Yes, I liked the dell, but the Acer had great reviews, was selling C$299 with Linux, and I all I had to do was walk into the Future Shop and lay down cash and it was mine. The clincher was that the Linux version was cheaper than the Windows version. To get the same specs on the dell machine I would have paid more for the Windows version then I would have for the linux version — dell discounts Windows boxes so much that it is almost always the cheaper alternative, despite the nominal C$30 premium for Windows.

So I have a small machine with 8 GiB of solid-state-drive (what a fun stone-age name — much improved over the old “tube” drives — “valve” drives from England?) The write speeds for this drive are supposedly slow, although I haven’t noticed any such problems. I am sticking with the linpus-lite operating system so I can learn what optimizations Acer has come up with for this hardware, but the long term plan is to migrate to debian where I feel at home. The red hat base of linpus is leaving me a bit lost. As are the tiny fonts. I bumped those up through the GUI controls for Xft and now am able to read better, but am annoyed that the text configuration files I first modified were being ignored. It turns out there are multiple layers of configuration with the earlier layers being completely ignored. How frustrating.

Part of the difficulty is that with such a small screen it pays to lie to the system as to the actual dimensions of the screen. X picks up the true dimensions through EDID from the hardware itself, linpus later appears to override text rendering by setting Xft to use 96dpi. Yuck. The fonts are too small for my aging eyes and my system is slightly schizophrenic, not sure whether it is 133dpi or 96dpi. It doesn’t make much difference until you start to try to configure other software, but then having 2 different settings isn’t good. The ideal seems to be to lie about the true dimensions just a little bit, and set the font sizes a little bigger, and so achieve harmony. Only I can’t get it to work. The xorg.conf DisplaySize config option doesn’t seem to work with this machine. XRandR does work but must be applied after initialization which just doesn’t seem right. I am wondering if the X server is being started with a -dpi command line parameter, but think it unlikely that they should do so with 133dpi and then set Xft to using 96dpi. What I would prefer is to have the (mildly fictitious) dpi set once at start time, and clear out all the other configurations so they don’t overwrite the one-true-setting.

The machine is really quite nice otherwise. Faster than my nearly 8 year old dell desktop. The cruftiness of all the running daemons gives me pause however. I prefer simple and clear configuration over “just works” “magic”. “Just works” is usually synonymous with “just awful under the surface”.