Re: [fsf-community-team] Philippines Acer Linpus thing

[Simon Bridge]

On Sun, 2009-12-13 at 14:30 +0600, Sergey Korobitsin wrote:

> 
> Hello! I'm not from Philippines, but I wanted to forward  here my letter 
> about a similar case:
Thanks - the activist wing of fsf is collecting information.

> 
> <-->
> 
> I've found information about unusable Linux installations at Acer Aspire
> Notebook via http://www.opennet.ru, and remembered that when our company
> have bought two notebooks with preinstalled Linpus Linux. When they were
> turned on, there was only a command line with root logged in, and no
> X11, KDE/Gnome, etc. I thought that Linpus is some kind of "stub" Linux
> then. Now I saw at their site, that it is not true.
Yeah - Acer's online documentation suggests that linpus normally comes
with xfce desktop (aspire one) but it is pretty normal for them to
install CLI only. This has been confusing customers for years.

It appears that they intend that the user will install their own OS in
due time and their faqs have instructions to install many different
flavours. If they would actually tell their cus-tomers this, then it
would not be so bad.

FWIW: the linpus is a gnu/linux distro without a gui and many of the
tools one would expect. But it is still gnu/linux.

>  Also, we've
> installed
> our Arta OS distribution (Debian-based), and found that the integrated
> WiFi does not work. Such kind of a Linux support from Acer has
> disappointed
> us.

In my dealings with acer I have learned that Acer catagorically does not
do software support. You'll find their support for windows and MacOS are
also wanting.

Your wifi set was probably atheros - popular at the time - which did not
have free software drivers. Most users installed non-free drivers from
madwifi - so you did have community support. But how was the average
customer to know this?

These days most distributions include excellent free drivers for atheros
chipsets.

> 
> The notebook model was Acer eMachines е725, there was information about
> Linux and GPL in the box, and no CD or DVD for Linpus. What a bad joke.

So far every oem vendor has had trouble getting their heads around how
gnu/linux is distributed - acer, dell, ibm, hp. In my case, the
distributor (retailer) wanted to add more ram to the standard box - they
did this the windows way, finishing by booting to the OS user level to
test the memory. With Ubuntu, this meant adding the user and password to
the oem install - which meant that I could not log in to the desktop.
Nobody had told them to hit escape at the grub 1.5 message and select
memtest.

The annoying thing is that gnu/linux gets the blame. Some users
attempted to install Windows XP to the computer under the mistaken
belief that "windows just works". When they discovered that windows
would not even work the screen, gnu/linux got the blame for this too!

We get hit coming and going so it is vital to get these oem installs
right first time.

Again, I had some success approaching the head office for the retail
chain and offering to train staff in handling this product line. You can
get an amazing amount done if you act helpful and don't take the credit.