[Gllug] Netbook recommendations?

[Joel Bernstein]

On 11 Jun 2009, at 21:32, Jose Luis Martinez wrote:
> I have a first generation Eee PC and I want to get a second hand
> replacement machine of slightly higher specs (bigger resolution screen
> being the most important), what I really need is the compact form
> factor which has probed quite convenient while traveling. I have
> thought about the Acer One, but I want to hear opinions about any
> similar machines.

I have one of these, an Acer Aspire One A110 with 1GB ram, and an 8  
(?) GB SSD.
I won it in the charity raffle at the London Perl Workshop last  
November, so it was more of a nice surprise than something I had  
craved forever.

I played with the horrific default "LinPus Lite" Linux distro for a  
few hours, then put it away until I had a use case for it. The screen  
is tiny, the keyboard is awful for typing on, it has mini keycaps with  
very little travel, and the trackpad is absolutely a joke, to the  
extent that it has the buttons vertically at either side, and 1/3 of  
the tiny pad area is a scroll area. This adds up to something that's  
not very easy at all to operate. It's not all bad but it's difficult  
to play Solitaire on let alone to hack code or watch a movie.

I stuck Ubuntu Netbook Remix onto it. It currently sits in a corner of  
my living room connected to a pair of USB disks, running firefly media  
server (mt-daapd, it does iTunes server stuff including on-the-fly  
transcoding of ogg/flac media), and this seems like a good use for it.  
It's adequate computationally but awful for interactive use. This way  
it's a very low power consumption home media server with the advantage  
of keyboard/trackpad/lcd for when it needs fixing and can't be ssh'd  
to, and a battery in case the power drops.

In summary - the Acer Aspire One is too damn small (and I have  
excellent eyesight and fairly small and nimble fingers) and the LCD is  
too damn short to be comfortably usable. Stick it on your lap and  
you'll break your neck trying to see the screen, the top of which will  
be 3" from your thighs. IME it doesn't do too well with video either,  
iPlayer is really jerky and looks like it runs about 6-8fps. I'm in  
London at the moment but when I'm back in Wales next week I will try  
some more elaborate testing. It seems a nice enough piece of hardware  
but I don't think I could replace my black macbook with it for more  
than about 10 minutes.

Finally I can bring it down to London with me soonish if you'd like to  
meet up and have a brief play with it some time.

/joel
-- 
Gllug mailing list  -  Gllug at gllug.org.uk
http://lists.gllug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/gllug