[Gllug] Acer Aspire Revo - opinions

[John Winters]

On Mon, 15 Jun 2009 23:37:29 +0100, Ryan Cartwright
<r.cartwright at equitasit.co.uk> wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> further to the netbook discussion, I was wondering whether anyone has
> had a play with an Acer Revo L3600  ( 1.6 Atom, 8GB Solid State, 1GB
> RAM, NVIDIA chipset (GeForce 9400) )?  Ebuyer have them at £149[1] (as
> do others)

I got one from SimplyAcer.  What I got wasn't quite what I ordered but I'm
happy enough with it.

I ordered the 1GB / 8 GB / Linux version.  What arrived claimed to be that
but also claimed to have a 160G hard disc.  When I booted it I found it had
an odd thing called RevoBoot which would allow you to run a web browser,
Skype client and a few other things, but was almost unusable.  I suspect it
uses a Linux kernel and the web browser seemed to be a re-badged Firefox,
but you couldn't do really basic things like resize a window - always full
screen and no way to move one window out of the way to see another.

The "Boot OS" button was greyed out and further investigation showed there
was no other OS installed - just 140G of empty disc.
It should have had Ubuntu on it but that simply wasn't there.

I scrubbed everything and installed Debian Lenny.  It all Just Works(TM)
with the exception of the wireless which required madwifi, but even that
was trivial to add.

As a machine it's quite nice to use and the graphics are undoubtedly very
fast.  It runs that loony window manager with all the special effects
(sorry - can't remember the name) without breaking sweat and it's
*extremely* quiet, despite the presence of the unadvertised HDD.

The model which I've got (1GB RAM, 160GB HDD, no OS) doesn't seem to exist
in the official line-up but it's a nice package and gougingly priced at
£150 inc vat (inc delivery too if you add something trivial to bring it
over the £150 barrier).

Of course I can't guarantee that someone else ordering from SimplyAcer will
get the same thing, but it may be that there is a supply problem with the
8G SSD and so they're doing a hybrid?

So far - very pleased with it.

John

P.S.  To get it to boot sensibly you need to go into the Bios, select the
boot device that you want *and* switch off a special "Revoboot" option.  If
you miss the last bit it ignores your boot instructions and boots Revoboot
regardless.
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