Tesco are selling an Acer Aspire 4315, online at Tesco Direct, for £269. That's a brand new laptop for £269. With a gigabyte of RAM, a DVD-RW, 80GB HDD, built in wi-fi, all the usual fluff, basically.
But, in case you didn't get it, it's only £269!!!
We just bought one. It came the next day. It's great. And you know what's even better?
On sale in New Zealand this laptop ships with Ubuntu 7.10 already on it. That means this machine is *guaranteed* Linux-proof, straight out of the box. Sadly the Tesco version ships with Windows Vista Home Basic (which is a bit like selling someone a car with no wheels) however just a little bit of faffing and you are up and running with a Linux laptop in no time:
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=307758 (option 2 works for me)
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=669267
I've just finished configuring it. It took just over an hour. I think that's a new Linux record. =)
Not quite so simple
Posted February 23rd, 2008 by AnonymousI spoke too soon. When I came to use Skype 2.0 Beta (which, coincidentally, works great with Ubuntu Gutsy and a Logitech QuickCam) I discovered there are issues with the Intel integrated sound card on these machines. The internal speakers and mic work fine, but the jacks in the front of the case are ignored so you can't use a headset or external speakers. This is pretty much down to Gutsy not shipping with the very latest ALSA driver and the laptop being too new.
It took a bit of research, but the resolution is actually fairly straight-forward:
1. Install the latest ALSA drivers:
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Gutsy_Intel_HD_Audio_Controller
http://www.alsa-project.org/
You may need to do this too, but I didn't:
http://ubuntuforums.org/showpost.php?p=3566719&postcount=8
2. Add this line to the end of /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base:
options snd-hda-intel model=acerhttp://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=314383
3. Reboot. =)