Acer Aspire One Update

Last month, I wrote an article detailing my experiences with PCLinuxOS 2009.2 on my Acer Aspire One. This month I got a little adventurous and installed KDE 4.3.1 via PCLinuxOS Minime 2009 (as Texstar says in the forum post, Installing KDE 4.) KDE 4 on the Acer Aspire One boots up to a usable desktop, by my "scientific" analysis (using a stopwatch), in ~ 2 minutes (1:57 to be exact.)

As to be expected (and as I said in last months article), screen real estate is essential. Many applications are optimized for 1024x768 screens, so there are times where many window functions are hidden below the kicker panel. Luckily, holding down the "Alt" key (while clicking on the window and dragging the window beyond the screen boundaries) solves this problem quite nicely. With desktop effects enabled, performance is somewhat sluggish, but it isn't always noticeable or as bad with an Intel graphics chip as my desktop's NVidia chip.

(Disclaimer: Personal experience, YMMV.)

As an added bonus, the left hand side SD slot labeled "Storage Expansion," works out of the box and is hot pluggable.