Alex Kaye’s DevBlog

A couple of weeks ago the Acer Aspire Revo I ordered from Play.com turned up. I went for the Linux version, which actually came with a 160GB HDD rather than the 8GB SSD quoted. No complaints here. My intention was simply to slap Ubuntu on with XBMC and a few other necessities (Skype with webcam, Spotify and Firefox 3 for browsing), and have myself a compact, low power HTPC with all the trimmings. As it turned out this wasn’t going to be quite as easy as it seemed at first.

Acer Aspire Revo (from Play.com)

I unpacked it, plugged everything in and attached it to the fantastic clip-on mounting device that fits on the back of most, if not all modern televisions. When I first booted the Revo, I was presented with Acer’s RevoBoot program, which seemed to be a cutdown Linux that allowed you to “Install an OS” and Backup/Update the Revo’s drivers. Seems simple so far, no? Upon selecting the Install OS option I found the first real downfall: a radio-button list with only one option. Vista. Imagine my surprise (or lack of). Were you not fantastically experienced with computers, this would be great. Providing you have a Vista licence key, you can use this to have Vista very quickly install (or perhaps activate) itself. In fact it really would have been brilliant had I wanted to use Vista.

For those of you who are wondering why it is called a “Linux version”, the answer is that Acer give you a cutdown Linux of their own, similar to what they did with the Aspire One netbook, only with even less real control. This includes a web-browser, picture viewer and a music player, with an option to “Start OS”, i.e. Vista if you have it installed. Not bad, but I wanted more functionality.

The next step then was to take a bootable image of Ubuntu 9.04 (64bit) and put it onto a USB stick. After rebooting and selecting this as the boot device, things became straight forward. A Live version of Ubuntu started up, allowing me to have a play with it. Everything seemed fine so far, so I proceeded to install Ubuntu to the hard disk. Everything was straight forward from then until it came to configuring the newly installed NVIDIA Ion drivers. After installing them, I was stuck with 640×480 resolution, and no way of changing it in the NVIDIA X Server Settings utility. This was no doubt due to the fact that I was using it with a reasonably low-end TV that only has VGA-in, rather than the HDMI that I suppose the Revo was really intended to use. Still, using my knowledge of X11, I edited my xorg.conf file to display the correct resolution (1440×900) for my television. This was no easy process given that I had no idea what resolutions to try, and most seemingly appropriate resolutions got me an “Out of range” error from the TV. After hitting CTRL-ALT-F1 more times than I would like, I finally had it.

Onto XBMC now. After installing and configuring it to use the Ion’s hardware acceleration, I tried playing a few different videos. Everything seemed to run flawlessly, save for 720p MKV files, which were a little juttery. With only 1GB of RAM and a 1.6GHz single-core CPU, this wasn’t much of a surprise considering the amount of system resources needed to decode MKV files. I wonder if any other Revo owners have found a way around this? The only other problem with XBMC on Ubuntu is the occasional crash, but I’m thinking that hacking it up a bit more may well fix this. Other than this issue, there are a few problems with Ubuntu 9.04 and PulseAudio (namely with Skype), and a small problem with the iPhone Remote app/XBMC’s webserver (it worked fine when I tried XBMC on XP). I’m sure these wrinkles will be ironed out soon enough anyway, and i’ll be able to start really enjoying the Revo (especially when I finally plug it into HDMI on a proper 720/1080p TV).

In summary, for £150 the Revo is a top-notch piece of kit, and i’m sure if you were happy just to stick Vista on it, everything would work just fine (however please don’t take that as an endorsement of Vista).

Yesterday, I met up with my first real client since I decided to go freelance, so that we could discuss a project he had in mind. Today, I started work on the project, my first in over a year.  Due to the nature of the project, I can’t talk about the specifics of it, but I can write about some of the things i’ve noticed after a year away from web design.

One of the first things I came across, as always, were cross-browser compatibility issues. In my opinion, working around these issues is at least 50% of the work put into creating a good website. Of course, there are things out there which can take some of the load off. Notable examples are the Prototype JavaScript library and Scriptaculous which provide useful, easy access, cross-browser compatible JavaScript functions and effects by way of extending the DOM.

These are all well and good if front-ends were only HTML and JavaScript, however, CSS is another predominant part of modern web design, which has as many, if not more cross-browser issues than JavaScript. If only the browser companies would stick to the standards! Until now i’ve done the usual thing, and just created my own hacks/workarounds. This is a really time consuming process, so today I decided to look around for a decent cross-browser CSS library. The only real result that Google came up with was the Yahoo! User Interface library. I watched a video explaining the main functionality, and it does seem very promising. Tomorrow I plan to start using it in the project. Its main functionality is to make sure that the base-level rendering of your web page is the same in each and every browser, so that you have a solid base on which to implement your styling etc. It also gives you an API to implement standardised page sizes and layouts without all the finickety CSS tweaking. On top of this it also comes with a load of extras which are detailed on the forementioned site. So what are you waiting for? Go check it out.

In summary today’s development efforts went from trying to implement a good cross-browser curved-border functionality, to researching a solid base from which to build this project – something which will probably save me a lot of time and frustration in the long run. More tomorrow…