Swapping Hard Drive in Acer Revo

The Acer Aspire Revo has a lot of potential for a home media player but the 160gb hard drive won’t be large enough for everybody.

I spotted a special offer on a Iomega Prestige 500gb Portable Hard Drive which contains (in my case) a Seagate Momentus 5400.6 drive, model ST9500325AS .

I already had a working installation of Windows 7 RC, so here’s how I swapped the hard drives: -

1. Download the Clonezilla ISO file (I used clonezilla-live-1.2.2-14.iso) and install it to USB stick via Unetbootin.
2. Boot Revo with Clonezilla USB stick attached & USB Hard Drive attached.
3. Select “device-device disk/partition to disk/partition” and choose the 160gb internal hard drive (/dev/sda) as the source and the 500gb USB hard drive (/dev/sdb) as the target.
4. Confirm (it asks a few times!) and then wait for cloning to be complete. This will take a long time, as it copies all partitions (on my original hard drive I had 4 partitions – Windows 7 NTFS, Linux ext3, Data NTFS and Linux swap).
5. Open the Iomega USB drive (two screws at the back) and take out the Seagate 500gb hard drive.
6. Open the Revo & Swap the hard drives (see forum post here).
7. Swap the drives and re-assemble the Revo and portable hard drive.
8. Boot up the Revo with the new hard drive in it – it should boot straight up.
9. Extend the partitions to make use of the full 500gb space (this can be done in Windows 7 by going to “Computer” then “Manage”. Go to “Storage” then “Disk Management” and then right-click the drive before selecting “Extend Volume”).
10. Put 160gb hard drive into Iomega case & re-partition hard drive.

Now I have a Revo with lots of storage space, and a spare 160gb portable hard drive for backups etc.

XBMC With VDPAU and iPlayer

There’s an interesting article on the How to do something differently… blog about getting VDPAU working with iPlayer under Linux with the SVN build of XBMC. I’ll be sure to look into it some more when I install Ubuntu onto my Revo.

Opening the Acer Aspire Revo

There’s a useful page on opening the Acer Aspire Revo here. Will come in useful for when I add an extra 1GB RAM to the existing 1GB, or maybe swapping the hard drive for a larger one.

List of Media Centre Software for Windows and Linux

Here is a list of free Media Centre Software for Linux and Windows.

Windows Media Center Software

• Windows Media Center – http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windows-vista/features/media-center.aspx (supports TV cards)
• XBMC – http://xbmc.org
• Moovida – http://www.moovida.com
• MediaPortal – http://www.team-mediaportal.com (supports TV cards)
• Freevo – http://freevo.sourceforge.net (supports TV cards)
• GB-PVR – http://www.gbpvr.com (supports TV cards)
• MeediOS – http://www.meedios.com (supports TV cards)

Linux Media Center Software

• XBMC – http://xbmc.org
• Boxee – http://www.boxee.tv
• Moovida – http://www.moovida.com
• My Media System – http://mymediasystem.org
• Entertainer – http://www.entertainer-project.com
• Freevo – http://freevo.sourceforge.net (supports TV cards)
• GeeXboX – http://www.geexbox.org (supports TV cards)
• LinuxMCE – http://www.linuxmce.org (supports TV cards)
• MythTV – http://www.mythtv.org (supports TV cards)

Installing Windows 7 on Acer Aspire Revo

Here are some instructions for installing Windows 7 RC onto the Acer Aspire Revo.

1. Backup Drivers

Using “Revobuild”, take a backup of the drivers on the recovery partition – they are copied to a USB stick. Might come in useful later!

2. Partitioning

Here is how I partitioned the 160GB hard drive (Using “GParted Live” on a USB stick) : -

• Partition 1: Windows 7 – NTFS (20gb)
• Partition 2: Ubuntu – ext3 9.04 (10gb)
• Partition 3: Data – NTFS (FAT32 has 4gb File size limit, linux partitions aren’t easy to access from Windows) ( ~127gb)
• Partition 4: Linux Swap (3gb – swap partition’s size should be at least as large as physical RAM for hibernation)

3. Install Windows 7 OS

Here are some instructions on how to install Windows 7 via a USB flash drive instead of an optical drive (thumb drive has to be at least 4GB).

4. Install Drivers

The most recent Nforce drivers (GPU/SMU/Sata/Ethernet) can be found here. This includes the graphics card driver (GeForce v185.85)

I’ve not tried HDMI yet, but you may also have to install “nVidia HDAudio HDMI Audio” which was saved from the Recovery Partition earlier.

5. Install Latest Graphics Driver

The nVidia GeForce/ION Driver Release 186.18 for Windows 7 was released on 18-Jun-09 so install it from here.

6. Configure Auto-Logon

As this is going to be used as a media centre, I want to skip the initial logon screen.

Press Windows R to bring up the “Run” dialog. Type “control userpasswords2″ and press enter – the “User Accounts” screen will be shown.

Select the user account in the main table and uncheck “Users must enter a user name and password to use this computer”. Press “Apply” button – the “Automatically Log On” window will be displayed. Enter the password and confirm it to add the password to the system so that it does not need to be entered during logon.

That’s it!

Power Consumption of Acer Aspire Revo

My Acer Aspire Revo R3600 arrived yesterday. Here are the specifications: -

• 1.6GHz Intel Atom 230 CPU
• 1GB DDR2 RAM
• 160GB hard disk
• Nvidia GeForce 9400M graphics
• HDMI, D-SUB out
• eSATA
• 6 x USB
• 4-in-1 card reader
• Gigabit Ethernet
• 802.11bg WLAN
• Linux
• Size: 30mm x 180mm x 180mm

I’ve installed Windows 7 (more details in another post) and done a quick test of the power consumption. As I’ve read in reviews (but didn’t quite believe!) the power draw hovers between 19 and 20 watts (this is idle – just displaying the Windows desktop after everything has finished loading).

I intend to stick another stick of 1GB RAM inside it, so maybe this will increase the power consumption slightly, buts its still pretty good!

Streaming HD Video to Xbox 360

I’ve been experimenting with encoding HD videos using EncodeHD and then streaming them to an Xbox 360 via TwonkyVision from my QNAP TS-101. The QNAP TS-101 is a small NAS device with 64mb RAM so I think its a safe assumption that no transcoding is being done.

I first took a sample video from here and then encoded it using the various presets. The files were then copied to the QNAP, and then accessed from “Video Library” on the 360 (note: not via the Media Center Extender).

Original File
Resolution: 1440 x 1088
Bit Rate: 11035 kbps
Video: WMP v9 (VC-1 Simple/Main)
Audio: WMA v2 9 320 kbps, 44100Hz 320 kb/s tot (2 chnls)
File Size: 67.1 MB
Played wonderfully well on the 360.

Encoded with iPhone Preset
Resolution: 426 x 320
Bit Rate: 1490 kbps
Video: H.264/MPEG-4 AVC
Audio: MPEG-4 AAC LC
File Size: 10.1 MB
Played on the 360 but had to change display mode.

Encoded with Apple TV Preset
Resolution: 720 x 540
Bit Rate: 4959 kbps
Video: H.264/MPEG-4 AVC
Audio: MPEG-4 AAC LC
File Size: 33.7 MB
Played on the 360 but had to change display mode.

Encoded with Xbox 360 Preset
Resolution: 1440 x 1080
Bit Rate: 9385 kbps
Video: H.264/MPEG-4 AVC
Audio: MPEG-4 AAC LC
File Size: 63.8 MB
Played on the 360 but had to change display mode.

(For reference, PAL DVD resolution is 720×576)

All stats were taken from the video files with G-Spot.

Ubuntu Wallpapers

To install some nice wallpapers on Ubuntu, run the following command: -

sudo apt-get install peace-wallpapers tropic-wallpapers ubuntustudio-wallpapers blubuntu-wallpapers

Xbox 360 Multi-Player Games

Here are some good Xbox 360 XBLA games that I have identified may be worth looking at. Most of them are also multi-player (either local or via Xbox Live)

Xbox Live Arcade

Catan (800 points)
Sensible World of Soccer (800 points)
Peggle (800 points)
Bomberman Live (800 points)
Small Arms (400 points)
Uno (400 points)
Tetris Splash (800 points)
Texas Hold’Em (800 points)
Super Street Fighter II Turbo HD Remix (1200 points)
Worms (800 points)
Carcassonne (800 points)

Xbox Originals

Dropbox

I know its been around for ages, but I’ve finally got around to trying “dropbox”. If you haven’t heard, it allows you to synchronise folders across different PC’s. How it works is you install the software on your different PC’s (work laptop, home PC) and then you have a folder called “My Dropbox”. When you add or modify a file in this folder it automagically appears on the other PC when you
switch it on. It’s really simple and is great for sharing files between PC’s instead of putting them on a USB stick or emailing them etc.

You can also set up shared folders that other people can access.

The clever bit is that you can log onto the website on your iPhone and
access all your documents and photos from there too. So it’s good for
storing photos easily and being able to see them on your iPhone.

The client software is available for Linux, Windows and Mac OS X.

There’s 2 GB of storage for free, or if you sign up via my referral link below, we both get an extra 0.25gb of space free.

https://www.getdropbox.com/referrals/NTEyOTM1NjA5