Essential Applications for Acer Aspire One

Here's a list of essential applications (for me) on the Acer Aspire One (Linpus).

1. Thunderbird & Lightning
2. Firefox 3
3. Skype
4. Gizmo
5. Truecrypt
6. Jungledisk
7. VLC
8. rdesktop
9. vnc
10. ssh
11. telnet
12. tor
13. privoxy (old version already there, just need to update it)
14. torbutton (tor button one click thingy for Firefox)
    
15. aa1blinux if you have an external drive, if not PING
16. Audacity
17. Picasa
18. Dia

Thunderbird and Lightning
Thunderbird is an e-mail client, and has a lot of capabilities with it. It comes with an address book already, so you can ditch the Evolution like one on the Acer. I tried Evolution, and it was OK, but I updated something that wound up screwing up the OS. Lightning is the Sunbird Calendar, but integrated into Thunderbird. Think of it as the calendar in Outlook. Both combined make a really nice e-mail client.


Firefox 3
Out of the box, the AA1 comes with Firefox 2.x. You can follow macles site to upgrade to Firefox 3.x.
http://macles.blogspot.com/2008/07/installing-firefox-3-on-acer-aspire-one.html

Skype
We all know (or should know) what Skype is. But just in case....it's a client that allows you to video chat, VoIP, or text with other Skype members. You can also VoIP for a small price to landlines. Anyway, get it. It's nice. Just realize that video for Linux with Skype is relatively new, so your video may be a little dark or dropped frames when using wifi.


Gizmo
For those who don't know, Gizmo is a VoIP/IM client. It supports AIM, MSN, Yahoo, and some others. http://gizmo5.com/pc/ It's good to use if you're looking for a free VoIP client with integrated IM capibilities that will work with your VoIP account/PBX.

Truecrypt
I happen to have the 8GB SSD version of the AA1. I love it. Some people think it's not enough space. It's enough space as long as you don't do video editing, or heavy photo editing, or want more music than you can listen to on your netbook...but I digress. Truecrypt is an encryption application that allows you to encrypt files, directories, or the entire hard drive. More info is available here: http://www.truecrypt.org/. How to install it, here: http://macles.blogspot.com/2008/07/installing-truecrypt-on-acer-aspire-one.html

Jungledisk
So, ~6.5GB not enough for ya? Fine. Go get an Amazon S3 account. http://aws.amazon.com/s3/. And then get Jungledisk: http://www.jungledisk.com/. As you may have guessed, it allows you to use the "cloud" or Internet as storage. Amazon S3 allows you to store data on their servers. Jungledisk allows you to access your data like a drive from Linux, Windows, and Mac. And yes, it even works from a USB thumb drive. How much space you say? Unlimited (you get as much as you pay for - they charge for pulls/pushes/and storage). I got just shy of 1TB there. You want access via web? You can do an extra payment to Jungledisk and get webaccess to...


VLC
You wanna play all those "moviez" you got from your "friendz", or "songz" you got from your "friendz". Download VLC. It'll have all of the codecs you need. Here's how: http://macles.blogspot.com/2008/11/installing-vlc-09-on-aspire-one-linux.html

rdesktop
What was that? You want to remote into a Windows box, but you can't find Remote Desktop for Linux? Get rdesktop. Fn+F2 > terminal > sudo yum install rdesktop
NOTE: If you want sound you gotta do: aoss rdesktop blah, blah


vnc
Huh, what? You want to control Macs now? Picky, picky. K, terminal > sudo yum install vncviewer

ssh
Oh, so you heard you can do things in Linux encrypted like. Maybe you wanna check e-mail on another server with Pine, or getting terminal access to a box somewhere but encrypted. Yes it can be done: terminal > sudo yum install openssh-clients

telnet
Yeah, telnet's not on here. I still use it. If you want to too: sudo yum install telnet

tor
Tor allows for some basic anonymity. Layman's terms? It changes your IP address that everyone sees. So it'll make you seem like you're in Germany when you're really in Tokyo. How? sudo yum install tor

privoxy
You gotta use this and edit the config if you want to use tor while surfing the 'net. sudo yum install privoxy (it'll actually just update it). Please go here for editing config file (check the Privoxy section):http://www.torproject.org/docs/tor-doc-unix.html.en

torbutton
So you have tor, and privoxy. But you can't get them to work? Install the torbutton add-on to Firefox and restart Firefox. Then fireup tor: sudo service tor start ...and sudo service privoxy start. Now, go ahead, click on the bottom right of Firefox where it says "Tor Disabled"...watch it turn from red to green. Do it...do it...do it. Now go to www.whatismyip.com...look it's different...now you're masquerading with a different address. Check out Google, you may get a different splash page if your IP is from a non English-speaking country...have fun...

OK, so now you're all set right? Wrong. You forgot backups ::slaps forehead:: Backups, yes, backups....that thing you wish you did when you lose all of your data. In my humble opinion, you have two choices. aa1blinux which seems to be alright. You don't need to compile anything, and you can back up to an external drive (not a network drive). Macles made it: http://macles.blogspot.com/2008/12/acer-aspire-one-aa1backup.html
Or you can use PING: http://ping.windowsdream.com/ A little more difficult to use for basic users, but it works. I've backed up and restored lots of times successfully. The caveat? You gotta be turned off to back everything up and boot from an image (it's waaay eaiser if you have a USB optical drive). But it backs up everything. Even your BIOS. All into an image. Recovery is pretty easy once you get the hang of it as well. Plus, it works with networked drives (SMB).

Audacity
One day you get the itch to make a podcast. Or maybe you're an aspiring ghost hunter and what to use this little netbook to present to your client. An any rate, it's easy. sudo yum install audacity I don't think it's add's the LAME requirements for *.mp3 though. If not, then you have to compile from source. But that doesn't scare you, right? You have backups now.

Picasa
Wanna share your photos with loved ones? Have a Google account? Try Picasa, it's great. http://picasa.google.com/linux/ Download and follow their directions. It's pretty straight forward. Technical stuff: It's really installing in under Wine for it to work with Linux. It's neat and works.


Dia
If you're like me and like to diagram things: Blueprinting, Visio-ing, etc., then this is for you. It's small. It's like Visio, and it works. sudo yum install dia.

That's it, maybe I'll post how to get the others working that require more steps.