For the time being. With 3 days left on my warranty, Acer went ahead and replaced the machine.

What a horrible, horrible company with which to deal. First, their online serial number lookup system said that the machine was out of warranty. I tried to call and discovered that there are separate 1-800 numbers for desktops/laptops, netbooks, and refurbs. It took me forever to find the right one. Luckily the refub department knew what I was talking about and agreed to replace it. However, it took them 3 days to ship out the replacement unit once they received mine. Man alive. To top it off, the warranty doesn’t restart, nor do I get a new 90 days on the replacement unit.

So I got the new one, installed Ubuntu and Zoneminder (the camera management package), all sorts of supporting software, then kind of monitored it for a few days.

Oh, and I can’t install Ubuntu 9.10 directly. I get an I/O error on the disk. I have to install 9.04, then use the update manager. That works fine.

Two days ago, the camera screen mysteriously went black in the middle of the morning. It turns out there was a permission issue which I think I solved last night, but I’m not sure. As far as I can tell, I really didn’t do anything.

Anyway, Acer sucks, and so does Ubuntu. It’s overrated. There, I said it.

So, anyway, here is the Cat Bed Cam.

This entry was posted on Friday, December 4th, 2009 at 11:28 am and is filed under Technical. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.