Well, well, well… Recently, I decided that I’ve been spending too much time in my office.  I really like my iMac, but unfortunately, its basically a one-location machine, and I want to spend more time in other places, like chilling on the sofa with my Wife. I also wanted a portable internet device that would be very easy to carry around with me, and potentially could be used to preview pictures when out in the field doing photography.  I also needed it to be cheap, as having a sprog on the way kind of puts a squeeze on the finances, as you might imagine!

Aspire One, Ubuntu Style!

After much deliberation, hand wrangling, and reading around, I decided to go for a netbook.  Many people look on these things as underpowered toys, but after having a bit of a play with one in PC World, I decided to take the plunge.  After all, if it ended up being no good, I could sell it on the back of the current netbook craze and make my money back easily enough.  So how did it work out?  Very well as it happens. The model I decided to go for was the Acer Aspire One.  After a bit of cashback and some vouchers, I managed to get hold of one for £125, which was, in my opinion, a great price.  The A150L is an Intel Atom based 8.4″ netbook, with 1Gb of RAM, plus a 120Gb Hard Drive (rather than the Solid State thing in the earlier models).  It has built in 802.11b/g WiFi, but no bluetooth.  The screen is glossy, but to me this isnt an issue, as the display is bright and clear, and very sharp (despite only being 1024×600).  The keyboard is pretty responsive, and I actually like the feel of it, and dont find it to be flexible like others have reported. The keys are 85% of the size of standard laptop keys, and whilst small, are still easy to get used to, unless you have a bunch of sausages for fingers.  The built in webcam is basic, though works absolutrely fine for the likes of MSN or Skype.  The trackpad is small, but again works very well.  The placement of the left and right buttons is unorthadox, with the buttons mounted to the right and left of the trackpad.  I use ‘tap to click’ anyway, so the placement doesnt really bother me, but if you like your buttons rather than your taps, you may want to use a notebook mouse with it.

The case is mostly glossy, and along with the screen, soon becomes close friends with your fingerprints.  You’ll find yourself obsessively wiping the thing for a while, until you get used to it… The ‘L’ models come with Linux preinstalled.  The flavour in this case is a kind of cut down distro known as ‘Linpus’.  This has Firefox 2 (rather than the more up-to-date 3) installed, as well as a simple messanger client, a proprietary mail client, as well as Openoffice, and various other apps.  However, for someone with more than a little OS experience, the whole thing feels a little restrictive.  You can enable a more advanced mode, which actually enables you to install more apps.  However, it still feels a little ‘Knobbled’ (so to speak!).  The whole Linpus install has a relatively pretty front end, which is great for people who just want to use it in its basic configuration, and makes it a brilliant first computer for a technophobe who just wants to surf the net, write a few emails, do a bit of word processing etc. After a good play with the installed OS, I decided to do a bit of research and replace the installed OS with something a little more flexible.

I decided on Ubuntu Linux NBR (Netbook Remix).  This is a version of Ubuntu that, whilst not being cut down, has a rather nice Netbook front end shell. The install couldnt have been easier.  I just used a little app to write the 1Gb image to a USB flash drive, which was then booted from on the netbook.  This booted into a live distro, which I had a play about with.  Once I decided I wanted to carry on with a permanent install, I just selected the relevant menu option, and the OS install proceeded.  I made a few tweaks to the partitions, but apart from that it was a case of next, next, next. Once installed, the OS takes only 40-50 secs to boot.  All devices work absolutely fine, apart from the SD card reader, which only works if a card is in it at boot time.  As long as you do this, you can take the card out and put another in and it will read it fine.  The webcam, sound, Wifi, etc, all work with no issues whatsoever.  The device has three USB connections, as well as VGA out, and the normal Mic and Headphones sockets.  It’s also furnished with two memory card slots.  The left one is SD only, and just serves to expand the machine’s storage (i.e. it comes up as a separate partition I believe).  The Right one is a multi card slot which takes SD, MMC, Memorystick and XD cards.  This is a more standard reader, but as previously mentioned, is not 100% working in Ubuntu. With Ubuntu, you can install any number of packages from Linux application repositories with the ‘add/remove’ app.  The main menu (the Ubuntu version of the windows ‘Start’ menu) is presented on the netbook shell as a nice full screen interface.  It’s easy to switch back and forth between the NBR shell and the standard Ubuntu desktop. Even the suspend/resume works perfectly, meaning you don’t lose the good power-saving facilities that netbooks are designed for. The battery life only weighs in at about 2 hours maximum, so you need all the power-saving you can get. You can buy bigger batteries (twice and three times the capacity and physical size), but this has an obvious impact on the size and weight of the device, kind of diminishing the point of it.

It works!

I was gobsmacked that even a ‘3′ mobile broadband dongle was picked up and installed via a wizard. All it did was ask for my provider, and it went away and did the rest.  It then just appeared as a connection option in the networks menu.  Brilliant!  Even though, in relation to the Aspire One itself, the dongle seems huge, it’s not really a problem as you’ll be taking the thing out when you pack it away anyway. Playing video (including streaming DivX, Xvid etc over the WiFi) worked well, but this is partly due to Ubuntu.  Apparently the pre-loaded Linpus Linux is not so forgiving, and lacks basic support for DivX, XviD, Quicktime and some other common codecs.

Overall? I’m impressed.  I didn’t think the thing would be more like a mini laptop than a purpose-built net surfing device.  It has, however, proven to be much more powerful than I though it would be, and is, in effect, a fully fledged linux box.  It even runs the Visual effects if you choose to enable them, but only in the full Ubuntu Desktop.  Running these in the NBR mode causes issues with graphical glitches. You can buy the same model with Windows XP installed, but the idea of using Windows for a dedicated surfing and email machine kind of fills me with dread security-wise.  Apparently, some have even installed Vista, and Windows 7 on it, with reports that both run fairly well.  I’ll stick to good old Ubuntu though. All-in-all, its a really good purchase.  It does exactly what I want, and it does it well.  For the price, it amazes me what you can get now.  With more and more companies sticking their toes into the lucrative waters of the netbook phenomenon, it seems that price to power ratio is only going to improve.   Going by the few days usage that I’ve had with the Aspire One, I’d recommend it heartily to anyone who wants what it proclaims to do.  Anyone who wants a true laptop replacement would be best to try it out first if possible.

I won’t list full specs here, as you can find them easily via the gift of google. Just for a bit of fun, I thought I’d stick a quick video overview (and I mean quick).  See below – press the HQ button for a much clearer view once playing if your bandwidth will handle it. Oh, and apologies for the apparent widescreening that youtube has done. It seems to have chopped it a little, but it doesn’t really affect it too much…