After a lot of indecision, a friend of mine decided to bravely enter the Internet age with an Acer Aspire One ZG5 netbook. Since we’d had such success with Kim’s netbook, I recommended that he get the same one. Again, as before, I removed the default Linpus operating system and installed Ubuntu 10.04 Netbook Edition.

UNE is very pretty. It has the default Lucid purple theme, and boots up quickly on the little Acer. Although you won’t get full compositing, there are a few nice touches in the GUI, which somehow make it feel very “solid”. All was going well until, after a brief “Awakenings” moment when I was able to authenticate to the wireless network, the WiFi card decided that enough was enough and appeared in the network manager as disabled! Read more…

This is an odd problem. A friend of mine reported it to me after he’d performed a clean installation of Ubuntu 10.04 in VMWare 7. The keyboard worked fine all the way through the installation, but then stopped working on reboot. The only way he could input characters was to use the on-screen keyboard, which is about as convenient as typing with your nose! The keyboard would then usually work after logging in. Read more…

It’s strange sometimes how things that should be simple can start to seem very complicated. A case in point is Skype on Kim’s Acer Aspire One. I have Skype working very well on my laptop, but after installing it on Kim’s, the microphone didn’t seem to be working at all!

Obviously, I’d followed my own advice in a previous post. I also confirmed that the microphone was working in Sound Recorder, but when I made a Skype test call, the conversation was very one-sided indeed.

A lot of digging around showed that PulseAudio treats everything as stereo – even if the microphone is mono! The two inputs cancel each other out, resulting in a stony silence for whoever you’re trying to talk to on Skype.

The solution is as follows: Read more…