acer aspire one 150L

Clicked myself an Acer Aspire One 150l yesterday. I just unpacked it this morning.
After my thinkpad x30 I didn’t really want to go with small laptops again, but the acer is so damn cute.  I would have bought a pink one, or at least a white one, but pink isn’t available and everyone wants a white acer, so i had to buy blue. pink is great, pop is good for you.

Hardware

I really like the hardware, 120gb SATA drive, 1GB ram. Other netbooks in the same class come with Windows XP, but there is no microsoft tax on the A150L.
Well, the fan is kind of loud. I tried to update the bios using http://unetbootin.sourceforge.net/ and an usb stick, but xxd diff shows no difference to the original bios. So i guess i’ll have to wait for a better one.
The display is great, brilliant colors and not wobbly like the msi winds, judging from the reviews on youtube. Touchpads make me feel uncomfortable, but no one likes trackpoints anymore, guess i’ll have to learn some mad touchpad skillz.

Linux

Once inside the linplus lite linux I activated xfces right-click menu, installed a modern terminal and pulled some software with yum and pirut.
Since my last redhat admin job in 2001, I forgot about redhats rpm format being a total waste of time. Maybe i thought yum might be to rpm what apt was to deb, but it really isn’t.
Anyway i don’t want to waste all this nice acer addons, the desktop is great. Maybe i’ll port some of it to debian (http://wiki.debian.org/DebianAcerOne).

Oh, about acers linplus lite linus:
* the ‘acer root’ hack actually consists of pressing alt-f2 and using sudo in a xterm
* the mail client is not really good with imap, no folder support… evolution isn’t installable because of some fc8 gnome dependency vs acer package conflict
* bootblock is lilo.. and why is there a ntfs bootblock on /dev/sda1
* only one 120gb partition on sata drive, but home mounted with aufs
* xfce compiz looks great though
* no firefox3, which is a real dealbreaker, well, and the fan
* no shadow passwords enabled
* X listening on port 6000…
* root actually uses a md5 password.
* no ipv6 support in kernel
* default screensaver kind of lame

I installed ssh, zsh and some other usefull packages (wireshark, lsof, …)

Benchmark

Simple benchmark using john the ripper, 1.7.0.2 installed from repository

Benchmarking: Traditional DES [64/64 BS MMX]... DONE
Many salts:salts396480 c/s real, 405398 c/s virtual
Only one salt:salt353213 c/s real, 359674 c/s virtual

Benchmarking: BSDI DES (x725) [64/64 BS MMX]... DONE
Many salts:salts13438 c/s real, 13768 c/s virtual
Only one salt:salt13374 c/s real, 13675 c/s virtual

Benchmarking: FreeBSD MD5 [32/32]... DONE
Raw:Raw3817 c/s real, 4000 c/s virtual

Benchmarking: OpenBSD Blowfish (x32) [32/32]... DONE
Raw:Raw199 c/s real, 202 c/s virtual

Benchmarking: Kerberos AFS DES [48/64 4K MMX]... DONE
Short:Short128357 c/s real, 130705 c/s virtual
Long:Long343500 c/s real, 351227 c/s virtual

Benchmarking: NT LM DES [64/64 BS MMX]... DONE
Raw:Raw3380K c/s real, 3478K c/s virtual