Installing Ubuntu on a 15.6" touchscreen Acer Aspire laptop

[an actual nerd]

The elderly lady I run errands for had a Windows 10 laptop that wouldn't get past some funky cellphone looking screen when it boots. So she bought a new laptop and gave me the old one.


I don't even try to fix Windows anymore. It's easier to install Linux over it. I don't want any cellphone style UI crap on my desktop PC anyway - although I'm thinking I can do some cool shit with that big ass touchscreen in Linux. I was gonna install Debian on it, but this YouTuber got the touchscreen to work in Ubuntu on this computer with no problems, so I'm gonna try it instead.





The laptop does not have a CD or DVD drive. The usual way to install a new OS in that case is to burn the installer disk image (ISO) onto a USB thumb drive and tell the BIOS to boot from it. The closest thing I have on hand to a thumb drive is an SD card drive that connects via USB. Question is, will the bootloader accept it as a regular thumb drive? That's what we'll be experimenting with tonight.

[Guest]

Not only did the BIOS accept the SD drive, it offered it as an option in the boot sequence.


I've crossed the Rubicon now. Told the installer to format the hard drive and install Ubuntu. It's copying files...

[Mister Obvious]

Not only did the BIOS accept the SD drive, it offered it as an option in the boot sequence.

[Guest]

The installer is now thoughtfully removing non-US English locale files from all packages.

[Mister Obvious]

I love computers.

[Guest]

Aaaaand... the touchscreen works a treat!


I think it installed GNOME desktop. It's a rather spartan GUI. You can change the location of the lock and resize the dock icons from miniscule to huge. RhythmBox (an iPod manager like iTunes) and Transmission (a torrent client) came pre-loaded.


As much as I like apt, I have to say Ubuntu has a slick-as-fuck GUI package manager. It's similar to the Android app store. On the Installed tab, you can remove packages you don't want. On the All tab, you can search for and install new packages. One of the defining features of a Linux distro is its package manager, and I'm loving this one. I highly recommend this OS for anyone who wants to resuscitate an old Windows 10 laptop.

[Guest]

I'm outdoors with the laptop today to get an idea of how much battery life I can expect. This machine is a lot lighter than my older Windows 7 laptop, which probably means I'll be using it as a portable a lot more.


GNOME got on my nerves in a hurry. It has a cellphone-style status / menu bar at the top of the screen. It's more like OS X than classic Windows. The screen resolution isn't really high enough to have another toolbar taking up space. In my opinion, all the little "tray icons" belong on the righthand side taskbar. So I installed Cinnamon, the same GUI I'm using on the Debian desktop PC. After changing GUIs, I thought I had lost that snazzy Ubuntu "app store" program, but I eventually found it and put an icon to it on my desktop.


Thankfully, the popup on-screen keyboard went away with GNOME. It was annoying, and I'd never use it seeing how there's, you know, a real fucking keyboard right there under it.





The only other thing that annoys me is that the machine has a full numeric keypad. The QWERTY keyboard and mousepad are farther to the left than I'm used to on a laptop.

[Mister Obvious]

I'm outdoors with the laptop today to get an idea of how much battery life I can expect.

That sounds nice!!!