• Acer Aspire One Linux OS

    Acer Aspire One Linux OS

    Rohan Naravane, Aug 28, 2008 1226 hrs IST

    The OS in the Aspire One is highly customized and claims to make Linux user-friendly for the common man.

    Neat and Organized interface, Attractive, Decent selection of built-in applications.

    There is a lag at times, No package manager, Default player does not support DivX video format, Wi-fi connectivity.

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Performance

Contrary to the "15-second instant start" caption on the Aspire one website, the system took around 30 seconds to boot, which incidentally is the same time the machine took to boot XP.

The system lags in its overall performance, especially while multi-tab browsing on a couple of sites at a time. This was surprising, as the Aspire One ran smoothly on Windows XP. I also had to restart the machine a couple of times as the OS hanged.

There were also times when the Wi-Fi connection automatically disconnected and failed to reconnect despite disabling and enabling the Wi-Fi. The only solution was to re-start the machine. However, on a positive note, the Wi-Fi reception was way better than what I got when I'd used the Aspire One with Windows.

With respect to battery life, the results were similar to what I got while using Windows XP, i.e. around 2 hours. These two hours were spent surfing the Internet via Wi-Fi with the screen brightness set around 90 percent and music played through headphones.

Conclusion

More and more Netbooks seem to be bundled with Windows XP nowadays, as the first-gen Netbooks weren't powerful enough to run XP smoothly. This is a major disadvantage because Linux worked even on low powered machines.

Also, to keep the pricing low, it made sense to use something that was freely available. And, over the years, Linux has become simpler to use. Also, we all know that using it does free one from most of the viruses, malware, adware, spyware etc. that plague Windows-based machines.

In comparison to the Linux OS on-board the Eee PC, I'd say this one is equally easy to use. But I preferred the earlier one mainly due to its speedier and hiccup-free functioning. The Acer Aspire One OS is decent for everyday computing like using the Internet, music playback and doing office work.

We'll be seeing more of Linux OSes made for Netbooks in the future; like the Ubuntu Remix .

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Discussion Board
(8) Comments
Girish Singh
,Delhi, on Sep 14, 2008 09:02 PM
The linux version of this netbook is available for 20k in India, on the contrary Acer sells laptops with proper 80gb HDD and DVD ROMS for 21-22k This beats the whole purpose of acer launching this netbook in India. Another interesting observation is that in the US market this netbook is now selling for approximately 350$ which is about 14.5k here in India. Although there might be differences in duties and taxation but a 30% price increase is certainly no possible due to these alone. Such marketing poilicies by Acer make this netbook as worthless buy. It is a sheer waste of money buying it in India, Although it is a great product in itself but the pricing policy is a sham on acer's part and is actually surprising considering the fact IBM is looking at India as one of the major markets of its soon to be launched S10 netbook.
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Voodoo
,Saratov, on Sep 02, 2008 06:06 PM
Notebook is very fun... But I want install Windows XP on it. And my installation is not complite(((
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Henrik R Clause
,Brabrand, on Aug 30, 2008 02:23 PM
No package manger? There's RPM, you just have to enable the advanced mode to use that. I'll install Skype the minute I get mine.
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David Friedman
,San Jose, CA, USA, on Aug 29, 2008 09:09 PM
My boot results were very different from yours. From an XP/120GB machine 75 seconds. From a Linpus/Flash machine, 15-20 seconds. Both machines were in stores in the U.S.
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techtree
,techtree, on Aug 28, 2008 12:58 PM
Has something very important been missed in the conclusion is the million "$" question?
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Anonymous
,chicago, on Aug 28, 2008 01:58 PM
It's just a review of the OS, you can either choose to buy the version with XP and pay 2000 more for just the OS or you can get the version of the aspire with linux, same hardware, 2000 bucks less.
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flywheel
,Broendby, on Aug 29, 2008 01:01 PM
Its not really the same hardware - AFAIR the Linux version has less memory and SSD disk
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zelrik
,winnipeg, on Aug 28, 2008 09:39 PM
They copied the MS window decorator....that's ridiculus. They could have done something more inovative...
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