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  • Taming the Acer Aspir beast.

    From wexfordpress@21:1/5 to All on Mon Dec 19 13:26:20 2016
    The Acer Aspire desktop offers a lot of hardware for less than $300. That is the good news. The bad news is Windows 8.5.1 and a custom Bios. Eventually I got it running under Slackware 14.2.

    Windows 8.5.1 offers page after page of games, ads and apps but no index, This renders the computer useless for serious work. there are 6 partitions, Step one is to delete all these partitions using cfdisk. Create the swap space (sda1) and dedicate the
    rest to your Linux partition. Initially the BIOS is set that the hard disk gets priority.

    Instead select first priority and set it for the DVD drive. The second priority is set to the hard disk and the remaining two priorities can be set to null. Other combinations can work but that is my KISS selection. You may have to diddle with other
    parts of the bios but the above is the core discussion.

    The disk drive offers a terabyte of storage. The rest of the hardware is up to date.The case is sturdy metal. I tried installing SUSE followed by Fedora work station followed to my old reliable Slackware. SUSE wants to repartition the disk. Let it.

    The upfront work is significant but you end up with a powerful box at low cost.

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)
  • From wexfordpress@21:1/5 to wexfordpress on Fri Dec 23 08:10:16 2016
    On Monday, December 19, 2016 at 4:26:23 PM UTC-5, wexfordpress wrote:
    The Acer Aspire desktop offers a lot of hardware for less than $300. That is the good news. The bad news is Windows 8.5.1 and a custom Bios. Eventually I got it running under Slackware 14.2.

    Windows 8.5.1 offers page after page of games, ads and apps but no index, This renders the computer useless for serious work. there are 6 partitions, Step one is to delete all these partitions using cfdisk. Create the swap space (sda1) and dedicate
    the rest to your Linux partition. Initially the BIOS is set that the hard disk gets priority.

    Instead select first priority and set it for the DVD drive. The second priority is set to the hard disk and the remaining two priorities can be set to null. Other combinations can work but that is my KISS selection. You may have to diddle with other
    parts of the bios but the above is the core discussion.

    The disk drive offers a terabyte of storage. The rest of the hardware is up to date.The case is sturdy metal. I tried installing SUSE followed by Fedora work station followed to my old reliable Slackware. SUSE wants to repartition the disk. Let it.

    The upfront work is significant but you end up with a powerful box at low cost.

    Addendum: on the Aspire box the button to open the dvd drive is the right end of the horizontal chrome bar right below the drive. This is not obvious and the machine does not ship with this instruction.

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)