As you may or may not have noticed there have been no new posts or articles for a while, and there won't be any, as the site is on a hiatus. This is the last update.

The FO200, announced recently, is old news now, but I'm still posting about it for the sake of completeness. It's the first AA1 to use an AMD processor and chipset. The AMD L310 processor with two cores at 1.2GHz is quite a bit faster than the Intel Atom used so far. So is the AMD M780G chipset with integrated Radeon HD3200 graphics core, which not only decodes HD video but also runs older or less graphics intensive games at a decent framerate.

Also new is the proprietary ATI XGP interface, basically an external PCIe port, which enables connecting of an external graphics card. Acer is currently preparing an encased Radeon HD4670 for that purpose. It's not the fastest card, and probably not very convenient to carry around in addition to the FO200 itself either.

Other features are the already familiar 11.6 inch screen with 1366x768 resolution, all the common ports and connectivity options of the previous iterations, but no HDMI port, and 5h battery life. It only ships with Windows 7 which is why it's not available yet.

It's not an Acer Aspire One, but it's close enough.

You could however easily mistake it for the Aspire One 751, as it's based on the same chassis with a few modifications. It also shares the 11.6 inch screen with 1366x768 resolution. But almost everything else is inherited from the Timeline series.

Like the Intel ULV SU3500 1.4GHz processor, which is at least twice as fast as any current Intel Atom processor. Or the Intel GS45 Express Chipset, with integrated Intel GMA 4500MHD graphics core and hardware accelerated decoding of HD video. Unlike other chipsets commonly used in netbooks it supports up to 4GB of RAM.

Other features and components: HDMI, S/PDIF, Gigabit LAN, Intel 802.11a/b/g/n WLAN, optional 3G and optional Bluetooth 2.1+EDR support. Not to forget 8h battery life. Windows Vista Home Premium is pre-installed, with the option for a free upgrade to Windows 7 once it's released in October.

The remaining unknown variable is the price. It obviously cannot and will not be priced like an Acer Aspire One, but it does fit nicely into the price segment between the Aspire One 751 and the Aspire Timeline 3810T.

Google Chrome is an internet browser based on WebKit. Which is the same open source browser engine that's being used by Apple Safari. Chrome also features a new JavaScript engine called V8. The first beta version of Chrome for Windows was released in September last year, and the development team has been working on Linux and Mac ports since.

There is no Google Chrome for Linux yet, and the first beta version is probably still a few weeks away, but Google has been uploading development snapshots of Chromium for Linux since March. Chromium is the open source project behind Chrome and is basically Chrome without the Google branding. It has reached a point now where it's useable and quite stable.





The first thing you'll notice when using Chromium is that it's quite fast and lightweight. To confirm the initial impression I selected a few browser benchmarks and compared Firefox 3.5b4 with Chromium. The new TraceMonkey JavaScript engine, that was supposed to regain the performance crown for Mozilla, is already enabled by default in the latest Firefox beta version. All tests have been run on an Acer Aspire One A110 with Intel Atom N270 processor.

The V8 Benchmark Suite is used by Google to finetune JavaScript performance. Firefox only scores 54 while Chromium scores 733, which certainly is impressive, despite not being a fair comparison.

A more neutral benchmark suite is the SunSpider JavaScript Benchmark. The authors are the WebKit developers, but Mozilla also uses it for Firefox benchmarks. Chromium completes the tests in 38.20 seconds while Firefox needs 81.42 seconds. You can compare the Chromium results here, and the Firefox results here.

Futuremark Peacekeeper is probably the only benchmark suite that's completely neutral, as all tests mimic functions commonly used by the most popular websites. Chromium scores 659 and Firefox 220 points. More details are in the screenshots below, but note that the bars use a different reference value and are a bit misleading.





The results confirm that Chromium is very fast. And it hasn't even entered beta phase yet. Google further claims that no work on performance optimization has been done so far at all. The benchmarks do also not show other performance advantages Chromium has over Firefox. One such advantage is that Chromium, unlike Firefox, is multithreaded.

Once a final version is released Google Chrome should become the first choice for netbooks running Linux. What currently makes Firefox the browser of choice for many are useful extensions, which Google Chrome lacks. Google already announced plans to add support for extensions, but it's probably still a few months away.

If you're eager to try Chromium yourself, and are using a recent version of a major Linux distribution like Ubuntu or Fedora, you can just use one of the unofficial repositories. Alternatively download the latest snapshot directly from Google here, or distribution specific packages here.

It's not so simple if you're using the pre-installed Linux on the Acer Aspire One. Chromium requires more recent libraries than already installed, and yum cannot update them due to unresolved dependencies. But you can download and extract the required libraries and make Chromium use them, without interfering with the already installed system libraries.

sudo mkdir -pm 777 /opt/chrome-linux/libs
cd /opt/chrome-linux/libs

wget http://koji.fedoraproject.org/packages/gcc/4.3.2/7/i386/libstdc++-4.3.2-7.i386.rpm
wget http://mirrors.kernel.org/fedora/updates/9/i386.newkey/nspr-4.7.3-1.1.fc9.i386.rpm
wget http://mirrors.kernel.org/fedora/updates/9/i386.newkey/nss-3.12.2.0-3.fc9.i386.rpm
wget http://mirrors.kernel.org/fedora/updates/9/i386.newkey/pango-1.20.4-1.fc9.i386.rpm
wget http://koji.fedoraproject.org/packages/cairo/1.6.4/1.fc9/i386/cairo-1.6.4-1.fc9.i386.rpm
wget http://mirrors.eu.kernel.org/fedora/updates/10/i386/pixman-0.12.0-3.fc10.i386.rpm

for i in `ls *rpm`; do rpm2cpio $i | cpio -idv; done; mv lib/* usr/lib/* $PWD
for i in `ls lib*so`; do ln -s $i $i.0d; ln -s $i $i.1d; done

cat << 'EOF' > /opt/chrome-linux/libs/chrome.sh
#!/bin/sh
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/opt/chrome-linux/libs:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH
/opt/chrome-linux/chrome
EOF

chmod 755 /opt/chrome-linux/libs/chrome.sh

Download Chromium and extract it.

wget -N http://build.chromium.org/buildbot/continuous/linux/LATEST/chrome-linux.zip

sudo unzip -o chrome-linux.zip -d /opt
sudo chown -R user /opt/chrome-linux

Open an editor.

sudo mousepad /usr/share/applications/chromium.desktop

Paste the following lines into the editor and save the file.

[Desktop Entry]
Name=Chromium
Comment=Chromium
Exec=/opt/chrome-linux/libs/chrome.sh
Icon=/opt/chrome-linux/chrome.png
Terminal=false
Type=Application

Download an icon and add it to the desktop.

wget http://src.chromium.org/svn/trunk/src/chrome/app/theme/chromium/product_logo_256.png

mv product_logo_256.png /opt/chrome-linux/chrome.png
dca add 10 "file='/usr/share/applications/chromium.desktop'"

To update Chromium just re-download and extract it. Personal settings are kept in the home directory and will be preserved. A new snapshot is usually uploaded every few hours, so it's a bit pointless to try and keep up with it. The latest build number is displayed here.

Moblin is a Linux distribution specifically designed and optimized for netbooks and mobile devices. It is developed by Intel and has recently been put under the umbrella of the Linux Foundation. What makes it different compared to other distributions is its user interface with an emphasis, according to Intel, on enjoying media, interacting with social networks and the internet. A nice introduction movie is available here. A few screenshots are below.







Only a Live Image is currently available for download, which can easily be installed to an USB drive. To do so plug the USB drive in and wait till it's mounted, only to then unmount it with the following command.

sudo umount /dev/sdb1

Download the image.

wget http://mirrors.kernel.org/moblin/releases/test/beta//images/LATEST

Write the image to the USB drive. Note that all data will be overwritten.

sudo dd if=LATEST of=/dev/sdb

Reboot, press F12 to open the boot menu and select the USB drive. Moblin boots in about 20 seconds. To enable WLAN open the network manager, indicated by the symbol in the upper right corner, and select a connection. You may occasionally get an error message and a prompt to submit an error report to the developers. It is still a beta version, so that's not unusual.

Another Aspire One, but this one is quite a bit different.

Not so much on the outside, as the chassis is apparently based on the D150. It also shares the same internal specifications, but has some additional components. The screen size is 10.1" still, but the resolution was increased to 1280x720 with a 16:9 aspect ratio. The Intel Atom N280 however cannot reliably decode H.264 or HD video in general at that resolution, that's why it's supported by the Quartics QV1721 Multimedia Coprocessor. It does accelerate decoding and encoding(!) of H.264 and other codecs, and also adds hardware scaling and filtering. You can find detailed information about it here.

Another addition is quite unusual. Acer added an optical disc drive, but not a regular one like ASUS did with the EEE 1004DN. Instead they opted for Vmedia, which are basically tiny Blu-Ray discs, protected in a plastic cartridge, with a diameter of only 32mm (Blu-Ray: 120mm) and a capacity of up to 2GB. More information is available here. If you don't notice the loading mechanism for the discs: it's on the left, indicated by the Vmedia logo.

It certainly is an interesting new entry in their netbook line, but the marketing name was probably not chosen wisely. It can easily be confused with the 751, which is a completely different machine.

The newest version of OpenOffice was released today. An overview of all new features and improvements is available here. You can use the instructions if you're still using the pre-installed version 2.3 or already upgraded to 3.0 or 3.0.1 as described here.

Uninstall the old version, but backup the custom icons first.

sudo cp /usr/share/icons/hicolor/48x48/apps/openofficeorg-* $HOME
sudo yum remove openoffice\*

Download the new version from an official mirror, selected randomly by the bouncer. If you're assigned a slow mirror just hit Ctrl+C to cancel the download and run the command again. The already partially downloaded file will be overwritten. You can edit the lang variable, en-US in this case, to your preferred language. A list of all languages is available here. Also note that the command below is split into two lines due to its length. Just paste both lines into the terminal at once to automatically join them. Alternatively you can remove the \ at the end of the first line and join them yourself.

wget "http://openoffice.bouncer.osuosl.org/?product=OpenOffice.org\
&os=linuxintel&lang=en-US&version=3.1.1" -O OOo_3.1.1_LinuxIntel_install.tar.gz

Extract the file and install the RPMs, which takes a while.

tar -zxf OOo_3.1.1_LinuxIntel_install.tar.gz
sudo rpm -U OOO310*/RPMS/o*
sudo rpm -U OOO310*/RPMS/desktop-integration/openoffice.org3.1-redhat*

Restore the icons and modify a few files.

sudo mv $HOME/openofficeorg-* /usr/share/icons/hicolor/48x48/apps
sudo gtk-update-icon-cache -f /usr/share/icons/hicolor

sed 's/-1.9/3/g' -i $HOME/.config/xfce4/desktop/group-app.xml
sudo sed 's/org3-/org-/;s/%U//' -i /usr/share/applications/openoffice.org3-{c,i,w}*

Reboot.

Acer updated the BIOS for the original AA1, but there is hardly a reason to get excited about it. The only change documented in the release notes is related to the PXE boot feature of the LAN controller. Acer is apparently using the slightly updated RTL8103E now, instead of the previous RTL8102E, and they just updated the PXE ROM to support it.

If you're not using the PXE boot functionality or have a model with the older LAN controller there is no reason to update the BIOS at all. You can check it in the device manager in Windows, or with the following command in Linux.

sudo lspci | grep RTL810

On the other hand there is also no reason to not update the BIOS, unless you're using the alternative BIOS with the restored brightness table. You can download the new BIOS from here. If you haven't prepared a bootable USB drive yet you can read how to do so here.

The BIOS has also been released by Acer Taiwan now, but without the release notes, and is available for download here.