Accessibility of netbooks

[Gene Collins]

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