Acer One a new companion…
04-09-09
I just got a new Acer One, the A110L model which is a 8GB SDD drive loaded with Linux and 512MB Ram. I ordered it on Thursday evening and had it Saturday morning. I immediately applied a few tweaks to the OS, such as activating the “full” menu on right click and speeding up disk access.
Then of course I had to complete re-mod the homepage that nifty little display and easy access buttons they give were nice but so not my taste.
With the homepage re-modded I felt I was able to really start using it. Although I still need to add the 1GB Ram module I ordered with it that arrived Today. Talk about an easy install, NOT! Actually it looks freaking hard but there are plenty of examples on the net like this one. So that’s the next project I guess.
Next of course was getting Adobe Air installed which is not easy considering XFCE is not officially supported but instead of doing an OS change I decided to hunt around a bit and came across a few posts about “rpm-build” and such and decided to give a simple command a go and then one last attempt. “sudo yum install rpm-build” and then found a post about it as well so felt a lot more comfortable that I hadn’t done something stupid to the machine and then with a view simple symbolic links I can now using ALT-F2 launch my Adobe AIR apps.
Also plug and play on my 3G T-Mobile “Web ‘n Walk” stick so I am now online anywhere in Germany and ready to go. But now to explain why I call it my “new companion”…
It’s certainly no replacement to my 17” MacBook Pro, I mean for dev work or web work the 8.9” screen is simply not enough screen for me, speed and performance wise it rocks though. The SDD drive is kicking butt on access times and speeds.
Having to hit the road on occasion my hope is that I’ll be comfortable with this as my travel machine in order to cut down on the amount of “gear” I always take with me and of course how much I have to carry. It’s getting more and more difficult to lug everything around with me and a 17” on those little airplane tables is just not comfortable at all.
Lippstadt, Germany