So, if anyone is wondering whether or not Debian or Ubuntu work on these machines, I can confirm that they do, and very nicely too. I am currently running Debian Squeeze on my machine and everything works just fine

A little while ago I bought an Acer Aspire Revo 3600 which is basically a small PC suitable for media playback. It has HDMI out and plays up to 1080p HD video in certain formats, so is ideal for connecting to a TV to consume video content

Fortunately, Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic) has introduced many changes that make getting the Revo up and running much easier than under the previous release of Ubuntu.

For my weeks on call, Brightbox let me choose an ultra-mobile (netbook) PC. This will allow me to leave the house without having to carry a heavy full-size laptop with me.

Fedora 10 with the LXDE window manager has been a pretty good experience on my Acer Aspire One netbook but the release of a new Ubuntu with a “netbook remix” prompted me to give it a go.

Looks like good things are up ahead for us Acer Aspire One users who have installed or upgraded to Jaunty Jackalope/Ubuntu 9.04 I’ve just fixed the sound problem and LED for wifi issue with just one package which is linux-backports-modules-jaunty so that was such a happy happy thing!

As I’m the proud owner of the Acer Aspire One netbook (Tech Digest review here), I thought I’d whack Jaunty on and see how it behaves. I’m impressed. The UI is clear and clean (although the default Ubuntu brown clashes rather with my machine’s blue chassis) and everything runs zippily.

The best news of all is that it comes with Ubuntu, instead of the awful Linpus found on the Acer Aspire One (which still comes with Firefox 2.x). This means we get a modern, well-supported Linux distribution, that’s easily updateable and not reliant on whatever Acer doesn’t do with it (like updating).

Since I last posted here, there has been a lot of work done on Ubuntu, getting ready to ship next month. What has changed on my end is two things: The addition of a Dell Mini-9 to the mix, and getting Alpha 6 working on the Acer Aspire One (AA1)

What all of this is leading up to is that I am going to install another Linux distro on this netbook. I downloaded a Jaunty daily from March 24th (I think the Jaunty Beta is out by now so you might want to try that), and proceeded to install it on Aspire One

I learned so much within these past 24 hours just by wanting to tweak my own unit of the Aspire One. For one thing, it really is difficult to go by without a DVD drive.