Jan-Krueger.net

I am always happy to find alternative applications of creativity. Today’s focus is on Acer or, more specifically, on Acer’s so-called Linux notebooks. Shipped exlusively in Europe (as far as I can tell), they attract interest by being cheaper than the version shipped with some version of Windows. Currently, the difference in price weighs in at 47.01 € at Amazon Germany (that’s, very roughly, 10% of the full price).

And, of course, they come with Linux pre-installed. So that’s fine for basic usage, even if it takes a little getting used to for the more Windows- savvy people. Right?

Let’s take a closer look. Acer’s Linux distribution of choice appears to be Linpus Linux (a Fedora fork developed by Linpus Technologies of Taiwan). Their website is down right now (I wonder…), but from what I gather from the rest of the web, Linpus comes in several flavors, among them a desktop edition and a server edition. The desktop edition is based on KDE 3.4 et cetera et cetera, so nothing really surprising there. Even if Linpus is rather unusual, it’s probably decent enough. Right? Right? Well… Guess again.

So what’s the big deal?

Turns out Acer thought it would be just spiffy to install the basic edition of Linpus. I would provide you with a screenshot but… did I mention that their website is down? So, as several unhappy customers explain with varying levels of frustration, all you get with Acer’s idea of Linux is a root prompt, i.e. a black and white text screen on which you can enter. That’s right, there is no graphical user interface at all.

This is a clever move by Acer. I’m sure it’s easy to ship their laptops with something like that, and it gets those pesky legal restrictions out of the way which tell vendors they have to include an operating system in the package.

As a consequence, users who may have heard that Linux is pretty alright to work with and thus give Acer’s Linux notebooks a try are pretty much stumped. Some installations even ask the user to log in even though they never created any accounts. Suffice to say that the login data is not supplied in the manuals shipped with the notebook. It’s hidden somewhere on the Acer support website, and you can find it on the Linpus website (which, as I may have written already, is unreachable right now). For reference, the user name is root (which is the user that has total control over the system and can royally mess things up) and the password is something like “111111″. we should have known that, shouldn’t we?

What does Acer say?

Acer, if asked about this in support queries, appears to be pretty blunt in its answers, basically telling customers that they only ship with Linux so they meet the legal requirements, and they really don’t care how usable that Linux is. This would be perfectly reasonable if Acer actually included some note to that degree in its product descriptions. Advertising these notebooks as shipping with Linux (or even Linpus Linux, of which there exist versions with graphical interface as well) seems like a misrepresentation of the package contents to me.

On the positive side…

Let’s keep in mind, though, that if you actually know your way around computers, you can easily install something different on those laptops, like your old copy of Windows or a more sensible Linux distribution such as Ubuntu. In that case, buying one of Acer’s Linux notebooks might be for you.

I’m secretly of the opinion that notebooks are throw-away hardware; no notebook any of my friends or myself have bought in the last several years has lasted longer than two years; in most cases, first defects (such as the display going on LSD and becoming totally psychedelic) appear as early as one year after purchase. That’s simply not acceptable for the more expensive notebooks out there (in 2001, I bought a notebook for 2500.- €, only to have its CPU fan’s screw sockets detach from the mainboard after about a year (random CPU overheating, anyone?) and the touchpad and battery dying in half-year intervals after that).

In short, I think it might be sensible to go for the cheapest thing that could possibly work (within a set of standards of your choice). In this sense, Acer’s Linux notebooks might be a reasonable choice, provided you are going to setup your own operating system. On the other hand, you might want to wait for the Asus Eee notebooks.

Conclusion

Good on you, Acer! Easy way of increasing your target market without any hassle. Let’s hope that any frustrated customers blame their problems on Linux instead of you, so you can keep cutting costs this way. Or let’s just hope that the legal restrictions get dropped so you can drop the act and there are no disappointments anymore.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, 2007-09-11 at 01:53 by Jan and is filed under General Creativity. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.