I am currently at Java Cafe playing around with my Acer Aspire One netbook. I am really quite impressed with it. In the past, I was not a fan of netbooks but after having Rich‘s Aspire One for nearly 2 weeks, my opinions have changed. Rich needed to have Windows XP Lite and Ubuntu eee installed on his Aspire One. Since I did not have time, I gave it to my student, Tommy, from AIS to do it.
Tommy returned to me this week. I spent a couple days playing with Ubuntu eee on Rich’s Aspire One. Wow, I really love it. The Ubuntu eee Developers did a great job on the desktop GUI.
Yesterday I purchased my own brown Acer Aspire One yesterday from Long Binh Computers. It came with a licensed version of Windows XP Home, not the Lite version. I was asked if I wanted a cracked version of Office 2007 but I declined.
When I got home, I tested Windows XP Home out. Yeah, it is still slow. I then downloaded unetbootin and created a Ubuntu eee LiveUSB. I installed Ubuntu eee relatively easily and booted into Ubuntu. Wow, I am still impressed with the nice Gnome desktop environment.
I managed to update the system but it took most of the night due the poor bandwidth here.
I will test it out at Barcamp Saigon tomorrow hopefully with some pictures of the event. A review of both Barcamp Saigon and the Acer Aspire One will come within the week.
So far, I am impressed………..with the Aspire One. My colleague plans to get one as well.
How was the battery life with Ubuntu?
I’m thinking about buying one, but doubting between Acer, Asus, MSI and Lenovo… 🙂
@Urko: Not bad at all. The battery indicator says 5 hours but when I use it, I get roughly 3 and a half hours before needing to charge it up.
I am thinking about dumping Ubuntu eee and install Ubuntu 8.10 instead. There is support for it now: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/AspireOne
Hey, that shop has a pretty good selection of netbooks, and decent prices too. Bookmarking… 🙂
I like Long Binh. They have a good reputation. They get their products from Singapore I heard.
I updated a lot of the drivers from the AspireOne Euro FTP. All runs without a hitch. With the updated trackpad drivers, you can now use two finger control (a la iphone).
So far, I like the form factor of AspireOne and the aesthetics. We have two of them now at my place. I have the brown 120GB mechanical hard drive, my partner has the white 8GB SSD. I recommend the bigger drives over the SSD, I don’t see any difference in speed.
I’ve read some good things about the lenovo…
My boss will bring back the Lenovo or Dell mini next week. I am curious to see it goes. I like my AspireOne but I still lug my Thinkpad around for work. It does go to class with me.