The Samsung NB30 is a great little machine and if you get the model with a touchscreen it can be a nice way to fully enjoy the new Ubuntu Unity netbook interface. I recently treated myself to one of these and now have Ubuntu 10.10 installed with (hopefully) everything working. I'll be writing much more about this netbook and touch screen interfaces in future blog posts but first to get the features working that don't work out of the box, or don't work well straight after installing Ubuntu. These include WiFi, the touch screen, screen brightness adjustment and the hotkeys.
installation
** Update 3rd May 2010: The instructions here also generally work for Ubuntu 10.04 LTS, for notes specific to this version see: Boxee and Ubuntu 10.04 LTS on the Acer Aspire Revo ***
A lot has happened since I wrote my post back in June about setting up Ubuntu and Boxee on the Acer Aspire Revo; a new version of Ubuntu has been released and today (7th January 2009) the new beta version of Boxee was officially released to the public. The new version is a major overhaul and represents quite a different, enhanced user experience from the alpha. So I thought I would do a new version of the post to reflect these changes. Fortunately, Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic) has introduced many changes that make getting the Revo up and running much easier than under the previous release of Ubuntu.
** UPDATE 7th January 2009 ***
See my new post for details on how to install the Boxee Beta and Ubuntu Karmic on the Revo:
How to install Ubuntu 9.10 and the Boxee Beta on an Acer Aspire Revo (including 64 bit option)
The details below are now out of date, but are still useful if you wish to install Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty) on a Revo.
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The Revo is a very new piece of hardware and features some cutting edge technology so installing Ubuntu on it is not completely straightforward as not many people own these units and have had a chance to make them work out of the box with this very popular Linux distribution. However, it can be done and the unit makes a fantastic Ubuntu machine and if you add Boxee a great entertainment centre for your living room. The first thing to do is to put a copy of the Ubuntu 9.04 desktop live CD image on a USB memory stick. Do this by visiting:http://www.ubuntu.com/getubuntu/download and selecting the 32 bit desktop edition. Once downloaded you copy it to a USB stick by using the USB Startup disk creator located under System → Administration. The task of installing centres around three areas: getting Ubuntu on the machine, getting the graphics to work (properly) and getting the sound to work (at all).
The recent release of Ubuntu 9.04 (a.k.a Jaunty) saw the release of the usual desktop and server editions but also a new edition: Netbook Remix. Confusingly we have all being talking about Netbook Remix for some time, meaning the distinctive interface that makes the most of the limited screen space on a netbook, but here we mean Ubuntu Netbook Remix (UNR) in the sense of an installation image that contains the entire operating system, including the Netbook Remix interface so you can easily install it on your netbook. This was a gap that was filled by popular derivative distributions such as Easy Peasy and Eeebuntu. I've been trying it out on my Asus EEE PC 701.
I've just been installing the new Kubuntu KDE4 Remix Beta on an old Acer L100 Media Centre using the Alternative Install CD (so I can do a text mode install) as I only have an old CRT TV attached to it. When I tried to boot from the CD it looked like the installer picked a display mode that didn't work with the TV as the picture lost stability and was unviewable. I couldn't find the usual options to change the screen mode, but found that this worked to override the screen mode: