Is the A1 still just a prototype ?!

I'm beginning to wonder why Acer decided to launch the A1 with Linux now... Maybe they should have waited for some months until everything was working properly ?

So far I have found three extremely annoying issues with this thing:

1. Only English keyboard on boot up, even though it was sold to me with Norwegian keyboard. All I have to do to fix this is to type a little command, but it is totally unprofessional to sell a machine like this. Not all users have the know how to find out how to change to their own language - let alone the patience to do it EVERY single time they boot up. They just want a working machine.

2. No video available in the messenger program while talking to other msn users.

3. No contacts show up as online in Messenger. Crap, the program doesn't work properly at all. Now I can't even add more contacts in there.

And I fear this list will probably grow as I dig deeper into this little machine

Conclusion: WHY sell a computer which is still in it's infancy ? I am a regular user. I'm not a computer geek. I simply don't have the time and interest to sit for hours and try to bypass a whole lot of bugs... While I love this little thing design vise, I am beginning to loath it for it's bizarre behavior and it's lack of compatibility with the world at large. Guess I should have waited for the XP version. Oh well...

 

If only they were bugs... But they're not.

It mostly comes down to Acer doing a shitty job with finalizing the OS, which itself is completely functional, and the use of poor programs. The Open Source community offers a variosity of programs to do the same job these apps from Acer do - better.

I think their goal was to make the machine "idiot proof", but they kinda f'ed it up in the process. I hope they will get atleast the keymap-issue fixed. We here know why it happens and how to fix it, so should they.

I bet the out-of-the-box version of Linpus is missing many of these problems (un)intentionally made by the techies at Acer.

But fortunately, a user capable of finding this forum will get help and be able to solve all those issues.

Putting those problems aside, the One is a brilliant machine and has a huge potential to be a #1 seller in the market!

 

Agree that the machine is brilliant. But it has too many issues right now... And for the regular uneducated user the machine is bound to dissapoint. Especially that key map issue. That one is really bad. I just ran Live update - which seems to have fixed some minor things. The Messenger program now show online contacts - but I'm still not able to add more contacts...

 

I suggest that you may want to run live update again, there are more available.

 

Yeah, I couldn't agree more. The keymap issue is rediculous!!

What the heck were they thinking when they dubbed all the different localisations/variants with a boot-up script that sets xfce to use us/gb keyboards only? Seriously, how stupid can you be? I would be interested to know how many people for example here in Finland have called Acer's support to ask about the keyboard... And also what they have answered; "Go to aspireoneuser.com, we don't know how it can be fixed"...

Like said, I hope they get atleast some of these problems solved fast.

 

not all bugs are fixable via live update, contact acer technical support to get the latest recovery version to resolve many issues

 

Well at least Acer Norway promptly provided me with the required information on how to temporarily fix the key map issue... But releasing the machine like this was a mistake. I suppose Acer's support lines get as many calls a day as they sell machines.

 

Maybe it's just me, but after having used Linux since v0.9 back in the mid 1990s, I've never found a distribution that I didnt have to do some amount of fixing to. The closest I've run across is Ubuntu, and even that needs work to get -everything- I want running properly.

Lots of folks forget that MS Windows used to be exactly the same...there were some things, like hardware, that -never- worked under Windows. It's better now, but still one step ahead of Linux in that regard.

I like that Acer modified Linpus to more tightly support the AA1. I've loaded both Fedora and Ubuntu on the little box and came back to Acer Linpus. It requires a couple of tweaks, but for the most part they are minor. I do agree that for casual or new Linux users even the small tweaks are challening!

Perry
www.kidpub.com