I have an Asus ePc, 7 inch screen with only a 4 gb internal drive, (SD card), and on that model, it was quite easy to up my memory from 512 to 1 gb by taking off a single cover on the bottom. I just wanted folks to know that not all the Asus machines are as difficult to change the RAM, as apparently it is on the model that Gene has. Glenn ----- Original Message ----- From: "Gene Collins" <collins@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> To: "Speakup is a screen review system for Linux." <speakup at braille.uwo.ca> Sent: Thursday, April 16, 2009 8:49 AM Subject: Re: Accessibility of netbooks Hi Alastair. I just bought an Acer Aspire One, which came with Windows XP on it. I used Partition Magic to repartition the hard drive, and then made a bootable usb stick from a grml cd image. Of course I had to have eyes around to reset the bios, so that the machine would look at the usb ports and flash drives as possible boot devices, before booting from the hard disk. It comes set up to boot from the hard disk first, and there is a special boot menu you can get to by pressing the function key, and f11, I believe, but I didn't want to always be hasseling with that. After that, the grml usb stick booted first time out of the box, and I was able to use debootstrap to install Debian on the second partition on the hard disk. I then went out to kernel.org, got the latest kernel source, and Speakup from the git repossitory, and custom built a kernel for my machine. I then borrowed inittab aned fstab files from another machine I have access too, and customized them for the netbook. The last step was running lilo, which complained because /dev/sd contained a windows nt file system which it wanted to modify but couldn't. The solution was to use the activate command to activate /dev/sda3, which is my root partition for linux, and then run lilo. After that, I edited lilo.conf, and modified the "other" entry to point at /dev/sda2, which is the windows xp partition. /dev/sda1 is a vfat diagnostics partition. My home and swap partitions are extended partitions. The results are quite satisfactory, as I now have a dual boot capabile netbook, which boots both Windows xp and Debian. I wouldn't recommend this approach for the novice user, since setting up and editing inittab, fstab, and lilo.conf are not tasks to be taken on unless you know what you are doing. The bottom line is that I am running both Speakup and Orca with the espeak software synthesizer. I also have nvda, Nonvisual Desktop Access, an open source screen reader for Windows up and running. The linux system properly recognizes the wireless card, the builtin network card, the touch pad, the usb mouse, the webcam, the sound system, and the flash drives. This is not the machine with the 16 gig solid state drive, but the one with the 160 gig hard disk. When you build the kernel for your machine, if you decide to go theat route, be sure to tell the kernel that you have a dual core processor. The processor is actually a 1.6 gig Intel Atom processor, which conforms to the dual core instruction set. Linux happily recognizes that there are two cpus. For anyone thinking of buying one of these little machines, be aware the the machine comes with no serial, no paralell, and no built in modem. There is no blue tooth either. The term netbook, is quite descriptive. The only connectors are the rj45 network connector, three usb connectors, a video connector, and the two sd flash drives. Oh yeah, one other thing. If you are planning on expanding the memory from one gig to two, I'd recomend having it done proffessionally. It turns out that you have to remove the mother board from the netbook to get at the slot for the memory module on the bottom side of the mother board. Perhaps my documenting of my experiences here will help others. Have a great day. Gene Collins _______________________________________________ Speakup mailing list Speakup at braille.uwo.ca http://speech.braille.uwo.ca/mailman/listinfo/speakup E-mail message checked by Spyware Doctor (6.0.1.440) Database version: 6.12190 http://www.pctools.com/en/spyware-doctor-antivirus/ E-mail message checked by Spyware Doctor (6.0.1.440) Database version: 6.12190 http://www.pctools.com/en/spyware-doctor-antivirus/
