I know I shouldn't be too surprised, but I am always happy when things 'just work'.
In a previous email I said that I have bought an Acer Aspire One netbook. I want to put Linux on it, but I am sort of waiting for distros to untangle themselves. I want KDE, but I hear KDE 4.0 is not so good, so really I need KDE 4.2 or KDE 3.5. Ubuntu is supposed to work quite well on the Aspire One, but you need the latest version to do it properly, but the KDE version is 4.0. Mepis was my distro of choice last time I looked, but 7.0 (the current version) doesn't fully support the Aspire One hardware and 8.0 is very likely to be ideal, but it's in RC2 stage and not finally released. There are other distros that work with the Aspire One, but I want to use Mepis (or some other Debian/Ubuntu derivative). More to the point, I want someone else to use Mepis 8.0 on the Aspire One and tell me what to do... But I digress. This email is about the LG Slimline portable DVD writer (GP08LU10) I bought to accompany the Aspire One. It's also about Mepis and Linux and standards. Later I can use it to boot the Aspire to install Linux, but currently I can use it to make DVD archives of my photos (which are backed up regularly to and external USB drive too). The drive was $180 at Noel's (you can find it about $40 cheaper from online retailers). It plugs into a single USB socket, but does have an additional USB power cable if the USB power is not grunty enough. It seems to support all flavours of writable DVDs and CDs. My 10 year old slightly wrecked ThinkPad 600X has been running Mepis for three years now (bought on TradeMe for not many $$$). I have a version of K3b from whenever Mepis 6.0 was frozen. I plugged the drive into the laptop. It works. I ran KsCD and told it to use digital audio to ALSA and it played CDs. I am currently running K3b to burn the first 4.1Gb chunk of photos to a DVD-R. It seems to be working! It's all a bit slow- the ThinkPad has a 600MHz Pentium processor and about 400Mb RAM. It has a single USB v1 socket. The battery is knackered and pointing stick is broken. I have to go through a complicated dance at boot time to cancel the BIOS error reports as I plug in an external mouse. Networking is provided via a PCMCIA ethernet card (how quaint) and the 80Gb hard drive I installed is almost full. But, *it works*, and the newest hardware I just plugged in works too! I hope that the disk I am currently burning will actually be readable (I'll know in about an hour, don't laugh), but aside from that I am pleased to see that a laptop designed 12 years ago and built 10 years ago works with an OS that was never specifically designed for it to drive new hardware that was not in existence at the time the sofware was frozen. I never expect things like this to work, but I am always pleasantly surprised when it does. Best wishes, Andrew
