Ubuntu and the Intel Atom 330 Processor

[Alan Pope]

Hi Michael,

2009/9/11 Michael Haney <thezorch at gmail.com>:
> I'm wondering, has anyone on this list had experience with Ubuntu
> running on Intel Atom processors?

Ya. I have an Acer Aspire Revo 3600 which is running Boxee on top of
Ubuntu in my lounge. Love it.

>  My current machine is an aging
> 1.2GHz AMD Athlon XP 2000+ with 1GB of RAM that I built myself long
> ago.  It runs Ubuntu ok but its performance isn't the best especially
> when using Flash which doesn't run all that great on Linux even on
> high end machines.
>

Don't expect miracles as far as flash goes with the Atom 330. If
you're watching videos you're doing a single threaded task, which even
though the 330 is dual-core and HT, you'll not see much benefit. Also
the fact that the flash plugin on linux doesn't do any hardware
acceleration via the video card kinda makes it suck a bit.

> The primary role of my desktop is to be my everyday machine.  That's
> the machine I do all my emails, web browsing, music listening, DVD
> watching and book writing on.  My laptop, which has more horses under
> the hood, is my gaming and video conversion machine.  So, any
> suggestions or thoughts?  I'm not sure when I'll be building this.  I
> don't have a lot of $$$ or I'd get a higher end machine to run Ubuntu
> or just go Mac.
>

I'd recommend not viewing youtube via flash, but grab
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/748 and
http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/38074 which makes at least some of
the pain go away.

Cheers,
A.