04
December
December
My latest improvement to my home desk area is an Acer Aspire Revo R3600, i currently have an old Acer Power F1 under my desk driving a second monitor running ubuntu 9.10 (sort of the 9.04 -> 9.10 update shafted it slightly). I use Synergy to let me use the mouse and keyboard on my main windows 7 machine control both machines.
I decided to replace the Acer Power F1 with a Revo. I went for the option on ebuyer that comes with a 2GB RAM stick aswell.
Job1: Fit the RAM
Fitting the RAM is the first thing i need to do, without it the Ubuntu installer will mis calculate the amount of swap space needed. My first big question on this was “can i fit the RAM without voiding the warranty?” the answer “yes”
To fit the ram find this screw (covered by a sticker):
Revo Screw hole
You thenhave to pull the side without the power switch on away from the main body. Took me a little bit of working to get it off but it did separate in the end. You will then be confronted with this:
Inside the Revo
Fit the ram into the spare slot (above the HDD next to the CPU).
Clip the side back on and your done!
Job2: Fitting the Revo
I want my Revo on the back of my second monitor, a Samsung SyncMaster 2043NW. The Revo comes with a nice VESA bracket for itself which fits nicely on a 20″ monitor. Once its clipped in it should look something like this:
VESA Mounted Revo
Job3: Install an OS
My Revo came with some random Acer Linux Distro on it that seemed to take the “its only got a 1.6 atom dont ask it to do anything bar open our browser” approach. So i set it to boot to my USB DVD Drive (you could boot to a pendrive to install an OS). It is very important that you turn off the RevoBoot otherwise it wont even try booting to your media.
My OS of choice is Ubuntu 9.10, it loaded up the live environment no problem and picked everything up. It did inform me that a “non-free” driver existed for my graphics card which i can install, you will need this after install!
Job4: Setup the OS Post install
This is where all you people not putting Ubuntu 9.10 (later versions should be similar) on their Revos need to split off to a guide for their OS.
You can try booting into ubuntu straight off but for me that didnt work, the nvidia drivers are missing and this means that X wont start for the fresh install. Now for me is was even worse and X kept attempting to start, meaning that i couldnt use tty1 etc… so i had to use recovery mode. To get into recovery mode pres the down arrow when grub appears during boot (i found the best thing to do was to hammer the down key just after the acer splash screen dis appeared). Select “Recovery Mode” from the list. Once that boots press “Shell with networking” and you should then be presented with a BASH Shell. Run a system update by typing in `apt-get update` and then install the nvidia drivers `apt-get install nvidia-glx-180`. Then re-boot and X will work again.
Thats about it, i’m yet to find anything that doesn’t work but write a comment if you find anything wrong. I used the Wired connection during install but once i had it in place in my room it quite happily swapped over to a wireless connection.
I added a USB Bluetooth Dongle to the setup so that i can connect up my phone if i ever need to, or if i get a Bluetooth keyboard for example.
It is remarkably quiet, not that you can hear much over the drone of my PC.
Revo behind the Screen
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