Living the startup life in Atlanta, GA.

I’ve had the machine for almost two weeks and used it a bunch, so it’s time to write a real review of the system.

Interface

I’ve got the one running Linpus Linux Lite.  Linpus is based off the Fedora project and optimized to run on lower powered machines, such as net-books.  The goal of the interface appears to be to abstract out as much of the Linux guts as possible.  The main screen is a collection of application buttons to launch the applications that someone figured would be the most used.  The list is pretty sensible.  I’d imagine the vast majority of users would actually use the machine for Web Browsing, Instant Messaging, and writing documents.  In another attempt to make things comfortable for main-stream users, the default theme and window dressing looks like WindowsXP.

This is how the Aspire c

However, if you aren’t a Linux Newbie or want to learn more about the how to use Linux, it’s pretty easy to break out of the Linpus box.  The Linpus interface is just some custom stuff on top of Xfce, a Linux interface that I’m a big fan of.  Like with any other Linux system, once you have root and a terminal, the sky’s the limit on what you can do.  I followed the steps in the link to enable the Xfce menu, which allowed me to add custom keybindings, virtual desktops, get rid of the default WindowsXP window dressing, and a hot key to open the run dialog.

more visually palatable

Installed Apps

There are a few surprises here.  Instead of shipping with Pidgin, it ships with an app called Messenger.  Messenger supports Skype, along with the standard text protocols, with the downside being that the interface is not as nice.

Despite the vast speed improvements present in Firefox3, the Aspire One continues to ship with FireFox2.

Otherwise, it’s your standard set of linux productivity tools, such as OpenOffice, some random media clients (no Amarok because the system in GTK based), and some of the usual free (and fun) games. It’s pretty much what you’d want in a system like this, unless…. Well I’ll get to that in a bit.

Input

The keyboard is slightly smaller than a standard laptop keyboard.  I believe Acer claims it is about 95%.  I used to use a Fujitsu mini-notebook that had a similar sized keyboard.  Personally, I like slightly smaller keyboards because they require less finger travel.   Another big plus is how responsive the keys are.  I often find Dells are just a little mushy.  The Acer keyboard is very nice and springy.

The mouse, on the other hand, is not as nice.  It supports up/down and side to side scrolling.  However, the scroll points aren’t right at the edge, so it’s very hit or miss on whether you’ll get the behavior that you want.  The placement of the mouse buttons to the left and right of the trackpad is a bit weird too.  It’s going to take a lot of practice to reliably hit them without accidentally scrolling to somewhere on the page.  All this means that using the mouse can often be frustrating.  Playing with the sensitivity settings may help a bit, but I have yet to find that sweet spot.

Performance

This is where the little machine really shines.  I figured that 1.6Ghz low voltage processor would be a bit of a dog, but this machine is pretty fast.  Of course, I’ve cheated a bit, I did pop open the hardware and add an additional Gig of RAM.  Websites are very usable on Firefox.  Openoffice loads quickly and is usable.  The games are smooth.  Messenger is pretty quick too.  I often have multiple applications open at a time and hardly get frustrated by the performance of the processor.

There has been a lot of noise online about the write speed of the built in flash drive.  It’s not super fast, but I haven’t done anything that’s made me mad at it.

Also the connectivity options sort of suck.  You can’t get one with 802.11n or Gigabit ethernet.   However, I find it somewhat unlikely that you’re going to transfer very large files to a machine with 8G of Hdd.

Linuxy-ness

Make no mistake, this is a real Linux system.  Occasionally this manifests itself in weird gui behavior.  When the network disconnects, I get about 4 error messages about it.  That’s somewhat annoying.

What’s not annoying is that a little knowledge of yum can set you up with gedit, mysql, postgresql, gcc, ruby and whatever else you want to run.  Since the performance is so good you can actually use it as a goof around development box.  While nobody is going to mistake it for a dual-core Macbook Pro,  it’s actually very usable. There are times that you’re going to want something with a bigger screen, or more horsepower, but $330, a machine that can do that much is really quite cool.

Summary

I had hoped that the performance of this machine would be good enough to take to a coffee shop and hack.  It’s far exceeded those expectations.  I love using this thing and it covers about 80% of my computer usage.  If you want something small, cheap, and useful (and your handy with a screw-driver) this is the machine that you want to get.  As long as you aren’t trying to develop some silly J2EE app, you’ll be thrilled with what it can do.

Tejus’s Note: I originally wrote this a few weeks ago on the Appcelerant Blog.

I spend a lot of time building web apps. I find that building web applications is just easier compared to my experiences dealing with SWT and Swing. Frameworks, like Appcelerator’s, just make it even easier.

Traditionally, there are just things you can’t do with a web application. You can’t interact directly with the user’s systems. You can’t (easily) install your app on the users machine. You can’t execute code from another person’s site. You have to be connected to the internet to access anything. These are pretty big restrictions, but there are a ton of interesting things that you can build with those limitations. Which is good, because these limitations are actually very sensible. You can use your web-browser to go anywhere in the world. Most of the places are going to be clean and safe, but when you happen upon one that’s not, it’s good to know that something is protecting you from it.

Unfortunately, sometimes this isn’t good enough. You just need access to something, be it the hard-drive to cache resources for offline consumption or the video card for high-quality video playback. Plugins can get you close, but they can get unwieldy.

Like with any problem that’s compelling to solve, there are people working on solutions. Google Gears and Yahoo Browser Plus extend your existing browser and provide some of this functionality. Adobe Air and Mozilla Prism are special browser’s built specifically to bridge the desktop and the web.

In each of these cases, you explicitly authorize a new level of access. The user either has to authorize each component for a site or download something (just like a real app). However, these technologies are built on browsers and have retained sandboxes.

If sandboxes protect users, great. However, if they make hard to build sensible things, it’s not so great. A great example of this is that Google Gears doesn’t let you cache external content for offline consumption. I really don’t see who is protected by this.

I think the solution that gains the most traction will be the one that finds the most sensible balance between protecting the user and allowing the application developer to deliver a good solution. Remember, a real desktop app can do pretty much whatever it wants and puts the onus on the programmer to do the right thing. The world of desktop integrated web apps is much safer than the web at large. We need security models that take that into account.

Last Sunday Sonali, a bunch of our friends, and I went whitewater rafting on the Ocoee River near the Tennessee – Georgia border. I’ve never been whitewater rafting before and I was incredibly excited.

I got the feeling that some of the other folks in the boat were a little nervous when we first got into the water. I got to sit in the front, which lead to three thoughts in rapid succession: “This is going to be awesome,” “I hope I don’t look like a moron and fall out,” and “Oh my god, I’m going to swallow a lot of nasty river water.” The trip down the river was fantastic, in no small part by the awesomeness of our tour guide, Dan. He’s been with their company for 7 years and uses his seniority to bend corporate policy enough to give his rafters a really good time (a trait that appeals to us programmer types). If you use Ocoee Rafting be sure to request him. According to him, the best time to go rafting is fall. There aren’t a lot of people on the water, which gives the guides more flexibility in what they do.

We look like some real adventurers (click the image to see the rest)

To add icing to the cake, after the raft ride, we went to a store and not only bought beer, but Yuengling, which is not available in GA because of our outdated alcohol laws. Take that Sonny!

So I finally did it.  I’ve been keen on getting a netbook since, well, 2004 when my old Fujitsu P2120 started to get a little old and slow.  Every time I went to replace it, I just balked at the price.  For the first 5 years of ownership, it would have cost me $2,000 to get something that was anywhere near as small, which was okay.  The real downside was in that five years, I still wouldn’t get anything significantly faster.

Then came the OLPC.  That was quickly followed with the ASUS eee.  Now we have the MSI Wind, HP 2133, Dell Inspiron Mini 9 and the one I bought, the Acer Aspire One.

Whats great about this wave of netbook is that they are both somewhat useful and very resonably priced. I got my Acer for $344 (incl shipping) on Newegg.com. For a fully featured, functional computer, that’s really cheap. I just had to get it. And since I had a spare 1G stick of RAM hanging around, I just had to take it apart, too.

If you’re brave, and don’t care about the warranty, there’s a good <a href=”http://qik.com/video/161904″>video</a> on how to pull it apart on the <a href=”http://tnkgrl.wordpress.com/2008/08/14/modding-the-acer-aspire-one-bluetooth/”>tnkgrl blog</a>.

Now for the pictures:

That’s all for part one.  Part II will be my review.