thanks to the crew at webupd8 :-)

http://webupd8.blogspot.com/2009/07/fix-fonts-in-firefox-35-and-ubuntu.html

oh my... I may have to get me some of these... my wireless mouse will never need batteries again!

http://www.usbcell.com/

As promised, the quality is not brilliant (due to smaller file size), but hopefully shows the main points :-)

HTC-Magic / Android Demo from i love my linux on Vimeo.

Absolutely amazing!!!  I am so in love with this phone, it truly is a geeks paradise!  Don't get me wrong, there are a few things are stupid and things that need work, but on the whole i think this phone rocks the party that rocks the party!  

First things first, how does it compare with the so called "Jesus Phone"... well according to our friends at el'Reg, the HTC-Magic review scored 85% and the new iPhone 3G S only scored 80% - I leave you to make your mind up on that.  Comparing my Magic with a friends iPhone 3G, I can say there are points where the Magic wins hands down, and others where the iPhone is a step ahead.  Overall, I prefer the Magic, but I would, considering I'm a Linux zealot.

Lets look at some individual areas:
Bluetooth leaves A LOT to be desired.  At the moment it can only do mono-audio.  it works with my nokia bluetooth headset without too much function loss, but that's all.  No data transfer, no tethering and no contact sharing or picture sending.  So if you want to send your mate a picture you have, you will have to do it via email (which it is set up to do very easily).  I believe the iPhone suffered with this as well, but may now have been fixed?

The keyboard - it's ok... lets be honest here, I have fat fingers and it's very small, but it's actually becoming more functional the more I use it.  It's saving grace is the auto correction. many miss hit letters get fixed pretty well.  I just have to be careful that I don't send texts or emails with the wrong words in when it auto-corrects incorrectly (similar to predictive text errors)! This is happening less and less though as i add more custom words to the dictionary and get more proficient with the keyboard.  you can always turn the phone horizontally and use the width to great effect.

Why, oh why, would you not put a 3.5mm jack for earphones on a multimedia device.  I mean really, the mini-usb connection! I've had to get an adaptor so that I can use my own earphones.

Battery life is limited and very dependent on how hard you are hitting it.  Using it during the day, lots of emails, web browsing and texting, it has died before on me in less than 12hrs.  This is mitigated slightly by the fact that it does only take a couple of hours to recharge, and because it charges through the mini-ubs socket, any computer is a potential power source.  On average now i get about 36-48hrs life out of it.  Dependent of course on what i'm doing with it.

Connectivity to Ubuntu is super easy, plug in and mount the SD Card out of the box with no issues (the phone comes with a 2GB Micro SD card).  The SD card can be hot swapped which is good. Music transfered easily and you can just build your own files system because the music player uses tags to organise your music and searches the card automagically. Still fighting with album art (should ideally download this itself) but slowly getting there with picard and reassigning the mp3 tags.  Oh, how good is this, ogg files played for me without any additional fiddling!

Applications:
The preloaded applications are good, gmail, email and google chat are very good. The Android Market is filled with tons of applications, but here is a list of what I currently have installed:

I've left of the rest of the random games I have, but there are tons to get if you want :-)

Overall I'm very very happy, and hopefully will get a short video posted before the end of the week with a quick demo of the interface.

Very soon... hopefully before the end of this week, I will be the owner of a new mobile phone.  Not just any phone my friends, but a phone that uses the linux kernel.

http://www.htc.com/www/product/magic/overview.html

I found this blog post by Mark Shuttleworth to be very interesting.   Mainly because I know very little about the development process of open source software.  It outlines some interesting points and if you have any points, please comment on the original post :-)

http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/288

Man, makes me worry who I'm talking to about OSS...

http://linuxlock.blogspot.com/2009/03/tempers-flare-as-recession-creeps-...

Something that I have been meaning to blog about for a while, but stupid university assignments kept getting in the way.  I have a Nokia N73 with 3G and bluetooth.  With my new Eee901 it seemed the perfect opportunity to attempt to get wireless internet access.  After a lot of fiddling and failing, and very simple and very easy solution presented itself.  I'll try to keep this as generic as possible, because it should work with most phones that have the capability. 

I'm running Ubuntu 8.10 on an Asus Eee 901 as the starting point.

The first magic step required is to install blueman.  It's a GTK+ bluetooth manager with many bells and whistles.  I'm using version 0.6, which is a beta, from the launchpad ppa found here : https://edge.launchpad.net/~blueman/+archive/ppa.  Before I go any further, PPA repositories are normally pretty bleeding edge and not fully supported by Canonical, so use with caution.  I'm using the beta because it features brilliant integration with network manager - you will see why later.

Once installed, you may need to reboot. then run blueman (should be under accessories). With the bluetooth switched on on your mobile phone, run an inquiry, and your phone should show up in the list.  You'll want to bond it, to make future connections quicker and easier.

Select your phone and click properties.  This will give you a run down of what bluetooth communications your phone is able to do.  The one you will be looking for is "Dialup Networking" and the channel number.  If you have this, you're one step closer to wireless internet heaven. 

We now need to get blueman, dialup networking and network manager talking - sounds impossible, actually really easy.  Hit Edit > Services and turn on "Serial" and go to the configuration settings.  Select "add new serial port", select your phone, and under the service, choose dialup networking.  you may need to add the channel number under advanced, but think that it will do this automatically anyway.  once you have added the port, highlight it and tick the box, "This is a GSM/GPRS etc" box.  It's this little option that makes the magic happen in network manager.

Save all of that, and hopefully network manager has given you a notification that you have a connection available.  If not, click once on the network manager icon and choose configure under "mobile broadband" and follow the instructions and select your internet provider.

That's it, it should now be as easy to turn bluetooth on, open blueman, and select the connection on network manager!

Good Luck, any issues, comment or email and I'd be willing to help as much as I can!

Peter Day from BBC Radio 4's 'In Business' had a very interesting program last week.  In it he Interviews Kevin Kelly from wired magazine and Chris Anderson from the Creative Commons.  A very good listen.  Download the MP3 directly here:

http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/radio/worldbiz/worldbiz_20090108-2030a.mp3

If you are not a Linux user and find yourself feeling overwhelmed by your new Linux Netbook (be it an MSI wind, Eee or Acer Aspire One) then fear no longer...  The guys and girls over at Reghardware has some nifty tips to help you out.

http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2008/10/17/netbook_linux_guide_1/

http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2008/10/28/netbook_linux_guide_2/

http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2008/11/24/netbook_linux_guide_3/

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!