Category: Linux

I’ve been pleased with my little 64-bit Linux box that is my Acer Aspire Revo, UK£149 from Play.com.Happily running Debian Lenny (of course), and playing with MythTV, I now also have a small radio-based keyboard & touch pad for it.

There doesn’t seem to be any sign of an Intel Atom 330 dual-core in the UK yet either, though some reports talk of this beast being available in Taiwan now and of a re-branded unit in the US. So while this is take a little longer than the optimistic “early June” I saw on one site months ago, I continue to play with my single-hyper-thread-based Revo.

What has been surprising is how there doesn’t seem to be any retailer in the UK who now have stock on hand (of the Linux version) ready to ship of these. Some sites claim “sold out” and “exhausted supply lines”. I’m a little unsure – if it was that much of a success (which I hope is true), then where is all the supporting documentation and support information on the official Acer corporate web site? Its almost as if it has been orphaned from its creator! Acer doesn’t mention it in the UK or US sites.

Meanwhile, I have seen main-stream the Channel 5 (UK TV station) in-house geek-fest that is The Gadget Show give away a Revo in their weekly prize pool.

I haven’t had any response from Acer to my enquiries for the availability of these units. I wish them success with the Revo – for me it’s an Asus Eebox killer, simply by the integrated HDMI, and cheap price (no MS Windows tax). I’d buy a second (and possibly a third) if there were supplies at the price I purchased (UK£149), and some visibility on the Atom 330 dual-core model.

It’s September now; the Atom 230 model has been out for 4 months. Acer, have all your UK based supplies of the Revo run out? Where is the dual-core model?

Some fan sites are now around: AcerAspireRevo.com, etc. Home Theatre PC sites are all a-twitter (!) with talk of this unit.

I finally purchased an Acer Aspire Revo 3600. The one with the Atom 230 single core hyper-thread CPU. Naturally I opted for the Linux based version for just £149 or so from Play.com.

Strangely when I look at Play.com now, they don’t have any of the Linux versions available; they had been putting the price up-and-down by £10, but now the option is gone completely. Hopefully they’re not doing what Asus did; use Linux to enter the market, and then ditch it just when the product starts to get traction.

The box arrived on time (before other vendors had stock in their supply chains). I un-boxed it and was pleased to see the included mini-keyboard and mouse, those would have been equally happy to save £10 for these off the price. Nice touch having a reference to the GPL on an included page in the packing material, along with the VESA mount.

Interestingly, this option should have had an 8 GB SSD drive, but was (as I had seen elsewhere) a 160 GB SATA disk drive. Not too bad.

The initial “Splashtop” was hideously limited in its abilities. It basically just had Skype, a basic browser, and a link to install “your operating system”, which only offered the option to install Microsoft Windows.

Luckily you can disable the splash screens, boto from USB, and get a real distribution installed. I am running Debian AMD64 port. True 64 bit computing on a bargain basement priced piece of kit that performs well.

And I am pleased that I did. I have installed the NVidia driver. The HDMI video and audio just work, but new for me was actually having to chose which audio output I want to use.

I’ve only had SD video files to far, and they play back on my 720p Samsung LCT TV with no problems at all. Likewise, using GLSlideshow for pictures is also smooth. In fact, I think this is the perfect set top box. I’ve experimented with MythTV, Video transcoding, etc, and it just seems happy with all these tasks.

I have now seen that in Germany there is an Atom 330 (dual core) version now available. Yay, even better.But I suppose I could always play with CUDA on this system to access the GPU and do some heavy processing!

My only improvements that I could suggest now would be:

• Drop the keyboard and mouse; drop the price or spend that difference on embedded bluetooth!
• Put a usable distribution no the disk of the Linux version – don’t leave it blank
• Ask NVidia to truly open source their Linux driver! Again!
• Ask Skype to produce a 64 bit Linux version of their client, or open source their client completely

Lastly, the must have accessories I am have or am contemplating:

• USB DVB tuner (freeview TV)
• USB Infrared reciever
• USB Video webcam
• USB RFID reader (I have the Phidgets, but it doesn’t read Oyster serial numbers – different frequencies)
• USB Bluetooth adaptor
• Blueray drive

The SD card reader can read the 16 GB memory cards that I use in my Sony HDD video camera, and the system is good enough to playback the 1080p AVCHD MPEG Transport Stream (MTS) video files it produces. Finally; the video camera was looking a little lame give that the olde-worlde HP NC6120 I had couldn’t read the 16 GB cards (no firmware updates to enable this??), and wasn’t fast enough to playback the video files from the smaller capacity SD cards.

All up, I am pleased with this unit. Cheaper than the Asus Eeeboxes I was looking at, and with HDMI built in! Perfect. Highly recommended, but some fiddling to get it going.

The Settop market is heating up; Asus and Acer are both coming to market with Atom A330 dual-core (2 x 1.6 GHz) low voltage systems, with discrete graphics and HDMI output, amongst other interfaces.

I’ve been delaying buying one of these for some time, waiting for one to come along at the right price point. I want to run Linux on it; I don’t want to run Windows + Antivirus – that just kills performance. Asus seem to be doing all they can to now drop Linux from their range; Acer is still there, with their Aspire Revo single-core Atom 230 unit sitting around UK£149 — UK£159 (inc VAT, see Play.com).

The features are there; but if only it can break the psychological UK£100 barrier, it can then be an impulse purchase!

When the A330 dual-core units hits, it looks like that model of Aspire Revo will be up against the Asus B208 unit – but with the advantage that Acer is still selling a Linux based unit, so no Microsoft tax.