much for all your suggestions guys!

I have used ubuntu many times before, in fact my main desktop is almost always running ubuntu. I decided to put my foot out on the line and try something new, so I downloaded Joli OS (which took an age to download) and its currently installing! I've seen several good reviews so I guess its worth a go! If not to my taste, I'll pop ubuntu 12.04 on it when it is released!

Gotta love the choice of linux =)
Peter

Haakin · Posted: Mon Mar 05, 2012 5:21 pm Post subject:

Hi,

I've got an Acer Aspire One. I'm using Xubuntu as main distro and it works quite well. Last weekend I installed WindowMaker as alternative desktop and it's great. Very fast. The only problem is that you need to spend some time configuring it.

Javier
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thameslink · Joined: Fri Dec 11, 2009 11:17 pm Posts: 18

I've had great success with 2 distros on netbooks, crunchbang out of the box and Arch, arch needs to be configured but there are great guides on the arch wiki including a page for the Aspire One https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Acer_Aspire_One arch also has a netbook specific kernel package in the aur which worked great for me.