Thinking of Buying and Software Advice Needed

[beddism]

My Son wants a Netbook. We are Looking as a Aser Aspire A150. Running Limpus Lite with 512mb and 120gb. Looks pretty good and quick.

Any reviews or thoughts on this.

Also, If purchased, where is a good site to get software for it.
Will a Bit torrent Software work with it.
Is installing Software easy on them
Is anti Virus or Popup software needed, If so which ones

Cheers Guys / Gals

[smolloy]

I don't know about the A150, but I have an Acer Aspire One running Linpus Lite, and I'm really pleased with it. Pretty low spec machine, but as fast as I need it to be (editting documents, browsing, scripting, emailing, connecting to other machines, etc.).

Since this is Linux, you don't really get software by navigating to a web page. Instead you use the pre-configured repositories. With Linpus you can browse and search through all the software available on the repo and install it with one click (or one command if you prefer the command-line as I do).

Bittorrent will work just fine. Have a look at Ktorrent.

Installing software is easy if you use the pacakge manager with their repos (as I described above). Have a look at the "sticky" posts in the "Linux Newbie" section of this forum for more info on this. This post in particular will be of interest.

Currently you don't really need anti-virus or pop-up software for Linux, so you don't really need to worry about that.

Good luck!

[beddism]

cheers for the advice. i think we will purchase tommorrow.

[smolloy]

One thing I forgot to mention is that I've had a little bit of trouble with the wireless card on my Acer. Apparently it heats up when doing long, fast, transfers, and, occasionally will stop working. When this happens the operating system thinks that there is no wireless card(!), and so won't reactivate it without you rebooting. (In fact, most of the time a reboot won't help, and it needs a full shutdown, and a pause for a few minutes before starting again.)

This hasn't caused me too many problems -- it's never happened with regular browsing, and I've never dropped a two-way skype video call because of it -- but it has annoyed me a little when trying to download a lot of work.

To put it another way, it hasn't been enough of an annoyance for me to want to return it!