Acer Aspire One

[wossname]

I has it.

On the "shiny precious things" scale it rates a very respectable 85% in my humblest of humble views.

I ended up with the 120GB hdd version the regular one was out of stock. Also the woman in Curry's was really hot and she clearly wanted me. But that's beside the point.

I've already found 4 major flaws with the preloaded software (the worst one was the wifi wouldn't work immediately, I had to use modprobe to get the driver noticed), so chances are I'll end up dual booting it with something sane like CentOS.

Flaws aside it is a really sexy bit of kit and is about the size of a hardback novel when the lid is closed. It's really light too. Don't know about the battery life yet though.

I was concerned that they had locked the shell away from the user by some cunning means but it turned out to be just a matter of running sudo passwd root in order to set your own root password. Which is nice. All signs indicate that the OS is a modified version of Fedora.

It doesn't really ship with any of the really useful linux utils (gcc, man, ssh [!]...) but it does have yum so all is not lost.

I've been playing with it for 2 hours now and I think it rocks. The keyboard is a decent size for a netbook this small, the key layout is a little unusual, but nothing I won't get used to.

The really impressive thing though is the screen. It's beautiful, very bright, decent contrast and viewing angle. The finger track-pad thing is probably the best I've used.

One of the things I was surprised at was the ability for the AA1 to watch iPlayer videos on the BBC!! I watched an entire 47 seconds of AutumnWatch (in the hope that Kate Humble would appear, she did not).

[Geeeek]
It boots up in 25 seconds.

The 1600Mhz Intel Atom CPU shows up (in cat /proc/cpuinfo) as a pair of 800mhz processors, which is interesting in itself. Does anyone know anything about the atom CPU?
Interesting IO ports: monitor out, 3 USB, LAN. It also has 2, count them TWO, SD card slots. One of them is apparently for extending the storage capacity a bit (a bit redundant on a 120gig machine IMO) and the other is a 5-in-1 memory card reader.

The only thing it doesn't have is a CD/DVD drive, but no matter, I'll just use NFS to install CentOS
[/Geeeek]

Verdict: Bloody awesome, but the OS is a bit of a shed. The Linux distro is called "Linpus", which is worth the asking price alone

I wrote this post on my AA1