Guilty Party Acer with its Acer Aspire One 110L

Charge Linking keyboard layout to selected user interface language

Aggravating Circumstances Overwriting configuration file on reboot with hardwired defaults for keyboard layout according to language settings

(Interim) Fix http://blog.laptopmag.com/acer-aspire-one-an-in-depth-look#comment-11841

Verdict Even my very seasoned Linux guru that helped me fix it (I failed miserably) was flabbergasted about this crude approach to internationalization. Sorry, but that's not the way to win over seasoned Windows users.

In The Virtues of Monoculture James makes an excellent point: "We celebrate the diversity of choices available to solve a problem and call it freedom. IT managers and CIOs look at it and call it chaos, confusion and uncertainty." Touché.

Having Virtual PC 2007 Beta, the virtual machine additions for Linux Beta plus a disc of Ubuntu 6.10 Linux sitting on my desk simply proved irresistible to me. Thus: create new virtual machine, slide in the DVD, and off we go.

That was the plan until I hit a snag: on switching from text mode to graphics mode, the screen garbled. Wait! I had seen this before: the emulated graphics card of Virtual PC advertises video modes it cannot actually display. And I sorted it out previously and blogged about it in mono::live. So I did the Ctrl+Alt+F3 dance and pasted the script - presto!

Now for the VM additions - of course used to the Windows way of things, I simply mounted the ISO image. Nicely opens up in the File Browser, where the f*ck is a Run As command here? OK, switch to terminal, su (I have to admit that took me a while including pestering a friend because I had already forgotten all the gory details). To spare you the details, after some twenty minutes of fiddling I decided to take a deep breath and actually read (gulp) the README that comes with the Linux additions.

Setup prerequisites step number two caught my attention:

A kernel module of the Additions is built at compile time. So, the virtual machine should have the Linux kernel source and build tools installed

No way. The mention of operating system & compile yourself makes me cringe. Thank you, but no thank you. I will live without the additions. There is no friggin way I am doing the dance, I am way too old, and sorry, this is 2006. I don't need that "power of Linux" if all administrative usability goes out the window (Note: I am a developer, and especially because I am one I totally balk at the idea of having to compile my applications / drivers before I can use them - that is ridiculous).

Oh, one minor roadblock was easy to solve - the networking stuff. System / Administration / Networking and then enable the Ethernet interface:

Now on to exploring.

After quite some struggle, I got the mono::live CD to boot & actually work in Virtual PC. The first step to sucess is to create a new VPC image, and capture the ISO of mono::live for startup of your VPC image:

This thing will now ask you a couple of questions, such as country, keyboard layout, and screen resolution you would like to use:

Now for the stumbling block - mono::live (or Ubuntu, the underlying distribution, to be more precise) detects the graphics card emulated by VPC, however, uses the 24BPP mode with the VPC-emulated card only supporting 16BPP. Looks weird at first and had me stumped too. But I got help on GotMono.com (actual post, interesting snippet provided here for reference):

As far as I am aware, the easiest way to handle this is to just allow the machine to boot up all the way, and then when you can see the fuzzy background image (i.e., the stretched Mono logo) so that it looks like booting is complete, hit CTRL+ALT+F3 to bring up a command prompt.
 
Then type (or rather, cut and paste), this command, all on one line:
 
Code:
sudo sed 's/DefaultDepth\t24/DefaultDepth\t16/g' /etc/X11/xorg.conf > /tmp/xorg.conf && sudo cp /tmp/xorg.conf /etc/X11/xorg.conf && sudo killall Xorg

to restart the X server at a color depth Virtual PC can handle.

Because pasting didn't work the way I wanted it to, I ended up typing this stuff using US keyboard settings on a German keyboard (don't ask). Anyways: this did the trick! Now I can start exploring mono::live without having to reboot my machine.