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...

There's a joke in here somewhere ;-)

http://www.computerworld.com.au/article/266965

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.

Nice one, guys.

http://www.elections.org.za

"Our server detected that you are using a browser or operating system (e.g. Netscape, Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome etc.) which is currently incompatible with our website. The current website is only compatible with Microsoft Internet Explorer V4 (and upward) on the Windows operating system."

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!
 

So, 8.10 has arrived. I'm not likely to be giving it a go on anything but my testbed desktop at home, but I'm curious to hear what you early adopter whippersnappers have to say about it. Voice your opinions via the comments!

One thing that caught my eye reading one of the reviews was a bit alarming: "Incidentally, 8.10 does away entirely with the X.org configuration file, long the bane of newbies but also the savior of more experienced users. The idea is that the graphical subsystem "just works", and if it doesn't you're supposed to file a bug report."

X has come a hell of a long way since my earliest experiences with it (which frequently included blacking out in a terrible rage and waking up in a room full of inexplicably murdered computer parts) but I'd still question this move. I've had display issues necessitating xorg.conf hacking as recently as 8.04, so I hope they've done their homework.

Phoronix thinks so. It's Wirth's Law in action, of course... Ubuntu isn't immune just because it's open source, unfortunately.

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=ubuntu_bench_2008&num=1

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...

Looks like Dell have finally released their Mini 9 netbook with Linux. Bit of a raw deal though, I think I'd rather have the XP version and just install Ubuntu over it ;-)

http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2008/10/06/dell_releases_ubuntu_scc/

http://news.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/10/04/2120206&from=rss

A quick update, since this is something that regularly causes me pain.

Ubuntu decided to release Thunderbird 2.0.0.17 to the Hardy repositories last week. This, of course, wreaked havoc on the delicate and sensitive machinery of the Lightning and Google Calendar Provider plugins (again). Starting up Tbird produced a number of cryptic error messages relating to not being able to load, read, write, or acknowledge in any shape form or fashion the existence of, any Google calendars one might have set up.

The solution is quite simple:

1. Uninstall both Google Provider and Lightning from Tbird. This may require use of both apt and the Tbird add-on manager, depending on what versions you have installed and where you got them from (I had Lightning 0.8 from the Ubuntu reps, and Provider 0.5 from the interwebs). Restart Tbird to make sure you've got rid of them.

2. Download and install the latest Lightning (0.9) and Google Provider (0.5) plugins (in that order) from here and here.

3. Restart Tbird to get them all going. You should be back in business.