Basic questions no answers on this forum ??

Had my One for a couple of days, and have spent ages looking on here for basic info, I can find loads of threads of people mashing Ones with XP or other Linux distros, but very little basic info - am I missing something - is there another forum which has the useful info - can someone let me into the secret ?

Maybe this forum should be split into three top levels, one for Linpus users, one for XP and one for other - I spend ages reading threads only to find they are ubuntu distro, so no use at all to 'normal' one users !

I can't find basic info such as:

Q how does left SDHC slot work when you plug a card in do you get any warning of merge or option not to do it or is this just done automatically and you then can never remove the card and still have a usable system ?, is there a size limit for cards (some posts suggest 8Gb is max supported, others talk about 16/32Gb cards?), is there a simple way to disable merging and just mount left slot as /home so I can run linpus off SSD, and just use left slot card for my storage?

Q what is battery life in standby ? Is it zero usage, or take some power ? Does standby drop into hibernate/shutdown after so many hours like with vista?

Q is there really no easy way to make a backup ? I have a choice of about 4 pages of command line typing, or downloading fwbackup which a lot of people claim won't work and wiping an entire external USB drive to store a couple of Gb ?? Surely this should be a one liner to copy SSD to external device ??

This forum could be such a great resource so seems a shame its so hard to find basic info.

 

I'm surprised... All issues mentioned by you are really good explained in this forum... There is a lot of beginners who look for the same answers and asking the same questions again and again... For all you issues this forum answered couple of times... I think new users are not willing to use SEARCH - that's why forum is useless for them...

 

I've searched a fair bit, battery standby, sdhc usage, sdhc help, find loads of other people asking stuff, but no answers. Even saw the sticky thread for new users, which only has about 3 links in top post, and then 3 pages of discussion from people who can't spell setting without an s.

I'll keep searching then.

 

What is needed is a wiki, like the asus eeepc forums have.

The acer aspire one community doesn't seem up to it, this forum is about as good as it gets.

The netbook phenomena is now too boring for hobbyists etc, so you have forums swamped by the general public :roll:

 

oooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooook

 

OK I'm in the good mood. As you can see English is not my first language then sorry for any spelling mistakes...

SDHC card: max size is 32GB SDHC.Linux OS is automatically adding SD card capacity to SSD space - there is no warning. Left card slot under OEM Linux is always used as Storage Expansion. Obviously you can remove card but you will loose extra storage space and obviously access to some file stored at SD card...

There is not such thing like zero usage. Always something is draining battery power. Especially stuff plugged into USB ports. Usage in standby is minimal but still it's usage. Hibernate is dumping system state to HDD, shutdown is closing system w/o copying anything to HDD. Battery usage in that case is the same but hibernate will give you faster start after power restore...

I have no Linux system on my AA1 but backup for me is actually copying important files/My documents to USB pen drive or SD card. In that case you do not need anything special. It actually depends what type of backup you require...

 

Thanks for info above.

I think there is a lot of truth in comment above that this forum has been swamped by the general public, maybe the basic howto guides should be locked threads for moderators only to keep them short/sweet and useful

I also found some great stuff on macles blog, which I think is what I was looking for really:

eg left SDHC slot http://macles.blogspot.com/2008/09/abou ... spire.html

Another great source of info is Jorge Barrera Grandon's blog which has an excellent tips page:

http://jorge.ulver.no/2008/08/06/acer-a ... nd-tricks/

 

With the greatest respect, I suspect that the reason you aren't getting good service is that all these questions have been asked, and answered many, many times. Of course, it's not your fault if the answers are difficult to find. Really, somebody needs to take on the responsibility of managing an FAQ for the not-particularly-geeky community. I'm not volunteering, however -- I just don't have time. Probably everybody who looks at this forum has a day-job too, which is why it hasn't happened.

I use a 16Gb card. I believe 32Gb works. The card contents are merged with the main user files without much warning. If you take the card out it won't break the system or the card, but of course you'll not get access to any files on it. It is not possible to configure which files go to the internal disk and which to the card without some technical knowledge of the Linux filesystem conventions. You can't easily disable merging in the left slot. You can't easily mount it as /home, and if you do that they it really _will_ cause trouble if you take the card out. The expansion slot is designed to be at least semi-permanent. The right-hand slot is just an ordinary card reader.

Mine seems to consume almost no power in standby, but I haven't left it like that for more than a few days. I don't believe it automatically goes into a hibernation state (although I haven't tried it). SInce the AA0 boots in 15 seconds, I normally just switch it off if I'm not going to be using it again in the next hour or so.

This is trivially easy. Get an external USB drive. Plug it in to the AA0. Use Thunar to create a directory called, e.g., `aao_backup'. At the terminal type

sudo rsync -vaux / /media/disk-1/aao_backup

(If your external is not mounted as disk-1, look in /media or in the file manager to see what it is called. These names are assignmed automatically by Thunar).

This will copy everything in the system areas and the user home directory on the internal disk to the external USB. It won't copy any expansion cards and it won't copy any temporary stuff (this is usually what you need). You can run this as often as you like at it will only copy files that have later datestamps than the last copy.

Gotcha: if youre external disk is FAT32 formatted, you might need to add something like --modify-window=2 because the FAT32 system (sigh) only has 2-second datestamp precision. And of course you'll lose Linux filesystem attributes because FAT32 is too dumb to record them.

 

Thanks for helpful replies, this is exactly the kind of info everyone will be after - if this was just cut/pasted into the beginners 'read first' thread and locked this would be perfect !!

Re using rsync for backup, this looks perfect for me, I have an external USB disk which is NTFS formatted (I installed ntfs-3g package for ntfs support which works like a dream), so I assume this will be fine for permissions etc and would give me a full backup of everything I have tweaked to recover to easily.

Should the worst happen, I assume I would create a recovery USB from Acer DVD, boot that to restore default setup then what command would I use to restore the rsync backup ?

Thanks.

 

I would strong, very strongly, recommend that if you're making a backup for one-step system restore (rather than the safety of user files and config) that you back up on something where you are _certain_ that file permissions can be stored properly. I am not sure NTFS will preserve the ownership attributes of files, because Unix and Windows ideas of user identity are rather different. I don't _know_ that's the case, but I am sufficiently sure that I wouldn't back up this way on NTFS without some testing first. You would be better off (in my view) doing what I do )) : I have formatted my external USB as ext2 (as the AA1 uses). Then there is absolutely no problem. If you do that, then the restore is pretty much the direct opposite of the backup:

rsync -trv /media/disk-1/aao_backup/* /

Almost certainly some files will fail to restore because they will be open (but that's true whatever method of backup you use). And it will take some time, because you need to copy over files which appear to be _more recent_ than the backup, because many of the files on the AAO are generated on install.

It's because of this file attributes incompatibility, I guess, that people are recommending proprietary backup tools or complicated methods. To be honest, I do not back up the system part of the AA0 -- I can restore it easily enough from the recovery disk. I only back up the stuff under /home/user, which is where my work and config will be. This I think you safely _can_ back up on an NTFS disk, because at the worst all you'll have to do after a restore is set the user and group ownership both to `user' at the command line, e.g.,

sudo chown -R user:user /home/user

If you want to do a whole-system backup, in order to restore from a disaster in a single step, and you want to use a FAT32 or NTFS disk, I would suggest compressing the whole system into a single file archive using tar. Because all the file attributes are stored in the archive, this is a rock-solid method (but slow). And it takes up less space because the archive can be compressed.

To back up:

sudo tar cvfz /media/disk-1/aao_backup/my_big_backup.tar.gz /

To restore:

cd /
sudo tar xvfz /media/disk-1/aao_backup/my_big_backup.tar.gz

The disadvantage of this method is that it's really slow and fiddly to take _incrememental_ backups, i.e., just storing files changed since the last backup. But you could use, say, tar to backup the whole thing once a month (say) or after major system changes, and rsync to back up just /home/user once a day.

Hope this helps.

 

I would strong, very strongly, recommend that if you're making a backup for one-step system restore (rather than the safety of user files and config) that you back up on something where you are _certain_ that file permissions can be stored properly. I am not sure NTFS will preserve the ownership attributes of files, because Unix and Windows ideas of user identity are rather different. I don't _know_ that's the case, but I am sufficiently sure that I wouldn't back up this way on NTFS without some testing first. You would be better off (in my view) doing what I do )) : I have formatted my external USB as ext2 (as the AA1 uses). Then there is absolutely no problem. If you do that, then the restore is pretty much the direct opposite of the backup:

rsync -trv /media/disk-1/aao_backup/* /

Almost certainly some files will fail to restore because they will be open (but that's true whatever method of backup you use). And it will take some time, because you need to copy over files which appear to be _more recent_ than the backup, because many of the files on the AAO are generated on install.

It's because of this file attributes incompatibility, I guess, that people are recommending proprietary backup tools or complicated methods. To be honest, I do not back up the system part of the AA0 -- I can restore it easily enough from the recovery disk. I only back up the stuff under /home/user, which is where my work and config will be. This I think you safely _can_ back up on an NTFS disk, because at the worst all you'll have to do after a restore is set the user and group ownership both to `user' at the command line, e.g.,

sudo chown -R user:user /home/user

If you want to do a whole-system backup, in order to restore from a disaster in a single step, and you want to use a FAT32 or NTFS disk, I would suggest compressing the whole system into a single file archive using tar. Because all the file attributes are stored in the archive, this is a rock-solid method (but slow). And it takes up less space because the archive can be compressed.

To back up:

sudo tar cvfz /media/disk-1/aao_backup/my_big_backup.tar.gz /

To restore:

cd /
sudo tar xvfz /media/disk-1/aao_backup/my_big_backup.tar.gz

The disadvantage of this method is that it's really slow and fiddly to take _incrememental_ backups, i.e., just storing files changed since the last backup. But you could use, say, tar to backup the whole thing once a month (say) or after major system changes, and rsync to back up just /home/user once a day.

Hope this helps.

 

Thanks for info, thinking about it I agree backing up system shouldn't be necessary, I will just keep a text file of the tweaks I've done - which I could redo in a few minutes anyway, rather than trying to restore everything.

Re using tar for system backup, when you say this is slow how long does this take roughly - 20 minutes or hours and hours ? Will the One go into screensaver/shutdown if it thinks its idle while this is running (I think defaults are to standby after 10 minutes ?).

 

Running tar (or any backup software) won't prevent the AA0 going into standby. So far as I know, only keyboard prodding does that. You'd need to change the standby settings in the power manager. Setting it not to stand by at all when on external power might be the right thing to do here

How long a full backup would take dpends on how much data you have to back up If you use tar, it's only the overhead of compression that makes this take longer than a regular file copy, and you don't have to compress if you don't want to. I think that you'd be looking at about 5-10 minutes per gigabyte with compression, and perhaps half that for a straight copy. But there are lots of unknowns here, including how fast your USB drive is.

If you just want to back up your own data and configs with rsync, you could just do

sudo rsync -vaux /mnt/home/ /media/disk-1/aao_backup

or something like that. This would do the expansion card as well. Or just /home/user instead of /mnt/home if you don't want to back up the card.