did you try it with Ubuntu? And if not, why not?

If you complain about keyboard, please then include picture of it, so we can complain together :)

I've the 8930G- Acer seem to be putting 4Gb of PC1066 in all their laptops at the moment. Nice! I have to agree with you about the HDMI port- I've tried plugging my phone into it several times already- its annoying as hell.

The phantom processor is something I've come across previously- as per here: http://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=2055557139

Vista will not automatically identify the new processor (at all) other than in 'About this Computer' which is strange as hell......

Looks nice- the battery life will really give the Samsung NC10 a run for its money......

Is it actually obtainable with any version of Linux?

What does inboard of the arrow keys mean?

I have to admit that I've become curious about Linuxing (or BSDing) laptops too. The information out there tends to be sketchy to cryptic, and including an ease-of-installation metric in all of your laptop reviews would be very useful. I do realize that sending your review copy back with a different operating system might be frowned on, and this would have to be cleared with the manufacturer.

But if you do get to do this... it doesn't have to be Ubuntu. Whatever you have on hand.

Seriously, if it were available here... Good build quality, a Core 2 Duo, 8 hours of battery life and only 2kg (together with an internal optical drive) on the 14" model, and, while not too cheap, it doesn't cost an arm and a leg?

...is that is it doesn't embiggen your mental capacity to remember where buttons and ports are? How perfectly cromulent.

Easy enough to try a CD/DVD version of Linux - get to see how well its works, and it doesn't affect the original OS.

*NIX-friendly or not?

"Then there’s the DVD drive eject button, which mirrors the position of the Power button - we found it was all too easy to press the wrong button when we wanted to turn on the laptop."

I for one would find the reverse quite a bit more annoying... but again, I'm part of these extremely gifted people able to remember the buttons' place after a couple hours using a piece of kit. ;-)

Looks like a very nice and reasonably priced bit of kit with an optical drive.

Being a Linux user on desktop, laptop and server I'd say it's likely that a little extra work might need to be done to get everything working, dependent on how standard the hardware is. For example a number of 802.11n wireless adapters are not natively supported within everyone's favourite fluffy distro, Umbongo. It can involve compiling and installing drivers from source supplied by the manufacturer or using an NDIS wrapper.

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Having said that, even if a bit of tweaking is involved to get it all working with Umbongo, it will run like the proverbial hot poo off of a shovel compared to Fistula. And do you really want an OS that isn't sure which CPU is still plugged in? *titter*

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