The other day, I couldn’t resist buying the el-cheapo Athlon 1.6 GHz-powered Acer Aspire 5532 in BestBuy for $330. With its 15.6 inch screen, seems that it is quite a nice bargain. It comes (of course) with Windows 7 Home Premium, but after slapping openSUSE 11.2 DVD I got from the last Camp KDE (must be from Will, thanks dude!) and a bunch of keystrokes, a few hours later the machine happily runs the shiny KDE 4.4. Sound was not a problem, even WiFi was easy to get it working (hard to believe that after all these years, NetworkManager still does not work for me, maybe my bad karma). The included radeonhd driver is good enough for its Radeon HD 3200 (RS780M chipset), but for the sake of testing, I did install ATI fglrx 7.4 10.1 and, voila, I got flawless KWin desktop effects. Even proprietary stuff like Opera, Skype, and Flash plugin faced no serious problem as well.
Time for some fun hacking! 🙂
Obligatory click-to-enlarge desktop snapshot follows:
