I recently purchased one of the Acer Aspire notebooks. It’s small enough that I don’t feel like Sisyphus dragging a rock up the mountain, but large enough to actually be useful. I got it home, wiped Windows, and set about installing Ubuntu 10.04 on it.
I like 10.04. It’s still got the Gnome 2 environment, which I find to be a great balance between usability and attractiveness, and I’ve absolutely no need to upgrade. However, the Aspire uses a newer Atheros AR9485 wireless card, and it’s not supported under the 2.6.32 kernel.
Crap. That means upgrading to 3.0. That means upgrading to Ubuntu 11 and losing Gnome 2 for the mess that is Unity. Do let’s start gnashing teeth and listening to Elliot Smith records now.
I did scads of research, and there is simply no way to get Gnome 2 working under Ubuntu 11. There’s a fallback configuration for Gnome 3 that looks a bit similar, but it’s not the same. Continued...