And to think, I actually wanted an Apple machine at one stage....

http://www.endofcontrol.com/2008/11/apple-bends-to.html

There seems to be a number of people that do not like Canonical and Mark Shuttleworth.  I'm not going to express my opinions just yet, but thought that it may be interesting to present two stories I read over the weekend.

Adam Williamson's "Why I don't like Canonical" and the response from Canonical's Community Manager, Jono Bacon.

Have a read, and comment with your thoughts, I'd be interested to hear opinions.

Thanks go to Sam for sharing this gem...

Alright, so I've had the 901 now for a week and I thought it would be a good time to put up a post giving my thoughts on actually running it.  (also, I started preparing this blog entry whilst sitting on the tube at 7am on a Sunday morning - how cool is that)

Firstly, and probably most importantly was the email I received from Sam on Tuesday regarding a fantastic package called eee-control.  I think this is a little bit like the ubuntu eee holy grail.  It requires that you are running adamm's customised kernel, and one or two extra python packages, but nothing too stressful due to the joy of deb's dependency solving.  Once installed and rebooted I can now turn on/off my wifi, bluetooth, camera and sdcard reader (all good when maximising battery potential).  I can also reconfigure the 4 hotkeys to do whatever I want them to... brilliant.  Very chuffed with this, and the system-tray icon is a very snazy Eee.

One of the things that I forgot to mention about the Eee 901 previously is the amazing touchpad.  I think that it is a really good size for this machine, but the coolest thing is that it is multi-touch.  Using 2 fingers on the touchpad means that you can scroll up and down, you can 'pinch and pull' images to zoom in and out.  What I also discovered this week was that you can use three fingers on the pad as well, and this relates to a right click.  It takes a bit of getting used to, but all in all fabulous.

I'm still getting used to the keyboard, but it really is not all that terrible.  I wouldn't like to try and type up a thesis on it, but for emails and and perhaps a couple of hours typing,  It's not all that bad.

Now for the issue - and only one so far which I believe might be a small manufacturing defect on my physical machine.  For whatever reason, randomly, the OS gets the signal that the lid has been closed, and opened.  I initially had the Eee set to go into standby when shutting the lid.  As you can imagine, this started causing serious havoc.  I would be working away and suddenly the machine would go into standby.  I've disabled all power management features with regards to the lid, so for now, it doesn't appear to be an issue, although every now and then the screen flickers on and off.  Below you can see an image of what my power history looks like.  Note all the lid open and lid closed notifications.  Although at this time the lid was fully up. 

The question I'm struggling with, is do I send the machine back to Asus for a repair - I have a year manufacturers warranty, or do I just live with it... I'm not sure about it because I have put ubuntu on...  plus it has a few stickers on it as well.

Finally, I have bitten the bullet and decided to buy myself an Eee PC. Those that know me personally, will know that I have been harping on about getting one for quite some time now. A couple of weeks ago I walked into my local PCWorld to discover that they had the 904HD. This started to get me very excited, although it left me with a dilemma... do I go for the 901, the 904HD or the 1000 version (link to see the differences). 

In the end I decided on the 901 and here where my reasons. 20GB of SSD hard drive space is more than enough for what an Eee PC is for and a 10" screen I think is the upper limit for a netbook and possibly even too big (plus I couldn't really justify the extra £100). The next question was black or white... no really, did I go for the 'Fine Ebony' or 'Pearl White'. The decision was black, because as much as I initially wanted a white one, the black one is so much sexier (yes, I used the s-word).

After unpacking it, adorning it with selected Ubuntu stickers. It went on charge for about 3hrs. Then it was play time!

Ubuntu Installation

I decided that I wanted to run a 'normal' Ubuntu OS. There are some good Eee derivatives (such as Ubuntu-Eee or eeebuntu), but I felt more comfortable using a normal Ubuntu install. Luckily for me, Intrepid has a funky 'create a USB start disk' application for just this sort of occasion. Pretty easy, put USB stick into my desktop, downloaded the newest ISO, point click, point click and I theoretically I had a bootable USB live CD.
(As an aside, it appears that you can also set aside an amount of space on the USB stick for settings and documents. I think this means that you can effectively have Linux on a stick that will work on a USB bootable PC and then have your personal settings and applications already installed?? I will research this further.)

Plug into the Eee, startup, hit F2 for BIOS. Here I had a few issues. The boot selection had 'removable media' as an option. This did not work. I fiddled a little bit more and in the boot -> hard drive disk section, an option for USB drive (make sure that your USB stick is plugged in when doing this). Turned this on, reset the boot order, saved BIOS and restarted. Weehee! Ubuntu install started! 

If I were to do this again, I would do it differently. I opted for the normal graphical install - be warned, not all the installation option windows fit on the small resolution screen. I had to be careful and use the TAB and ENTER keys selectively to hope that I was on the 'next' button. This model has 2 SSD drives, one 4GB and one 16GB. They have been formatted EXT2 with the 4GB mounting as / and the 16GB mounting as /home. Wasn't too bad in the end, and a cuppa tea later I was installed and ready to go! 

Wifi

Yip, that old chestnut! Didn't work out the box, then again, who ever expects that it will, but UbuntuForums are your friend. After a little research, it seemed that one of the best solutions to all things Ubuntu and Eee was to use a customised kernel provided by array.org. I added the repositories (plugged into the router via an ethernet cable), added the medibuntu repositories, selected a number of packages to install, hit apply and made the second cup of tea! Rebooted to the new kernel, and Bob's your Uncle and Sarah's your Aunt, everything worked. Wifi, webcam, sound, bluetooth, shortcut keys. You name it, it worked! (just a point here, the webcam, wifi and bluetooth were disabled in bios, apparently the default xandros ignores this and still works, I had to enable them). 

Overall thoughts

I LOVE THIS MACHINE! It is everything that a netbook should be, small, light, fast (the atom processor has so far seriously impressed me). I can scale the CPU, choosing between 800MHz, 1.00GHz, 1.2GHz or the full 1.6GHz. Also has the on demand setting so that the CPU will scale as required. So far, and this is only on the second charge cycle, I'm getting about 5hrs of normal usage (with the wifi turned on and being used). Suspend and resume works, very cool. Now for a bit more usage. I had it up a the University library today and it was stellar, it fulfilled it's purpose, 110%. I could even connect to the Uni's wifi network!

I am a very very happy Eee owner!
 

If you are a Virtualbox user (the commercial one from Sun), and recently had Ubuntu upgrade the kernel from 2.6.24-19 to 2.6.24-21.  You may have your virtual box freeze on you with a small window stating: spawning session.

You need to rebuild the kernel module for vbox, this achieved by running the following command:

$ sudo /etc/init.d/vboxdrv setup

Should work after that :-)

Nice... should be interesting to see what this does to their market share.

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20081009-wikipedia-adopts-ubuntu-fo...

Every wanted to throw away that old hard-drive, or old laptop and been worried that you might leave some important/embarrasing data on it, then fear no more :-) DBAN is here

"Darik's Boot and Nuke ("DBAN") is a self-contained boot disk that securely wipes the hard disks of most computers. DBAN will automatically and completely delete the contents of any hard disk that it can detect, which makes it an appropriate utility for bulk or emergency data destruction."

It uses a linux kernel, and works fantastically.

Having started university this September, I have been very impressed with the IT departments acceptance of FOSS.  Namely, all the computers on campus use firefox as the default, and during lectures we have been advised that should we not want to buy M$ Office, they supply the link to openoffice.org.

However, using FF3 in windows XP displayed the stunning Strata theme that is the Windows default theme.  After a little investigation, I found this beauty, Strata for Human - the Ubunutified version! BEAUTIFUL!

In an effort to continue evaluating and reviewing different Open Source Operating Systems, I downloaded and installed OpenSolaris 2008.05 onto the test partition of my notebook.  FAIL

It was rather late in the evening and I was tired, so when I installed it, I forgot to keep an eye out for the grub options during the install.  This means that when I ejected the CD and rebooted, all I got was the grub menu list from OpenSolaris, I had no way of getting back into my Ubuntu installation :-(

Google is your friend, and I found this....

http://www.sorgonet.com/linux/grubrestore/

Worked a charm! and I was back up and running in no time, a short summary follows:

From the OpenSolaris grub menu presented to me, I hit "c" to enter the grub command line interface.  I know my Ubuntu was installed in (hd0,1) and so entered root (hd0,1) and the did setup (hd0) which reinstalled my Ubuntu grub on the master boot record of my harddrive - easy as pie!

If you are stuck without a grub menu (ie you had to reinstall Windows on your dual boot and it overwrote your grub install) you can use any live cd, open a terminal, type grub and continue from there.

Review of OpenSolaris will be up some time next week once I've had a chance to tinker.

Only 8 years later since I first started delving into Linux, and I have finally realised that I need to do give something back to the community that I am so fond of.  Sure, I have advocated and told as many people as I possibly could tell, but I need to do something a little more serious.

So, I am now officially a member of the Ubuntu Documentation Student Team and am being mentored through my first Document Revision. YAY

I will fill you in on the progress as things progress, but here we go :-)

Remember, if you too want to contribute to Ubuntu then visit the Community website and find an area that interests you.  Or join a LUG/Mailing List in your area.

In the past when visiting a website, using Linux/Firefox, that broke on my system, I promptly swore at the webmaster for not developing a website that was W3C compatible or at least not tested under different platforms for compatibility!

I would like the world to change and for web developers to not only design their webspace for Internet Explorer.  However, until this happens(and I'm not sure I will be that lucky in my life time), I have discovered the User Agent Switcher Firefox Addon.  It allows you to change the packet of data that is sent to the server and you can then essentially tell it that you are browsing the website using IE7 and Windows Vista.  So far, it works and I am chuffed, here is just one example that I have recently come across, where the flash menu lands up on top of everything else.  Switching the User Agent, hitting refresh, and it looks good, YAY. 

Using the Default Firefox User Agent - note the big blue block on the left

Using the IE7 Windows Vista setting

Try it out and let me know if you have any success stories.

If you are interested in what Blender (a free open source 3D content creation suite) can do, I would suggest that you pop on over to the following two movies:

http://orange.blender.org (Elephants Dream is the story of two strange characters exploring a capricious and seemingly infinite machine. Created in 2005/06)

http://peach.blender.org (Big Buck Bunny tells the story of a giant rabbit with a heart bigger than himself. When one sunny day three rodents rudely harass him, something snaps... and the rabbit ain't no bunny anymore! In the typical cartoon tradition he prepares the nasty rodents a comical revenge. Created in 2007/08)

And the new project (although still a while away), http://apricot.blender.org which will be not be working on a movie, but using Blender to create a 3d game.  Crystal Space will be used as the 3D engine and delivery platform, and Python for some magic scripting to glue things together.

Now metal music may not be your cup of tea (I know it's not mine), but Jono Bacon (the Ubuntu Community Manager) is attempting to see if it is possible to release music under the Creative Commons and still be able to make any money. I think this is something to keep your eyes on and support where possible if you believe in freedom.

More details can be found at the Severed Fifth home page, and I would start by listening to the announcement (direct link to ogg file) explaining the project ideas and goals.

Good Luck Jono :-)

Feeling inspired by Quinn's post below, I thought I would pick up where he left off and attempt some of my own tests with wine. 

System information is as follows:

• Ubuntu 7.10 (gutsy)
• Kernel 2.6.22-15-generic
• Memory 1.5GB
• AMD Athlon XP 2400+
• Nvidia Geforce 6600GS (XFX)
• wine v1.0.0

I was able to install steam with no troubles, except that when it wanted to update itself after the install it continually crashed at the 26% mark.  This, luckily, is not uncommon, and can be solved by running wine at a different priority by using the following command:

$nice -n 19 wine .wine/drive_c/Program\ Files/Steam/steam.exe

It's been recommended that running steam with the following command line code produces the best results:

$WINEDEBUG=-all wine .wine/drive_c/Program\ Files/Steam/steam.exe

I have an account with steam, and have a Half-Life 1 product code.  Using this I was offered a range of games in the "My Games" section. I then installed Counter Strike through steam, hit the launch button and away I went.  It runs brilliantly! I dialled up the AA and AF to 4x using nvidia-settings and it was still pumping out over 40fps at 1280x1024. I would assume that it can be just as easy to run all the other HL1 spin-off games via this method (the original HL runs fine as well).  Of course if you have bandwidth restrictions, it may be an issue.

I then tried the Half-Life 2 demo also downloaded and installed via steam.  Installation was no issue, but when launching the game I got nothing but black screen and a message that said the monitor mode was not supported - some dodgy default settings causing problems.  So did a bit of reading, and if you right-click on the game and select properties you can set the launch options.  I used the following:

-width 1280 -height 1024 -refresh 60 -novid -console

This worked and we had action! The game performance is far from superior, but dialling everything back, I get between 15fps and 40fps depending on the environment.  The demo was playable and good God, I had forgotten just how fun it is to play around with the physics!

If valve do eventually port the source engine to linux, I will be the first to buy the Orange Box :-)