Acer Aspire One: GPL situation?

[William Gallafent]

I recently purchased one of these machines (manufactured by Acer, http://www.acer.co.uk/ 
  ) which runs Linpus Linux Lite ( http://www.linpus.com/ ). It is a  
very nice piece of hardware, the price is right (£220), and it runs  
Linux. What's not to like?

I now wish to see the source code for the GPL software which ships on  
it.

There is a piece of paper in the box which says "The Linpux Linux GPL  
source can be downloaded from the website www.linpus.com."

I have searched that web site, and cannot find a download location for  
the source code. So far, fairly unsatisfactory, since I would expect  
it to be a lot easier to locate the source code given the "written  
offer" quoted above. I have emailed Linpus and Acer, and await a  
response from either of them. I will update the list if I receive a  
response.

As a footnote, the reason I want to look at the source code is to  
determine the configuration of the sound hardware, which is not  
working perfectly for me using ALSA of Xubuntu 8.04.1, nor ALSA  
1.0.17. Additionally, with the shipped version of Linpus Linux the  
machine locks hard if the wifi is switched to adhoc mode, although it  
works with managed mode. With the latest MadWifi HAL and Xubuntu  
8.04.1's stock kernel, it no longer locks hard, although I haven't  
actually got it to work yet.

I just don't understand why, when the system ships with a recovery DVD  
(which has plenty of spare capacity), the source code for the whole  
shipping distribution isn't included in a subdirectory of the DVD -  
that would surely be the most straightforward way to provide it to end- 
users!

As a second footnote, the piece of paper says "Copyright (C) 1997-2010  
Linpus Technologies, Inc." - one can surely not claim copyright  
protection for a future date, since the copyright is intrinsically  
linked to the written text, which must by definition already have been  
written in 2008 …?

As a third, according to that document apparently "Linux" is a  
registered trademark of Linus Trovalds. Who he? ;)