Acer Aspire One (ZG5) Hands on experiences, part #2

Hey everyone,

I’ve been using this little bugger now for few days with Xubuntu Hardy 8.04.1 and thought that a part #2 post would be good. Otherwise the Edits to older posts will be unnoticed and important notes might “fade to the noise”.

So, those few things I’ve promised to try out:

Movie playback
Playing movie that has been ripped to .iso file from external usb hard drive works fine
Playing movie that has been ripped to .iso file from 8Gb SDHC card placed to Storage Expansion slot (formatted as ext2) works fine
Playing actual DVD from DVD-drive connected to usb – You need to install xubuntu-restricted-extras ($ sudo apt-get install xubuntu-restricted-extras – works fine

At this point some of you are asking “why/how is he using DVD movies ripped into .iso files?”. Quick and dirty answer is that I have most of movies backed up as .iso files, and I don’t have to carry an external DVD drive with me to watch movies.
To get the movies to .iso, I use dvd95 program to “compress” the original DVD to fit to DVD5 disc in case I need to burn the movies back to disk. Kids are quite efficient in destroying DVD’s.. and no, I’m not concerned about the quality. If I want top quality, I’ll go and buy full HD TV or projector and BluRay-player.
When I’ve moved the .iso file to the PC I want to watch it, I’ll mount it as loop device with command $ sudo mount -o loop /path/to/the/isofile /path/for/desired/mountpoint. remember to have the mountpoint folder created. Then open vlc and point it to open the DVD from the mountpoint you used.

Heat dissipation
Ok, this one I noticed yesterday late at night. I was sitting in bed with a small pillow under the laptop for some time. The laptop started to really heat up and the reason seems to be that almost all of the ventilation grille is pointing down and only small part of the grille is facing to the side from the case. As the pillow was blocking the grille facing down, the heat could not dissipate well enough. Not a big deal, but still something to bare in mind.

Touchpad
I’m not a fan of this kind of pointer device. Stick is much more user friendly, though it costs much more and replacement part price for keyboard with stick is ridiculous. First few days went on finding the correct setting to disable Touchpad tapping and scrolling. To disable tapping and scrolling, you need to modify xorg.conf file. Open terminal of your favor and..

$ sudo mcedit /etc/X11/xorg.conf
now find the part that says
Section "InputDevice"
Identifier "Synaptics Touchpad"

Add the following line to the end of this section, above the EndSection
Option "TouchpadOff" "2"

Now log out and back in, result should be that touchpad is not scrolling anymore, and tapping is disabled.

External display settings
This I’m still working on.. I’ll edit this post as soon as I’ve got some solid settings/info gathered.

EDIT:
Screensaver and lock screen
As I use this computer at work, it’s vital for me to be able to lock the screen when I leave my desk. By default, Xubuntu seems to have a bug that prevents screensaver and thus screen locking to execute. To fix it, you need to add gnome-screensaver to autostarted apps under Settings – Settings Manager.
Click + Add then enter a preferred name, for example Gnome-Screensaver, description can be for example Gnome Screensaver Daemon and command is /usr/bin/gnome-screensaver and hit Ok. Log out and back in, modify screensaver settings to your desired choice, then right click the little icon for Quit-button in panel and click on properties and select action type as Quit + Lock screen.

Tsclient and tsclient panel applet
Again an work-required program/tool issue. As I work also with several Windows servers, I need to have terminal server client (RDP client) installed, with panel-applet so it’s fast and easy to open connections to remote servers.
Install tsclient package ($ sudo apt-get install tsclient) and try that it works. Create one quick connect entry as saving connection details for testing purposes. Now install xfce4-xfapplet-plugin ($ sudo apt-get install xfce4-xfapplet-plugin) and right click on panel – add new item. Browse to end of the list, click on Xfapplet, then Add, and then choose Terminal Server Client Applet. Terminal server panel applet should now show up on your panel.

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Possibly related posts: (automatically generated)

• Maybe today!!
• Acer Aspire M100

Tags: Acer, DVD, Experiences, Movie playback, Screensaver, Touchpad, TSClient, Xubuntu, ZG5