This is a summary of experience I had when installing debian Wheezy on a brand new Acer Aspire One 725 netbook.
Lets consider the worst case scenario. People who buy netbooks and use them as their main machines are usually the
people who are constantly on the move, perhaps freelancing somewhere far far away from anything they could call home,
and definitively not enamoured with the idea to be tied down to some place by a wired internet connection. This leaves
WiFi, USB tethering to a phone, USB internet dongle, WiFi tethered to a broadband connection via phone and similar.
Installing any small distro on a USB or CD will solve the problem, providing it is of comparable age to your current system.
Once you boot in the rescue distribution, mount --bind all the volatile and living data like /dev /proc and /sys (perhaps even some subdirs
from var, although i got away without this) to corresponding directories of the non-functioning system, then chroot /mnt/kernelessdistropath
and install the kernel, or any other fundamental building block of a Unix system which made it inaccessible.
I read a lot of good things about Debian, especially the idea that the folks behind Debian prefer to be safe than sure, in other words, do more testing before they release a new version, and do not care so much about using the latest software, sounded very good to me.
1.Out the box basic mice functions will work, great! Point and click I didn't even change xorg.conf.
--Picked up by the usual 'mouse' driver and usb setup.
--The hardware 3 step res works fine.
2.Try:
$>xev
and click the thumb and tilt wheels while over the window to see what is detected and as what button number.
3.Ah the tilt buttons...I have actually had this mouse since using Sarge, I can't believe that this is still not automgically setup and the user just picks what they want the buttons to do! How many millions of multibutton mice must be out there by now? Perhaps I'm missing something really simple but the following works for me.
4.The good news is that everything is now readily available it just needs some good ol' hacking, and it's very satisfying when it works.
