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
Last edited by wossname; Oct 30th, 2008 at 03:34 PM.
I have never, under any circumstance, wanted a computing product with the labels "eMachines" , "Gateway" or "Acer".
I don't know how much better Acer is these days. When I bought my first home PC back in the dark ages (1998), it was an Acer. Damn thing didn't even work when I got it home.
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I've had a high end acer laptop (£1200 new) for about 3 years, been a good machine.
Only problem I've had with it was the power button stopped working not long after I got it, had to boot it up using the 'Arcade' button, however I resolved this by holding it upside down and shaking it a bit - worked ever since.
It's still working even after having a phone thrown at it (smashing the screen), had about 6 new screens put it in after each one having a dead pixel (£320), it's been dropped with the power cable plugged in causing the power connector inside to break - had a new power device soldered onto the motherboard (£80), and recently been dropped again causing both of the screen hindges to snap - not got this fixed yet. Still works great but I have to prop the screen up with something now otherwise it flops backwards or forwards.
i have played with one of these. Don't know why they didn't just give it a standard linux Interface like Gnome. Seems like extra work to lock out features that you might actually want to have. Nice little system though. I like how it has a full-size keyboard.
I've had a high end acer laptop (£1200 new) for about 3 years, been a good machine.
Only problem I've had with it was the power button stopped working not long after I got it, had to boot it up using the 'Arcade' button, however I resolved this by holding it upside down and shaking it a bit - worked ever since.
It's still working even after having a phone thrown at it (smashing the screen), had about 6 new screens put it in after each one having a dead pixel (£320), it's been dropped with the power cable plugged in causing the power connector inside to break - had a new power device soldered onto the motherboard (£80), and recently been dropped again causing both of the screen hindges to snap - not got this fixed yet. Still works great but I have to prop the screen up with something now otherwise it flops backwards or forwards.
my mother-in-law had the same issue with her laptop. Dropped it and broke the socket for the power supply in two. I chalk this up to poor design. If there was an "L" plug there it wouldn't have broken anything.
Also i hope acers have improved over the years. My first PC system was an acer (i made the switch from amiga) and i had it only a few months and the keyboard controller went out.
That is the very essence of human beings and our very unique capability to perform complex reasoning and actually use our perception to further our understanding of things. We like to solve problems. -Kleinma
Does your code in post #46 look like my code in #45? No, it doesn't. Therefore, wrong is how it looks. - jmcilhinney
Well you know, with a new processor no one's ever heard of, there may have been a good reason it came with that particular custom linux distro. It may be the only one that supports the processor. You should do some research before installing cent-os.
Edit: looks like you could even install windows on it. The atom processor is instruction-compatible with the core2. And amazingly it is about 1/8 the size. 11 cores could fit on a penny. Think about that. Imagine actually putting that many cores in one system! It's biggest claim to fame however is evidently it's ridiculously small power consumption.
Last edited by Lord Orwell; Nov 3rd, 2008 at 11:28 PM.
...seriously, these guys cannot even make a battery! In that case, ignore all laptop manufacturers, as the mostly use Sony's batteries. Should have gone with Energizer...
After a few weeks of abuse in the hands of a rabid Linux hacker my Aspire has undergone the following procedures:
* Booted off just about all bootable media known to man apart from network boot. I strongly recommend the aquisition of a large USB stick (8 GB or more, something big enough to get an entire set of linux install CD (or DVD) .ISOs onto).
* HDD completely stomped and CentOS 5.1 installed sucessfully (although I took it off again because of some random Grub screw-up).
* Linpus restored from a bootable USB stick. At which point the Aspire was back in factory condition, everything worked exactly at it did originally. This is good to know because recovery discs often don't have this property.
* Had development tools installed (GCC etc...), man pages and so on.
* Linpus's Automatic package updater thingy does seem to work quite well although it's a bit slow.
So in summary I'd say the 120gb HDD version is well worth £220 of anyone's money. If you're a linux hacker then don't expect miracles, you have to put in a lot of work to make this a comfortable machine to work with.
I'm using the Linpus Distro most of the time now because it does what the manufacturers originally intended and does it well. I still use the terminal a lot so I can ssh into my servers and write the occasional bit of code.
The only thing I can't do at the moment is send a Wake on LAN signal from the Aspire when it's operating on wifi. That's not a major gripe though.
Go buy one. And While you're there get yourself a USB CDRom too, it will make life soooo much easier.
Actually you can. Highly recommended. Much better than the "free" equivalent (and all that stupid nonsense - much better to get paid for support so you can moan at someone down the customer support line).
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Originally Posted by Torc
