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Acer Aspire One

After resisting the EeePC for so long in the hope that better ultra portable laptops would appear with better specs, I finally decided to go for an Acer Aspire One. The 8GB flash storage and 512MB RAM are perfectly adequate for basic use in Linux, it's a great little device for browsing a few sites without having to take a huge laptop around with you.

The Aspire One comes with Linpus Lite, a Fedora based distribution aimed at lightweight devices. After using it for a day it seems reasonably adequate for an average user, but for someone who understands Linux well might get a little bit annoyed at the quality of this particular distribution.

This version of Linpus Lite is based on Fedora 8, slightly out of date as it was released back in November 2007. Firefox 2 is included, which is also a little bit old and support is ending shortly as Firefox 3 has been out for quite a while. I suppose this is sort of expected with the fast pace of change, but it's slightly annoying. The one thing I did try to do is run yum upgrade from the command line, however the dependencies are broken so it won't update – not exactly great.

I'm keen on replacing Linpus with Ubuntu in the future, however the support for the Aspire One isn't quite complete at the moment with some functionality not quite working. I'll keep track of it for the future, however I want ease of use instead of having to deal with command line tweaks to fix broken functionality.

Overall a thumbs up for the Acer Aspire One, but a bit of a thumbs down for Linpus Lite. I just wish they could've sorted out Ubuntu for this device.

© Alex Tomkins.