Posts Tagged ‘ubuntu’
November 17th, 2009
I appear to have broken my netbook.
Well, ‘broken’ might be a bit steep – it no longer responds to a lid close event with the nice, neat standby mode it once treated me to. Instead, it triggers the standby script and gets itself into a half-on, half-off state.
In this state, the power light is flashing to indicate that it’s in standby. Unfortunately, it isn’t – everything’s still working fine. The only indication that it even tried to standby is that my SD card unmount/remount script is triggered and the default keyring is locked.
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April 8th, 2009
It seems that Microsoft is scoring a bit win in the netbook sector, with claims doing the rounds that Windows XP has gone from a mere 10% of the market in February last year to 96% now.
As someone who uses – and likes – Ubuntu on most of his hardware, this is a surprise. Sadly, it’s not that surprising – most people will always vote for the status quo.
I did write an article for Bit-Tech on the matter, but a real journalist did the same. Accordingly, here’s the article that never made it:
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April 5th, 2009
My laptop is now officially Powered by Ubuntu, thanks to System 76 and the Linux Emporium.
To snag yourself some free Ubuntu stickers, simply pop a self addressed envelope across to:
The Linux Emporium
Bridge House
17a Maybrook Road
Sutton Coldfield
Birmingham
B76 1AL UK
They’ll drop a pack of four by return of post. I think you’ll agree that it looks much nicer than the old “Designed for Windows Vista” sticker it replaces.
January 1st, 2009
Being a huge fan of Ubuntu, I’ve been using the OS on most of my hardware for quite some time – including my first release spec Eee PC 701. Originally running Ubuntu 7.04 and then upgraded to 7.10, it’s always been a bit ‘finicky’ – mainly as a result of the non-standard hacks I’ve had to implement to get things like the shortcut keys working.
I decided the time had come to move to something a bit newer, however, and have just finished installing Ubuntu 8.04. Using the ISO from the Ubuntu Eee website, it was a fairly painless install. I was disappointed to see that the installer didn’t set up fstab in the manner I prefer – with a limited number of writes on the internal SSD available, I like to put /tmp, /var, and others on a tmpfs mount – but that was easily sorted.
What wasn’t quite so easy was the wireless. Unfortunately, Asus have opted to use one of Atheros’s less supported wireless chipsets in the Eee – with no official Linux driver available. The madwifi-ng driver included as part of the Ubuntu-Eee package sort of worked, but tended to drop out rather frequently – oddly, when the signal was at its strongest rather than its weakest.
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