A Man and his Penguin

I think it’s been a while since I last wrote to here, but Linux users are probably going to be very interested in what happened to me today.

I finally went out and bought a netbook. Over the last couple of weeks in particular I’ve been in situations where I’ve thought “Gee, I could really do with having a portable computer right about now”, so I decided to get one. Linux, of course (why on earth do people want to run a 7-year-old outdated, archaic operating system on a netbook, especially when they could be paying more than $100 for the OS?)

First, I was thinking of just getting the original 7 inch Eee. Arrow Computers have them for $299. But then I read that the 900 MHz processor is underclocked to just 600 and something MHz. And a 7 inch screen is pretty small.

So I decided to choose between an EeePC 900 or 901, and an Acer Aspire One. At first I was for the One because of its looks and the Atom processor (as opposed to the 900’s Celeron), and then I found that the 900 and 901 both have 20 gigabytes of SSD storage; perfect for long train rides! So I wanted an Eee.

I rang up MCG who had advertised the Eee 900. They didn’t have any. I called Kambo’s, Officeworks, and Good Guys. Officeworks said they had some Eees with Linux and an Atom processor, and that the price was $478. I was a little suspicious because that was the advertised price of the One, but I went there anyway.

As it turns out, the guy had quoted me on an Aspire One, and they didn’t have any Eees with Linux. Desperate dash around; Harvey’s only had the XP ones, Dick Smiths didn’t have any, Retra only had XP, and Arrow only had 7 inch. So I ended off going back to Officeworks and buying the Aspire One. I would have bought the One elsewhere as penalty for the misleading, but I’d like to think it was an honest mistake; and besides, they were the cheapest.

As further demonstration that Ubuntu isn’t driving my wireless card correctly, the One shows my wireless signal strength as being 92%. Ubuntu shows 13%.

I’ve enabled the XFCE menu by pressing Alt-F2 and typing “xfce4-setting-show” and then going to the window manager settings and enabling the right-click menu. There’s an unusual bevvy of stuff installed on the One. Compiz is installed, but won’t run. There are heaps of window manager themes for the person who delves into the XFCE settings, but few control themes apart from the XFCE defaults. The Session settings menu item is present, but the actual program doesn’t exist. Sudo is available, with no password - this makes it easy to set a root password and get access to the Pirut package manager.

There’s also a bunch of Acer bloatware, like some amateur games and an “XP Recovery” program that doesn’t run. There’s also some open-source games like Tux Puck, Supertux, and Frozen Bubble. Funnily enough, Acer also includes their own amateur rendition of Frozen Bubble that looks completely out of place compared to the slick, professional open-source equivilant.

Halfway through the first level of Supertux, some of the arrow keys stopped working, and then none of the keys worked. I had to reboot. I don’t fancy doing much gaming on this machine, of course.

Once I’ve got a bit more speed on my internet connection (I’ve gone over the 5 gig mark) or get into a free wifi zone (like just outside Linda’s house!) I’ll do the equivilant of apt-get update and start installing some packages on the One. And I’m also planning on doing some wardriving too!

I do want to get a bigger battery if I can find one. The one it comes with is ridiculously tiny, and out-of-the-box I’ve got something like 2 hours. Once I actually charge the battery I should get more.

This entry was posted on Monday, November 24th, 2008 at 10:26 pm and is filed under Backstory, Open-source application software, Ubuntu. 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.