Out and about with the Acer Aspire One and Ubuntu 9.04

Please bring your netbooks to the upright and locked position...

As I type this, I am winging my way to the San Francisco Bay Area. The Acer Aspire One (AA1) is in its natural habitat, i.e., a tray table on a crowded 737-800/900 (it does not say which...). All seats are filled, and there is no spare room for anything, much less a large laptop.

Since I last traveled with the Acer, I have made a few changes to the AA1. I upped the RAM to 1.5 GB, so that for a simple edit session with OpenOffice WebWriter, I am only using 11% of the memory. 38% is in use as cache, and the rest is just waiting for something to do. Don't get this wrong though. I am not sorry I upped the RAM, even it it was a real PITA relative to something like the Dell Mini-9 or even an Apple Macbook. If I could have gone 2GB, I would have. On the plane I am trying to conserve power and only have OpenOffice WebWriter open. On the ground, in a library, or at Starbucks I might have seven or eight things going at once, and then the RAM is handy. Besides, on any notebook computer, I like as big a disk cache as I can get to "speed up" (I.E. cache) the writes to the typical 4200 or 5400 RPM disk.

The other big change is that the netbook is running Ubuntu 9.04 GA, and while I experimented with it for a while, I have taken off the Ubuntu NetBook Remix (UNR). Mostly this was because I use Gnome desktops on all my other Linux systems right now, and while I like Netbook remix, I prefer to be able to window the desktop from time to time, even on the tiny netbook screen. Sure, I could use the desktop switcher to run over to classic mode, and then pop open a window and tell Maximus to stop maximizing everything.. but then I'd have to undo all that when I switched back. Ultimately I decided that the eye candy of NetBook Remix was not worth the hassle. I can always turn on Compiz if I want eye candy. What is still impressive to me is that this little unit can do the eye candy with Linux and not be noticeably slowed by it. I will probably replace the XP install on this unit with the GA of Windows 7 at some point, and it will be interesting to compare those two on the same box. Hard to see the Aero effects (even of the tweaked out Win7) working very well, but who knows? Linux can do composited graphics on a netbook. Surely MS won't leave that gauntlet tossed to the ground forever.

Heat and Noise

I experimented around with the 'acerhdf' kernel module, and it worked more or less as advertised, at least as far as keeping the CPU fan turned off most of the time, but I did not like how warm the AA1 became when it was installed, and the Wifi would start to act flakey after a while, so I disabled it for now. Fan runs more especially when on A/C power, but the systems stays cooler to the touch and the Wifi has not wigged out since. I assume without sensor data or thermal scans to back me up that the Atherosw Wifi card was getting too hot.

The main problem that the acerhdf was trying to address was how noisy the AA1 is, but if I am listening to music on the iPhone, or typing blog entries on an airplane, I can not hear the fan at all, so why take the chance of heat damage (further heat damage?). It was all really Dell Mini-9 envy anyway, because that little unit runs dead quiet: Does not even have a fan. Might as well face it: The AA1 is not the Dell, and if quiet is key, get the Mini-9.

A disappointment so far as it relates to heat is how few sensors appear to through ACPI to the lm-sensors code. I run the Gnome applet to monitor that and all I can see are the hard drive (42C right now...) and another one called 'temp1' out of 'libsensors', but it always reads 0C, so whatever that is it is not being accessed correctly. Whatever temp1 is, it did not even appear under Ubuntu 8.10, so I assume someone is working on getting the AA1 sensors mapped correctly. The best computer I have ever had in this regard was the IBM T41: It had a whole raft of instrumentation. CPU, Graphics, batteries, various memory, i/o busses.... the works. I gues you could make the case that the IBM was a top of the line (at the time) business computer, and the AA1 is a 300 USD or less consumer unit... but really: Do thyristors cost that much? Would one on top of the CPU and another on the Wifi card really jack the price up that much? If so, then how about Intel and Atheros just build that stuff in to everything they make?

Battery Park

When I bought the AA1, most of the units being sold had 3 cell batteries and 120GB hard drives. As I noted here in past posts about the AA1, the box my unit came in said it had 120GB HD, but it was really a 160GB, and that is de rigueur these days for the Netbooks with mechanical hard drives.

The 3 cell battery that came with the unit has 2200 mAh, and was good for about 1.8 hours of usage. Another reason I was interested in the acerhdf module was to keep the fan off as much as possible, and make the battery last as long as possible. 1.8 hours is barely more than one meeting, and does not even come close to one Austin to San Francisco plane trip, or one Houston to Alpine train trip.

Backing up for a sec to the heat thing: it should be noted that the fan does run less often when the AA1 is not plugged in. It appears to do a better job dialing itself down, and running with less heat when unplugged, It does this without any obvious slowing of the computer, so I am not sure why it does not manage its power/heat a little better when on A/C.

Acer had 6 cell batteries as an option for the AA1, but I had never seen one at retail back at my time of purchase and come to think of it I still have not. In fact, one Fry's ad at the time noted that they had the 120GB / 6 cell config, and when I went there they had the 160Gb / 3 cell config. Only way I have seen to get a 6 cell battery from Acer as the stock install is to order it that way. That is just my experience, as I have read accounts of people finding them in the wild.

No matter what, the 3 cell I had was just not going to get it done. Even my Macbook Pro from three years ago has longer battery life (and I have not been deeply impressed by the MacBook Pro's batteries, but that is another post). I decided to order a 9 cell, 7200 mAh replacement. There are several makes and models out there, and I found a manufacturer in the US that makes a 7800 mAh unit … right after I had ordered mine. Doh.

Mine came from Global Laptop Batteries, and it appears to be a decent unit. See picts. Ignore the Apple logo. That is just dreaming... or a Dell Mini-9 converted to OS.X. Not the Acer. It is a bad OS.X candidate, not even counting EULA's and all.

Overall the Global buying experience was mixed. The battery shipped almost immediately from Hong Kong, according to the USPS, but from then on it was never really clear where they were. The steep 20 USD in shipping did not buy any sort of enhanced tracking, and the battery was two weeks in arriving.

7200 mAh gives 6+ hours of power cord free time, especially here on the airplane with the Wifi off. Probably closer to seven, but I am not measuring it with any precision. I have used it for three hours messing around and writing this, and still have 4 hours runtime left according to the battery meter. Wonder what that 7800 mAh would do...

If this ebay deal is any good, it would run rings around the deal I got.

The 9 cell battery is tall, and I rather like that, as it angles the keyboard towards me on the tray. Much nicer to type on with the tall battery installed. Cuts less into my palms at the edges of the keyboard, as there is no real 'palmrest' on something this small.

It is a big battery: I have not weighed the AA1, but it is probably 3 pounds now. It is a good tradeoff, especially as the battery is shaped such that now the AA1 has a nifty handle on it, although before carrying it all over the place with the 'handle', make sure the battery lock slide is engaged! I'm just sayin'....

With the 'handle', any extra weight is not really noticeable, and I do tend to carry it around sans bag and power cord now, so I am probably saving weight overall.

Ubuntu 9.04 GA

Ubuntu 9.04 itself is a thing of beauty. The performance on the Acer is crisp until I start trying to manipulate photos. That can insert pauses and make the fan run a bit. Firefox, when pointed at a page with a lots of Web 2.0 stuff like Gmail will also crank up the fan, although the browser stays fast. I run the FF 3.5 beta 4 rather than the Ubuntu sourced 3.0.10 though. One of the things Beta 4 brings to the table is better speed in Javascript, which helps all the Google apps. Except one. Google Gears is not yet updated to support it, so I can not run offline Gmail or Docs without reverting to 3.0.10. No problem: I have both Firefox versions installed if needed.

One app that does not run well is Google Earth. it just needs more CPU/graphics mojo than this little Netbook has. Maybe a Linux native version would work better, but not this boxed WINE version.

With 1.5 GB of RAM, having both browsers running, plus OpenOffice , Rhythmbox (for Internet Radio) , and a few other things is no problem. Everything launches very quickly as well, and relaunches from cache are even better. OpenOffice has been rapped over the years for its slow initialization, but I just re-launched the WebWriter and it came up in 3 seconds. Netbooks may be minimal hardware by todays standards, but Linux is still lean and mean enough to make them seem pretty crisp most of the time... as long as you are not running the a mini-9 with Dells default LPIA Ubuntu 8.04 build... You listening out there Dell?

Aside: I have read that Win7's most basic version will limit one to only running three things at once. With Ubuntu 9.04 on either the Acer of the Dell Mini-9 with its 2GB, I have never hit the limit for how many apps I can open. Either machine stays responsive well past three things running at once. That limit is clearly not being imposed by the hardware. In my testing of Win7 Beta I have seen that while it is faster than Vista, it is slower than XP SP3. Win7 RC is supposed to be faster than the Beta, So I assume that the limit is just there to make people want to install XP SP3 again.....

Do You See What I See?

Even Internet video does not work too bad on this AA1. With Flash 10 installed, I can watch Hulu or MSNBC's news programs while on the road. The screen is bright and beautiful, the contrast ratio better than the new MacBook (but not the new Macbook Pro...), the wide screen perfect for movies. This puts a lie to the recent statement by Apple that Netbooks are 'junky'. Don't believe me: Go in to the Apple store. Fire up iPhoto on a Macbook, and a Macbook Pro. Navigate to the same picture on both, and one with good contrast and lots of black. The Macbook.. the brand new cadillac carved from a block of aluminum Macbook... has dark gray on the screen rather than black. Sorry: no room to be calling Netbooks junky till your own house is in order there Apple.

Video is the leading edge of the Netbooks 1.6 Ghz Atom CPU though: pretty much nothing else can be happening on the computer if you want the video to be smooth. When in a hotel room on the road, the little AA1 is perfect for sitting in the bad and watch programming till ready for sleep. Here is a place where the AA1 appears to slightly exceed the Dell Mini-9.

AA1 to Dell Mini-9 Comparisons

I can watch video on the Mini-9 (when my wife lets me see it) as well, but its screen does not appear to be quite as bright, and since the unit is fanless it feels like it dials itself down to stay cool far faster. It may just be that the Dells stock SSD is just slower. I am looking at the high performance (appears to be mostly from RunCore) and larger stock speed SSD's available for the 9 because while Ubuntu 9.04 does fit in the 2GB SSD, it leaves little room for growth or patching. The SSD price points are shifting so quickly right now it is hard to determine what the best deal is. As i write this, a 32Gb SSD at stock speed is about 80USD, and a RunCore high speed SSD is about 130USD. The main difference is that the write speeds are about 4x faster. Read speeds are a tiny bit slower. For standard writing and web browsing, I am not sure the performance is worth the price.

One of the things I like to use the AA1 for is to listen to Internet Radio. Mostly stations like WBUR, KQED, or Air America, While Rythmbox is a great app for that, the AA1 speakers suck rocks. Here is another place where the Dell exceeds it, as it has tiny but fairly usable speakers at the base of the monitor, facing forward towards the listener. If you are going to have a fat bezel around a monitor, why not use it for something? What a terrific idea! Plenty of room on the Acer monitor bezel for speakers... but no. Music on the 9 is passable as long as it is not serious listening, just low volume background. 'All Things Considered' or 'The Rachel Maddow Show', being mostly speaking voice, come through fine on the Mini-9.

The AA1 by contrast has speakers mounted facing downwards, just under the 'palm rest', and the 9 cell battery tips the unit forward, closing out some of the air space between the speakers and whatever the AA1 is sitting on. I invested 10 dollars in a pair of battery powered speakers, and while they are not great, they are portable, tuck in luggage nicely, and bring the AA1's sound back to at least as good as the Dell mini-9's. They also will run off the USB port for power, so the batteries inside the speakers last a good long while, even though they are AAA size. For really good sound, I have the Altec Lansing portable speakers that I use with my iPod.

Back to Ubuntu

One of Ubuntu 9.04's new features is the unified message center. It took me a bit to get used to that, especially as the NetManager icon sits in it, and when I upgraded one of my test machines to 9.04 I had lost the icon for the NetManager out of the Gnome toolbar, and it was driving my nuts trying to figure out how to get it back. FWIW, should this happen to you, it is called the 'Notification AREA' in the 'add to panel dialog (right click on tool bar to access). Ubuntu also moved the power down / suspend / hibernate button to the notification area from the 'system' menu. Took me a couple times to figure that out. Now that I know what it is, what has been centralized there I like it. It is a very clean way to present all of these functions. Avahi Autodiscover reports what it finds there as well.

Herein lies another reason I switched back to the classic menus from the Ubuntu NetBook-Remix. I keep my tool bar stocked with all sorts of applets: launchers for terminal and Firefox, remote console access, sensor and system performance data, weather, and so forth. NetBook-Remix only displays some of these things, because it re-tasks part of the toolbar for the top of the currently focused window. I get it. It makes great use of the screen real estate, and lets the focused app fill the screen. If I were building a NetBook for a Linux neophyte, I would install NetBook Remix as the default. When I handed the Mini-9 over to my wife, I had NetBook-Remix as the default in fact. It was the first thing she turned off. I assumed that, since she is primarily a Mac user these days she would like UNR better than Gnome. Nope. Her UNIX system programmer genes reasserted themselves immediately. She wanted multiple windows available. She wanted drag and drop to the desktop. UNR was making everything too simple. Oh well. The desktop switcher makes short work of flipping back and forth, though I note she never does. She has left Maximus intact though.

One of the funny things about the AA1 (and probably most netbooks right now) is how often when I am using it out and about at someplace like Starbucks or Taco Bell that people stop and ask me questions about it.

• How well does it work?

• Which one do you have?

• Did you look at any others?

• Are you glad you got it?

• Was it worth the price

• How well does Linux work on it?


• Can you really use Linux to replace Windows?

It's kind of fun to be able to talk about it with people, and, unlike some things, no one appears to find you too geeky or perhaps even a little elitist (a unfortunate common reaction to an Apple MBP). People seem to get that this is a computer that almost anyone can afford. In fact, based on some of the conversations I have had recently, I think there is a great unmeasured consumer group out there: Those who have wanted computers but never thought they could afford one before now. Those for whom this will be not be an ancillary, special purpose computer, but their first and only computer.

Ubuntu 9.04 Alpha 6, the Acer and the Dell

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)

The Dell Mini-9

The Dell Mini-9 came into my hands, albeit briefly, last week. I bought it as a gift for my wife, although she does not know it yet. It shipped with Ubuntu 8.04.1, and a "special" low power version of it at that: All the complaints I have seen about the speed of the Mini-9 can be traced directly back other fact that it is *not* an I3/4/686 version of the binaries, but a special compile for the low power version of the Atom called "lpia". It is not horribly slow at that, but it is not great ether. The Acer with Mint 5 on it ran rings around it side by side, and the Dell has 2GB where the Acer has 1.5 GB. Neither are memory constrained, yet the Dell was slower.

Backing up for a second: the Mini-9 came with 512MB, and when I plopped in the 2GB chip, it made very little difference to the speed. A very undramatic upgrade. The good news there is that Linux still runs great in 512MB....

The "lpia" version of the Ubuntu 8.04.1 has another problem: Not much appears to be compiled for it, so if you go into a tool like "Synaptic" and try to add things, rather than the 26,000 some odd packages, that are far less: Forgot to count. Already installed over it. Worse, even with software sources set to do all versions, not just LTS (System / Administration / Software Sources) it still would not update to 8.10.... Because Dell has not done an lpia version of 8.10 yet and released it. The Atom can run X86, so lpia had to go.

For all the trouble with software upgrades, the Dell beats the pants off the Acer for hardware upgrades: The hatch on the bottom opens with two screws, and there is the memory slot, the SSD slot, the WIFI slot, and an empty one labeled WWAN on the mainboard silkscreen. The Acer required taking nearly the whole thing apart to get at the same bits.

Then there is that capability to take a 2GB memory chip (in my case a Patriot PSD22G8002S, or PC-2-6400 800 Mhz). The BIOS on the Acer can only take a 1GB unit. Phooey. And now I have another 512 MB chip to find some use for. Someone needs to make chip stackers again....

The next upgrade the Mini-9 will get will be to replace the 4GB SSD. I tried to get one from Fry's, but all they had were the full length, EEPC style units. The Dell has a half length mini-PCI slot. A quick look around the Internet, and it appears I won't have any problem finding something. Probably a 32GB SSD. Linux does not need that space: It fits easily inside of the 4GB, but as I learned, it is really easier to keep /home on the SSD too and sync it to the SD or USD Flash drives later for backup. More on that in a sec. Coming from the Acer's 160GB moving-parts-hard-drive, it is a very different world.

I created a USB stick with Ubuntu Alpha 6 on it (same procedure as in "Mint 6 RC1 on the Acer Aspire One") and booted the Mini-9 off it. My first pass was to put in a 2GB SD card and make that /home, but that caused all sorts of issues with suspend / resume and reboots, where apparently the MMC driver was not being installed soon enough in the boot so that /home was not available. Grrr.

One thing about the Ubuntu 9.04 installer: They changed the Time Zone selector. Much much much better. Now you just see the 24 time zones. Neat world map too. Thank you Ubuntu folks!

I guess I could take the mount of the SD card (/dev/mmcblk0p1) out of the /etc/fstab and put it in rc.local or something as a mount, so that everything would be up first, but I'll let my wife figure that out. I am not really sure what she'll do with this unit. Another option would just be to have Conduit (very nifty app!) sync the SSD version of /home with the SD card from time to time.

Even though the Dell has a Broadcom Wifi card, Linux loaded it up and it worked right out of the box: In fact, everything did. Install was dead easy if slightly slower than I would have expected. SSD's are slow on write.

I went ahead and installed the Netbook-Remix while I was at it to see how that compared to the Netbook desktop that Dell had provided on the default 8.04.1 install. The answer was that the Ubuntu Netbook stuff is IMHO far better. If nothing else, faster since it is X86, not lpia. But I liked the whole setup better: I imagine Dell will at least think about using the Distro default version at some point rather than continuing to maintain their own version of a desktop, whenever they get around to supporting 9.04.

Turn off Compiz if you use the Netbook desktop. Compiz will load by default, and even works on the little netbook fairly quickly, but the Netbook launcher and Compiz hate each other. Very frakkin ugly.

I tweaked out the Mini 9, and basically have it ready to give to my wife, so now I have to quit playing with it. Its bad enough I opened her present I guess, but Ubuntu 8.04.1 really had to come off there first, or she would have thought the Mini-9 was not so frelling great.

There: A Farscape and BattleStar word, and not half done! Geek Points!

Acer Aspire One and A6

The AA1 may not be as easy to upgrade, hardware-wise, as the Dell, but it is still a nifty little unit. There are two things about it that beat the Dell: The screen is better a little better (brighter, deeper colors), and I like the keyboard better. The AA1 keyboard has slightly smaller keytops, because it has 6 rows of keys rather than five. The Mini-9 drops the PF key row, and embeds those as fn- keys (Like fn-a is F1) in the regular keyboard. Further the Mini-9 messes around with where the single and double quotes are, and the vertical bar, which I use all the time on Linux, is also a fn- type key. PF11 and PF12 are just gone. The Mini-9 BIOS uses regular letters at boot to control getting into setup or changing the boot order.

I liked that the keys were a little bigger on the Dell, so while I prefer the Acer, I could live with the Dell. it will be interesting to see how my wife, a blindingly fast touch typist, adapts to the Dell.

The Acer has my normally prefered Atheros Wifi card, but with Ubuntu and 8.10 and the mess around the "ath5k" drivers that has actually favored the Dells Broadcom chipset. Weird.

Once I had the Dell dialed in with Ubuntu 9.04 A6 and the new Netbook desktop, I liked it so much I wanted the exact same thing on my Acer. As I wrote here back in January about Alpha 3 ("Ubuntu 9.04 Alpha 3 on the Acer Aspire One... briefly"), the Wifi mess was still not sorted, but I was ready to try again. After all, GA is next month! This had to be close I thought.

It is, but it was not easy like the Dell.

I booted the USB, and installed Ubuntu 9.04 A6 for the second time. It installed more quickly than on the Dell, because the SSD drive is slower on writes than the round-and-brown of the Acer. Actually, last time I took apart a disk drive, the platters were silver now, not brown. But I digress...

It booted up, and my misery started. There were two issues, but it took me a while to find them:

1) acer_wmi module has to be blacklisted, or you can not use the Gnome desktop network widget for connecting to Wifi. I had to hand code 'iwconfig' statements at command line till I figure that out. No biggie, but the widget is so much better.

2) And this is the one that really killed me: For reasons I do not know, my repository sources were set to default to Chile. I could not figure out why Synaptic / apt-get update were taking so long to refresh, and why I could only see about 6,000 packages after they had refreshed. It was making me crazy! Lost at least a day to this. The reason I lost part of this time was that until I found the note on an Ubuntu forum about blacklisting acer_wmi I thought I was fighting a network problem with the ath5k stuff still.

As an aside: I am not sure not that I look at it that the problem I was having with the AA1 and the Wifi with Alpha 3 was not the "acer_wmi" thing. I did not dig that deeply then. This time I was determined to make it work.

Next up, the AA1 fan runs way more than it used to under Mint 6. More like the way it does under XP. I do not know why yet. I loaded up "powertop" and had it crank back the write-back settings, and that seemed to help, but it still runs more than it used to. It might be that without the acer-wmi loaded something is not connecting up in power management, but if so, I'll just wait for that to be fixed. I love the Wifi widget too much to lose it. The fan shuts off when the system is unplugged, so it also appears that it is just staying CPU cranked up when it has bounteous electrons.

It all seems so noisy compared to the dead-quiet Mini-9.

The battery life on the AA1 is not great either, and about 2 hours, but it never has been. The battery is just too small. The Dell has a 4-Cell unit, and it good for about twice as much time as the 2-Cell Acer. I should have bought the 4-Cell Acer I guess: I am looking in the after-market at a couple options. The AA1 2-Cell has got to go. It was amazing how much nicer it was to carry around the Mini-9 and not be worried about it running out of power during the day.

Because the AA1 had Mint 6 and a full Gnome desktop on it, I had to clean up the Gnome config files to get the Netbook desktop to look right: Rather than spend a great deal of time thinking about it, I just torched .gconf, .gconfd, .gnome2, and .gnome_private, and restarted Gnome, and the Netbook desktop appeared.

Well, once I turned off Compiz. Boy those two hate each other!

While waiting about today for some lunch, I wrote part of this post on the AA1 in the text editor (since Bloggers interpretation of HTML is kinda sucky) and it was really nice to have the AA1 up on Ubuntu 9.04 with the Netbook desktop. Fast, full featured, and if the usage is slightly different, much easier once used to it on the 1024x600 screen. Several people stopped by to ask about the unit and see how it worked... although one of them was because I have an Apple sticker on the lid. That would be nice: an Apple Netbook. Everything I have read says that is not going to happen though. In the meantime, this all works pretty well. Finally.

Next upgrade to the AA1? I am guessing Mint 7.