Filled with dissatisfaction with windows, I set off on a quest to find a suitable Linux distribution for the Acer Aspire D250-1165. It came with Windows XP, but the performance was always less than impressive and Windows is a magnet for spyware and botnet clients. The machine is theoretically highly compatible and thus support should be simple, right?
First I tried Moblin 2.1. This point release from 2.0 was supposed to clear up driver problems and include some slightly-updated software versions. I found it more stable than 2.0, but the web services functionality of the clutter interface actually worked less well than in that version. When trying to bring the machine back to suspend mode, you'd see a blinking cursor for a couple seconds, and then the machine would re-suspend. This was a less than impressive beginning.
I followed this attempt with the alpha (?) release of Meego, the fusion of Intel's Moblin and Nokia's Maemo. This attempt was fairly successful in that the install worked, but as I would have noticed had I bothered with the readme, there is currently no GUI component — though X11 is included and apparently sufficiently configured to get a stipple and an X cursor. Perhaps in the future, I will take another look at this, because I'm hoping to get certain specific apps which are much nicer on Maemo (and thus hopefully on Meego) for small screens than in their original incarnations; I'd like Maemo mapper, and the Maemo version of freeciv, for example.
Next, I tried Ubuntu Moblin Remix. This is what it sounds like; Ubuntu Karmic with components from Moblin, both for hardware support and for the Clutter interface. It installed smoothly and presented the same interface you'd get with Moblin 2.1, with the same web services problems. Suspend/resume worked properly and it's a nice way to get Clutter (if you want it) on top of a rational operating system, i.e. Debian, upon which Ubuntu is based. Moblin is (was) a bastardization of an old version of Fedora Core, so adding software to it from repositories is a nightmare. Not so Ubuntu Moblin Remix. Still, with Clutter failing to actually work correctly, let alone support social networks other than twitter and last.fm, I decided that this was not the right operating system either.
What I'm running now is a daily release of Ubuntu Lucid Lynx Beta 2, AKA 10.04 LTS (from April 15.) Post-install, of course, the nightly status is irrelevant, and you're running whatever the latest packages in the repositories are. I tried this about a month ago and it wouldn't actually boot on any of my machines, but as the LiveCD (in my case, LiveUSB made with the Karmic USB installer creator) worked with the exception of a mystically disappearing mouse pointer, I decided to do the install. That worked great, and now my Aspire is up and running Lucid. Compiz works very nicely and so far, zero problems...