Aspire One Live Update Problems, and Messaging

I recently looked at the Aspire One netbook for a friend who couldn’t get the Messaging working – MSN really. I clicked on the icon, some waiting then… nothing. This started a can of worms.

When I started the Live Update feature, the downloads of various patches proceeded normally, until the last update. Then I got some “Server Error”, and the update stopped.

Turns out, Control-F2 lets you run any command, and the any command I ran was xterm.

Googling a bit reveals the fact that the Live Update program is called “onlineupdate”, and running it in xterm reveals all kinds of diagnostic details, including the urls of the patches. These are shell scripts; and have .sh at the end.

This is interesting because one of the patches is for Live Update itself.

I typed in the url of the Live Update fix in firefox, which helpfully has onlineupdate as the default handler for the patch files. It downloaded the patch and did the update.

I believe but have not yet verified that the patches were downloaded OK, and manually passing them to Live Update will install them.

Anyway, once the Live update fix was installed (plus a reboot), Live Update now installs updates like it should.

Live Update should be visited several times, because it seems that there are patches that do not appear until others have been installed first. I finally saw a fix for amsn (that supports MSN instant messaging). I had to manually select this patch in Live Update. After it installed (and another reboot) – Messaging started up fine.