Acer Bets Big On Linux

Stony Stevenson writes to tell us IT News is reporting that Acer is betting big on Linux, looking to push Tux on many of their upcoming laptops and netbooks. "The company is already heavily promoting Linux for its low cost ultra-portable netbook range out later this year, but senior staff have said that Acer will also push Linux on its laptops. [...] Acer sees two killer apps with Linux on computers: operation and cost. Its flavour of Linux will boot in 15 seconds compared to minutes for Windows, and the open source operating system can extend battery life from five to seven hours."

I'm not suprised

[Anonymous Coward]

Having experienced Vista on a $500 Acer laptop (click, wait several minutes, click, repeat ad nauseum.) I can well understand why they are going with Linux. Vista is completely unusable on these machines!

Re:do what now?

[Tubal-Cain]

Ubuntu takes ~1.75 minutes to boot on my laptop and Vista a little longer.

Battery Life

[Facetious]

the open source operating system can extend battery life from five to seven hours

Here I sit, typing on my Ubuntu running Acer TravelMate 4674WLMi that won't last two hours unplugged. I really hope the above quoted sentence is true.

Here's the article :D

[Anonymous Coward]

Acer has stated that it will be pushing Linux aggressively on its laptops and netbooks..

The company is already heavily promoting Linux for its low cost ultra-portable netbook range out later this year, but senior staff have said that Acer will also push Linux on its laptops.

Acer has already started selling Linux in its Media PC business but this should now spread, according to Gianpiero Morbello, vice president of marketing and brand at Acer.

"We have shifted towards Linux because of Microsoft," he said. "Microsoft has a lot of power and it is going to be difficult, but we will be working hard to develop the Linux market."

Acer sees two killer apps with Linux on computers: operation and cost. Its flavour of Linux will boot in 15 seconds compared to minutes for Windows, and the open source operating system can extend battery life from five to seven hours.

At the same time, the company expects that the price differential of Linux will make the offering attractive for consumers at the low-cost end of the market.

"Microsoft's operating system typically costs around £50 per unit," said David Drummond, UK managing director at Acer. "On a £1,000 PC that is peanuts, but on a £200 computer it is a major issue."

Re:Operation and Cost?

[Creepy Crawler]

What's killer for me is that mplayer is on there in full working order.

I've found that I can throw ANY format I want at it, and it can always create OGM's, MPG's, or AVI's. No if's and's or but's from it. It just works.

Since there's multiple video decoders and renderers, I can play everything even if some video (like... video from the bad div3 hacked up codec) doesnt play on one player.

In windows world, if it crashes on 1 program, it will crash on another (since they almost all use the windows codec system).

Re:do what now?

[Anonymous Coward]

I wish it was only 30 seconds on my machine. My work laptop is a couple year old Dell D610 (Pentium M, 1.83 Ghz with two gigs of ram) and it takes 4 - 5 minutes for it to boot up to a state where I can lanuch an app. Personally, I blame all the shit that Global IT has running on startup (Symantic protection agent, norton antivirus, asset management, etc.)

Re:Operation and Cost?

[TheLinuxSRC]

Yes there is. [gimpshop.com] However, from what I understand the bigger problem is that GIMP doesnt understand CMYK color formats.. though I could be wrong there.

Re:Operation and Cost?

[Red Alastor]

Photoshop CS2 installs perfectly under Wine and they are working on CS3.

Re:Operation and Cost?

[websitebroke]

Yeah, no CMYK or 16 bit TIFF support. Supposedly, this will be changing soon. Otherwise, I'm perfectly happy with GIMP

Re:Acer. Uh uhuh.

[Randon]

Actually, I bought that Acer laptop at CC for (450.00 I think) and have been very happy with it for the money--no problems for the year I've had it (except that the internal wifi card won't work under Linux). The bluetooth switch is useless (it works on their high end laptops), but the wifi hardware switch has come in handy a couple of times when I've had to boot Vista but wanted to keep Vista off the network. As far as I can tell, the switches are there to let you conserve battery power by explicitly disabling the wireless networking hardware.

Re:Operation and Cost?

[Maxo-Texas]

News from the Web...

Oct. 12, 2004

MSN announces the first official U.S. release of MSN Music. Microsoft also announces that MSN Music will be available in eight additional countries, creating the world's largest network of legal online music download services.

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August 31, 2008
Microsoft is ceasing support for its MSN Music service. After August 31, 2008, people who have bought music from the service will no longer be able to move that music to different computers, or even change the operating system on their current computers.

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So play's for sure... lasted slightly under 4 years. Then you have to buy it all again. And this is from an enormous multi-billion dollar corporation that is still in good financial health. Apparently Microsoft is no Sears when it comes to this kind of support.

---

And our other example of DRM:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DIVX [wikipedia.org]
The DIVX rental system was created in 1998 in time for the holiday season and was discontinued on June 16, 1999 due to the costs of introducing the format, as well as its very limited acceptance by the general public. Over the next two years the DIVX system was phased out. Customers could still view all their DIVX discs and were given a $100 refund for every player that was purchased before June 16, 1999. All discs that were unsold at the end of the summer of 1999 were destroyed. The program officially cut off access to accounts on July 7, 2001.

---

How can consumers be so bloody stupid? They have two clear examples of perfectly good product being killed in less than 5 years by DRM so they had to buy it again. And yet they are letting governments and the entertainment industry stick it to them and even contemplate prison and unreasonable fines for trying to avoid being screwed.

Re:do what now?

[dave562]

There is something wrong with your computer then. I have an HP desktop with a P4 2.8ghz chip running XP and it takes about a minute or two to boot up.

Re:Operation and Cost?

[morgan_greywolf]

These problems go to Windows to its core. How do we change the Registry in text format so that we can guarantee that we do not corrupt it? I'm sure there's a commandline regedit somewhere, but I'd like to edit it as flat files ala /etc.

Meet the _winreg [python.org] Python module.

I'd like to use a Microsoft system that does not require graphical support. Where's a rich commandline for those that need no graphics (samba server, calendar/mail server..)?

Windows 2008 Server has this, I believe.

I'd like a full update of nearly every program at once.

win-get [sourceforge.net] is like an apt-get for Windows.

Windows has file locking. Linux doesnt.

Um, that's just plain wrong. You're obviously not a programmer or a sysadmin.

I can save a MP3 in linux and play it at the same time. I can also delete it WHILE playing and nothing bad happens (until I hit the beginning again).

That's a function of how the applications are written and has nothing to do with the OS whatsoever.

There's tons of things here and there that will lessen the usability of ported BASH and python on Windows.

I won't disagree about bash, 'cause you're right, but Python works pretty well on Windows. Gotta give kudos to PSF on that one.

Don't get me wrong. I run Ubuntu almost execlusively at home. But my knowledge of Windows is pretty deep as well, and while I don't like Windows, I know how to get by on Windows out of sheer necessity.

Re:do what now?

[C0vardeAn0nim0]

you don't need to tweak the code to get a boost, just the kernel's .config

a simple reconfiguration of the standard kernel shipped with ubuntu to remove all the unneccessary drivers, schedulers and other shit reduced the time from GRUB menu to the KDM login screen from 1.5 min to less than a minute.

Re:Operation and Cost?

[camg188]

This talk of photoshop vs. gimp is superfluous to the article. Nobody is going to run photoshop on a $300 Acer laptop.