New Laptop, an Acer Aspire TimelineX 1830T

I wanted a netbook to test UNE, but I also wanted something with a bit more oomph than an atom, so I got the 11.6 inch 1830T. This is a notebook in a netbook’s body! (i3-330UM processor) However it’s also much pricier than a netbook. 

Someone already had excellent documentation on the wiki on the older 1810TZ, so I have adapted this page for the 1830T and will be documenting my efforts there.

Don’t let the length of the page fool you, everything was working ootb except the NIC in Lucid (you need to install linux-backport-modules); however the newer kernels in Maverick support it out of the box. I need to still go through and check to see if all that crazy stuff is needed for the other features, so very much WIP.

Here’s some pics:

This “finish” on the lid is great, as it’s textured and not as much of a fingerprint magnet.

The keyboard is pretty decent, not Thinkpad quality but it’s comfortable. The hardest thing is getting used to not having a trackpoint. I suspect a future Thinkpad X100 will have similar CPU and insides (indeed if they made such a thing I would have bought that.) However I really like how this feels, it’s quite thin and light and has great battery life so far. I don’t know if it’ll hit 8 hours so I’ll have to test that, however I used it for quite some time in the coffee shop and didn’t notice the battery life being sucky. More detail later when I remember to pay attention to the battery life, heh.

Acer Timeline owners …

I’ve been mulling moving to a smaller form-factor laptop, something more netbook-y. I’ve been eyeballing the Aspire Timeline 1830T.

Does anyone with a current 1810T or 1810TZ care to comment on how it’s running with Ubuntu? I found this thread on a notebook forum, and the tips on the help site look helpful. Any information on real-world battery performance would be useful!

EDIT: Hey, looks like the 1830T has hit the States!