Acer appears to be following Dell's lead and is installing Ubuntu Linux on at least one notebook PC. The Acer Aspire 5710Z with Ubuntu is only available in Singapore, where it's advertised for SG$999. That's about $660 US dollars.

This PC's specs would seem to indicate that it's targeted at budget-minded consumers, and the omission of Windows XP or Vista probably helps drive down the price. But while you could only run Windows Vista Home Basic on a computer with just 512MB of RAM, your money gets you a full version of Ubuntu Linux with all the bells and whistles.

Of course, you could just buy a laptop and load your own copy of the free operating system onto it. But we assume Acer have tested Ubuntu on the 5710Z and ensured that all the appropriate drivers are loaded. That alone makes these systems with Ubuntu preloaded worth their weight in gold for the new Linux user.

No word on whether Acer will be offering Linux laptops in the US anytime soon.

[via Engadget]

We know, it's the middle of the summer, but it's never too early to start looking at what you might need for the upcoming semester. And if you are looking for another way to get, and stay organized while off at school, Notely might be your lecture note savior.

This online tool allows users to organize data from meetings, appointments, class notes, lectures, accessing it anywhere. There are a number of free features that the Notely application supplies, including:

• Calendar
• To-Do
• Homework Organizer
• Course Manager
• Notes
• Link, Contact and File Organizer
• Notebook/Lab book

Notely is a pretty powerful online application that can aid in keeping all class information together, in an easily managed interface. One main thing we wish it had, search. It would be nice to search for a phrase or keyword and have all related notes, calendar items, and course information show up. All of the content that users store in Notely can be exported as PDF, DOC, TXT, Excel and synced with iCal.

A similar online offering is stu.dicio.us.

Word first surfaced about Zoho's latest offering Notebook at DEMO 07 way back in January. Demo participants got a glimpse of the application, similar to what Google offers with Notebook, that can be used for gathering, creating and collaborating with multiple types of content.

Notebook just broke out of the testing phase at Zoho, adding to their ever expanding list of Office based applications, and is available to use immediately with a Zoho ID.

Zoho Notebook certainly has a lot more features than Google offers with Notebook. Not only can text, images, drawings and audio be embedded, but Zoho's Notebook also acts like a content aggregator for HTML content from the web or other Zoho applications. Check out this Firefox add on that makes clipping web pages a breeze.

Zoho Notebook features:

• Content creation and editing
• Drawing tools
• Ability to add text, images, audio and video
• Embeddable Word processor and spreadsheet functionality
• Collaborative editing
• Works with other Zoho apps like Writer, Sheet and Chat

Get a little more organized with this updated Notebook release from Google. The organizational tool looks a little nicer now, care of some AJAXy goodness from the team at Google. They have updated and transformed the once boring Google Notebook, into something extremely useful.

Notebook now uses a nice blend of AJAX and common Gmail features to store and share notes. Users can create a list of nicely organized Notebooks, or folders on the left hand side where notes are stored and auto saved. Notes can easily be made in each Notebook, and even shared with other users for collaboration, or exported to Google Docs for further work.

Take a look at the new Google Notebook, Its pretty helpful now. Especially with the Google Notebook Firefox Extension that you can easily use to clip and collect information as you go about your WWW travels. Maybe Google will think about adding this into the Gmail interface one of these days? It would do wonders there.

Zoho announced a new product called Zoho Notebook at this week's DEMO conference. Pimped as "the online application for gathering and creating multiple types of content that can easily be shared with others," Zoho Notebook is a little bit of Google Notebook with some Microsoft OneNote sprinkled on top, and finally brought to a simmer with some innovative and powerful web 2.0 collaborative goodness. Read/WriteWeb got to sit down with Raju Vegesna, one of Zoho's developers, to ask a few questions, and indeed found that collaboration is indeed one of the most compelling aspects of Zoho Notebook. Users can choose to share an entire notebook, a single page or even a specific piece of content on a page. Sound complicated? Then check out the demo video Raju put together to strut Zoho Notebook's stuff.

Of course, if you're already salivating, you're going to have to pick up a self-control book or two. While Zoho Notebook was announced today, it won't be out in public beta until March. Still, if it's as handy and powerful as the video makes it out to be, we'll be sure to get our hands on it for you as soon as possible.

In this issue of Googleholic we cover:

• Google copyright clarification
• Google slowish?
• Google Notebook improvements
• Google is the local search leader
• Google Transit trip planner adds more cities
• Good Charlotte stops by Google
• Giant bug spotted in Germany on Google Maps

Continue reading Friday's Googleholic...

Google Notebook, the Ajaxy bookmarking app I praised when it launched back in May, has taken a cue from Writely and Google Spreadsheets and added collaboration features. Whereas previously sharing was limited to letting others view your Notebook, it is now possible to invite other people to add to and modify your Notebook. This could be ideal for group research projects, trip planning--basically any situation in which several people are all collecting information online for a single purpose.

In addition to collaboration, Google Notebook has a couple other minor new features, including improved drag and drop support, Trash and undo (so when you accidentally delete something, it's not actually gone), and a Notebook gadget for Google Personalized Home. As always, I'm relieved to see Google is still developing this project instead of leaving it to gather dust.

[Via Lifehacker]

Battery Eater Pro is an application that exists solely for the purpose of making life hell for your portable computer's battery. Rather than giving you a best case scenario prediction of the battery life in your notebook, Battery Eater Pro uses every power-hungry option to try to drain your battery as fast as possible. This is in many ways a better benchmark, since it's consistently repeatable, and lets you know what you can expect under the worst conditions. During testing the utility stresses the CPU, RAM, HDD and videocard. For optimal results (meaning the worst battery time), make sure that you turn on WiFi, BlueTooth and IR ports.

Despite it's name, Battery Eater Pro is free.

Google Notebook, the new product Google was being a bit coy about last week, is now up and running, and I have to say I'm pleasantly surprised. When some screenshots surfaced last week it wasn't clear just how Google Notebook would work, but luckily my initial suspicions were confirmed: Google Notebook is powered by a Firefox extension an addon for Firefox and IE. Basically, Google Notebook is similar to the ScrapBook extension, but combined with an Ajaxy web service. It lets you grab web pages, text excerpts, and images and save them to Notebooks. The extension's main interface is a box that pops up in the lower-right corner when you click on "Open Notebook" in your status bar or right-click on something and click on "Note this." When you do so, an editing field pops up where you can type anything you want or drag-and-drop text and images to it. If you've made a selection on a web page when the box pops up, it will automatically be added to your new note. From this interface you can also see the contents of all of your notebooks, create new notebooks and sections heading, and edit previous notes. The little box also links to Google Notebook's "full page view," i.e. the full-fledged Ajaxy web service I mentioned. Anyone who has spent some time with Gmail, Google Calendar, or Google Reader will feel right at home with the interface. The web interface is like a bigger version of the extension's interface, allowing you to delete notes, do more editing (the extension only has buttons for bold and italic, but the web interface has full-fledged rich text support), rearrange notes, and even entire sections by drag-and-drop, and change your sharing preferences (here's an example of a somewhat eclectic shared notebook). You can also select multiple notes using the familiar Shift and Ctrl keys to do batch deletes or moves.

I think that people will find a lot of different uses for Google Notebook. It could, of course, be used as its name suggests, for taking notes and doing research. Others will use it to make collections of links to share, e.g. teachers who want to give their students an annotated list of resources. It might also make a nice way to keep a wishlist. Some will use it to keep track of bookmarks, but it really isn't suited (and doesn't aim) to replace the likes of del.icio.us. Google Notebook lets you search your notes, and having separate notebooks and sub-headings will be enough organization for some people, but the lack of any kind of tagging make it poorly suited for managing a hodge-podge of a few bookmarks. Google Notebook does have a social aspect, though, in the form of a not-yet-implemented global search for searching everyone's publicly-shared notes, but it is primarily a personal tool like Google Calendar. Currently Google Notebook is missing a couple of things that I believe are crucial for its success, namely RSS feeds and an open API, but given Google's track record, I think it's fair to assume that these are on the way and I can't wait to see what people can accomplish with them. I'm also still expecting Google to integrate Google Notebook into Google Toolbar at some point, but since it still lives under the Google Labs banner ("Labs" is the new "Beta"!) they may wait until it's a more proven product.

[Thanks, Bill!]

The subject of one of Google's many announcements at Wednesday's Google Press Day was Google Notebook, a somewhat mysterious project that Google has described only as "a personal browser tool that lets you clip text, images, and links from the pages you're searching, save clippings to an online notebook, and then share notebooks with others." Google will be launching Google Notebook sometime next week, but today you can see a whole pile of screenshots of the product in this Flickr set. Even from 18 screenshots, though, it's tough to tell exactly how Google Notebook works, but to my eyes it looks basically like an online bookmark system. "Notebooks" seem to be little more than collections of links that you can manage through a web-based interface. In the screenshots the user searches for "gifts for mom" on Google, and then uses a small pop-up in the corner of the results page to save and annotate one of the resulting links. Then the user goes to the Google Notebook site (google.com/gn, but don't bother, it doesn't work) where all of her notebooks are displayed. This looks very Ajaxy, including some pretty transparent drag-and-drop stuff. Notes can be edited and there seem to be rich-text controls, and of course there are buttons to share or make notebooks private, as well as "New Notebook" and "Add note" buttons. And that, it would seem, is about it. In There doesn't appear to be any tagging functionality or any social aspect a la del.icio.us. In the screenshots the pop-up box only seems to be displayed on Google results pages and I don't see any other indication that this is, say, a Firefox extension. However, this shot shows a URL box, so obviously possible to add URLs that aren't included in search results, just more difficult. A bookmarklet will undoubtedly be created either by Google or some third party to make that easier, but I think very soon we'll see that functionality integrated into Google Toolbar.

Obviously Google Notebook isn't intended to compete with social bookmarking systems like del.icio.us, but while the interface and the snappiness that comes with Google's web apps appeal to me, I don't really see anything Google Notebook can do that I can't already do with del.icio.us (with the possible exception of the ability to rearrange items), and without tagging I can imagine notebooks with many items quickly becoming unmanageable. However, for all I know these screenshots are of an older version of Google Notebook, and what we'll be seeing next week might be something different entirely.

Google made a number of big(ish) announcements at yesterday's Google Press Day, but isn't that what Press Day is for? The biggest, or at least most fun, announcement was Google Trends, a new project at Google Labs that gives you pretty Alexa-like charts of search activity and Google News articles for the keywords you punch in. The charts are reminiscent of Google Finance, with news articles marked to correspond to points on the chart. By separating them with commas you can specify up to five different keywords to show on the same chart.

Last week I insinuated that Google Health might be among the news, but that was a little off. What Google did launch is Google Co-op, which is two things: First of all, it's a sort of tagging system that allows Google to create "vertical" search engines on specialized topics, e.g. Health. This works by allowing experts and professionals to "label" (i.e. tag) a bunch of URLs and upload them en masse. The tagging end of the equation isn't aimed at end users a la Yahoo! My Web 2.0 (yet), but the results are. Second, Google Co-op does something called "Subscribed Links," which basically allows third parties to create modules that will pop up for relevant searches, much in the way that, say, links to Google Maps currently pop up when you search for something that looks like a location. Currently there aren't very many Subscribed Links available, but they do show what's possible. The Digg subscription, for example, shows you recent popular posts related to your query on Digg along with how many diggs they've gotten. The Fandango subscription shows you movie information and links to tickets and showtimes for movie title queries. I can imagine this becoming really useful.

Google also announced the Beta release of Google Desktop 4. The biggest new feature is the inclusion of Google Gadgets, i.e. widgets. I won't go into too much detail here since widgets are all but ubiquitous these days (see Apple's Dashboard and the Yahoo! Widget Engine). Instead, take a loot at the Gadget library to see what's available. Of course, there's an open API for creating your own, and you can even import some Gadgets from your Personalized Home to Google Desktop 4, and Google will recommend Gadgets for you based on frequent searches.

Lastly, Google is being a little quiet about the last of its announcements, Google Notebook. It's described as "a personal browser tool that lets you clip text, images, and links from the pages you're searching, save clippings to an online notebook, and then share notebooks with others," but that's about all we know. They could take this in a number of idrections, but it sounds to me a bit like the ScrapBook extension for Firefox, though I'm sure it will have a significant web-based component. Look for Google Notebook to launch next week at Google Labs.