Scribblings of a Techie
All I.T. related rants/posts.
Predictably with Windows 7 almost out (22nd Oct), Acer have a few more models of the Revo in retailers lists: “Acer Revo 3601 Atom 330 Dual Core 4gb 500gb Windows 7 Premium” for £302 inc VAT from Ballicom UK, for example.
Sadly, none of the Dual-core Linux ones have actually started shipping in the UK yet; it’s been weeks now since they were announced!
Alan Turning is one of the pioneers of the computing industry, working at “Station X”, Bletchly Park during the 2nd World War cracking the Engima codes that helped shorten the war by 2 years.
However as a gay man in the 1940s, he was prosecuted under what is now antiquated, discriminatory laws, and forced by the government to undergo chemical castration. Turning committed suicide in 1954. He was never public recognised for his efforts.
However, a public petition is now underway, with almost 30,000 signatures on it at this stage, to ensure he is given official recognition for his work.
Turing stands as one of the great Computing giants of Britain, along with Sir Tim Berners-Lee (WWW), Lovelace (ADA), etc.
Here is the product number, or what looks like it, for the Dual-Core Atom 330 Linux edition of the Acer Aspire Revo: 92.NVDYZ.UI0. Finally!
It appears there are three retailers in the UK listing this right now:
None of these appear to have any stock, but this is a good sign that soon we will have dual-core goodness without having to buy a Microsoft license!
Check out more Revo stuff on the blog site AcerAspireRevo.com.
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:
Lastly, the must have accessories I am have or am contemplating:
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.