Dear Mr. Chmielewski,

thank you for your support request.

The Acer Aspire One 751 is only avaliable with a Microsoft Windows licence.

As a matter of principle the return of your licence is possible. The following criteria have to be met:

1.) The licence agreements, which appeared when you first started the system, MUSTN'T be accepted.

2.) The item has to be sent in to our Service Center including all accessoires and equipement. If you already created recovery discs it is utmost important that these will also be sent in with the item. No copy of the former deliverred operating system is allowed to remain in your property / hands.

3.) The ACER service is then going to remove the Windows lincence plate and will erase the whole harddisc.

4.) You then will receive a refund (by bank transfer) for the preinstalled OEM licence (about 30 Euro) .

5.) You have to pay the shipping cost to the acer service center and the shipping costs back to your address.

If you wish to return the licence we need the serial number of your notebook, your contact details including the shipping address and your bank details.

We will then provide you with a reference number with which the item can be dispatched to our Service Center.

Please follow the instructions below before dispatching the item:

- Please note the reference number clearly visible on the outer package / cardboard box.
- If possible pack the item in the original packaging or use another package that is safe for transport.
- Please note that ACER will not accept items that arrive being dispatched "freight collect".

ACER Computer GmbH
Repair Center
Kornkamp 4
22926 Ahrenburg

If you have any further questions regarding this topic please do not delete the previous correspondence.

Best regards
C. Riecken

Your ACER support team

Probably several times, and usually, you had to log in using either VNC or RDP (Remote Desktop Protocol – Microsoft Terminal Services). If you’re used to SSH, you may wonder why the overhead of a complete desktop is needed just to start a few text commands.
Of course, there are free and commercial SSH servers for Windows, but one problem with them is that they have to be installed separately. Which may be too much work for a one-off task now and then. Are there any other methods of accessing a remote Window text console from your Linux station?

But hey, here comes winexe to the rescue! Below, accessing Windows CLI from Linux remotely (using a Windows domain account):

From the project’s page, “winexe remotely executes commands on WindowsNT/2000/XP/2003 systems from GNU/Linux (probably also other Unices capable to compile Samba4)“.

Some notes:

• note that winexe doesn’t offer encryption of any kind – you may want to use VPN to make sure your connection is secure,
• if your distribution doesn’t offer a packaged version of winexe (most distributions don’t), winexe homepage offers a static binary; on the other hand if you have a recent Linux distribution, the static binary will most probably not work for you – in that case, just build the tool from source,
• you can use winexe in your Linux scripts – this way, you may execute certain tasks on your Linux machines, other tasks on your Windows machines – all that as a part of one bigger task / script,
• winexe can be seen as a Linux equivalent of psexec (a similar tool available for Windows).

Useful examples:

• See the list of processes / logged in users. Useful if you want to log in via RDP but don’t want to interrupt user session. Useful in a script, to check more workstations.

winexe --system -U 'DOMAIN\Administrator%password' //192.168.10.21 "tasklist /V"

• Start cmd.exe console:

winexe --system -U 'DOMAIN\Administrator%password' //192.168.10.21 cmd.exe

HP, as every reputable hardware vendor, provides support for the products it sells. Its Linux-based HP Compaq t5735 Thin Client is no exception here:

So what happens if we choose the only supported operating system, which happens to be Debian GNU/Linux 4.0?

Well, unless you’re used to the fact that your hardware vendor’s domain is to offer you RPM or DEB packages for Windows products, it shouldn’t surprise you that HP offers only Windows executables as a way to support its Linux products:

Heck, have fun figuring out what to do with these instructions on your Linux distro:

INSTALLATION INSTRUCTIONS:
1. Download the SoftPaq .EXE file to a directory on your hard drive.

2. Execute the downloaded file and follow the on-screen instructions.

Why not run a full blown Windows domain controller for a group of small office branches?

In fact, we deployed such a setup in a company I work for. Each branch office has a FSG-3, which runs the following:

• Samba as a Windows domain controller,
• OpenLDAP to sync users between the branches,
• CUPS for printing,
• OpenVPN to secure communication between the branches,
• WPKG for software deployment,
• Unattended for initial Windows deployment,
• ISDN dialin – in case a remote DSL dies, we can always log in using a ISDN telephone line,
• of course, other Linux goodies offered by Debian.

Works great – the solution is really flexible, there is no need to place a traditional PC-server anymore, and moreover, we didn’t have to pay a dime for a Windows Server license.