My AC100 travel laptop

I recently noted that I have never blogged about this nice little device I now own for a couple of years. I originally bought the Toshiba AC100 before a two-month-long trip through Russia and China.

I was looking for a possibility to have a basic laptop, but without much weight. The AC100 is an ARM-based laptop which originally ships with the Android operating system. It weights less than 800 gramms and thus is lighter than the usual subnotebooks. According to my knowledge, it's not produced any more, but it can still be bought on ebay.

The nice thing is: You can install Linux on it and thus it will give you the possibility to run an almost full desktop-system. Though a warning ahead: While basic things work, it is quite a hacky business and you should expect to see problems. If you aren't prepared to solve them, this is probably not the solution for you.

Originally I was running Gentoo Linux on it (and it did well on my two-month trip), but now I'm running Ubuntu. The reason is that it was just too hard to get anything fixed if it didn't work. I rarely could find help anywhere, I assume there are only a handful of people that ever tried installing Gentoo on this Device. Ubuntu up until version 12.10 has reasonable support.

The great thing is: This is probably one of the lightest solutions to have a desktop/laptop-like machine with a real keyboard. Perfect for travelling. As it's running Linux, you can have access to a large number of standard applications. With lightweight apps like Abiword or Claws-Mail you can use basic applications.

The limitations are the Browser and Video. You can run Chromium or Firefox, but the device clearly shows its limits. Expect to wait longer sometimes, don't open too many tabs - and I always have to remember to never try to open Chromium and Firefox at the same time, as this makes the system mostly unusable. Obviously there's no Flash and nothing else that's only available in binary form, because ARM Linux is such a niche OS that nobody will provide binary apps for it.

Videos work, but limited. There's no xv support in the free driver. That means if you want to upscale a video to fullscreen, this has to be done in software and that usually means you cannot play videos fast enough. There's a binary graphics driver by Nvidia (the internals of the device are based on the Nvidia Tegra chipset), but I haven't had much success with it.