openSUSE on Acer Aspire One D270

A few days ago I've inherited a really cute laptop.

As by title, it is an Acer Aspire One D270.  It turns out there's
a wikipedia page about Acer Aspire One, and the D270 model
somehow deserved a dedicated section:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acer_Aspire_One#Acer_Aspire_One_D270

The display of this unit was unfortunately damaged, but the
laptop was otherwise in working conditions, and I could see that
the operating system was booting regularly!

I wasn't sure whether it was worth the effort, but I decided to
tempt the fates and fix the display.  The operation succeded,
although it was a little expensive to buy a replacement.

Once the new display was mounted I could see Windows 7 Starter
reaching the login screen, where I was prompted to enter the
password for the user. I guessed it correctly as the name of the
previous owner.  Naive.  By my code of honor respected their
privacy by not looking at any of the stored data.

It should come with no surprise that there wasn't much to do for
the discontinued operating system.  Screw that, I was planning to
install Linux anyway, so I figured I shold probably try Puppy
Linux, or some other distro targeting old hardware.

With my surprise, even if the operating system managed to boot,
the computer ended up frozen as soon as the graphical server was
started.  I tried all of the available boot options, but nothing
seemed to work.  Then I decided to try with another distro, but I
got the same result.

It took a while to figure out that the `quiet` option passed by
many distros as boot parameter was responsible for this odd
behaviour.  Even so, running a lightweight desktop environment
such as XFCE4 turned out to be too much for this laptop.  The
installation procedure just froze before any installation could
be done.

Eventually I decided to give Debian a shot, since it comes with a
textual installer.  It took ages, but Debian + XFCE4 eventually
popped up, unbearably slow, but working.

After a few days of torturing myself with a very slow system
(as I didn't have a much faster workstation at my disposal)
I challenged myself to attempt the installation of openSUSE.

Why openSUSE? - you may ask.  Well, obviously I could have fixed
the perfectly working Debian by dropping XFCE4 in favour of any
of the many window managers available.  But I grew fond of
openSUSE lately, so why not?  I just decided to try, just for
fun, and because I can.

The challenge comes from the fact that openSUSE is not known to
be the most lightweight out there.  I'm quite sure there is some
minimal net install available for download, but I decided to just
use the live installed on my USB drive.

I edited the kernel command line at the boot loader, removing the
problematic `quiet` option, and adding the
`systemd.unit=multi-user.target` parameter.
The latter corresponds to "ye olde" runlevel 3 (multi-user mode
with networking, and text-only login on TTYs).

In openSUSE, the installation is started by launching a shell
script that can be found under `/sbin`.  Now I don't recall by
heart the name of it, but there are just a few commands whose
name ends with the `.sh` suffix, and that's one of them.

The installation took some time, but it ended smoothly.
By chosing the "Generic Desktop" system role, I ended up with a very
snappy system, even on such a old piece of hardware!

The system boots in a reasonable time to a text prompt.
I can optionally start a graphical session based on IceWM by
typing `startx`, exactly as it was on Slackware, when I was a
teenager.

The result? A cute little laptop, running a cute little distro.
It is unfortunately not so good at running the huge and bloated
browser that you need to surf our huge and bloated web, but
it is good enough for many other things. :)