406 Not Acceptable

After waiting for what seemed like an eternaty, I recieved by Nokia N900 in the post on tuesday. I was using a G1 beforehand, and the N900 does a good job of killing my interest in Android!

First, let me start with something that has been worrying many people eyeing the N900: the size. From previews, the size and weight were frowned apon. To be honest, neither is an issue. The N900 is pretty much the same size as the G1. In fact I use my G1’s carry case for my N900! Whilst a collegue noticed the weight of the device when looking at it, I don’t really notice any difference in comarison to my G1.

Next up is the touchscreen, it’s resistive, but a very good one. I would say the N900 sets the benchmark for all other resistive screens to be measured against. Coming from a G1 I did notice you either have to push a little more or tilt your finger to use the tip or the edge — rather than the pad. Once you have the technique down it becomes second nature and is just as good as a capactive screen. To be honest, i used the same technique when trying to select small links on my G1. The resistive screen demonstrates superior prescision and is far better at dealing with small links/menus. Another, although rarely used in my case, benefit is the stylus; which helps when using debian applications.

I don’t think the keyboard is an improvement on the G1’s. The keys feel too close and the lack of rows does slow me down; although, the predictive text implementation is outstanding.

Maemo itself, feels much more like a real linux distro than android ever did. That’s probably because it is one! Already real linux applications are being ported, many of which will never see light on Android unless there are substantial changes to the platform.

This post is already getting wordy! I’ll post some more impressions later.

I have been waiting eagerly for the past  year for a Ion powered netbook to replace my 12″ Advent radiator; however, no-one seems interested in releasing a 10-12 inch netbook (whether 12 inch counts as a netbook is another topic for another day.) I have had a look at all the other smaller machines on the market, that have a dedicated graphics card such as the Dell M1330 toa even the MacBook. In the case of the MacBook I would have to sneak a dual boot Windows/Linux it and wipe all memory it had of OS X! The problem with these machines is the same one that plagues my Advent — they get too hot under heavy use.

The heat levels are mostly down to the Core 2 processor used by most of these portable laptops, so the only way I can avoid one of those is to head down the netbook path; however, every single one of these machines uses the same Intel graphics that’s in my Advent. Sure, you can install Compiz on them with ease, but you can’t use them for a quick gaming session. The only game I really play much is Trackmania, which on the lowest settings almost runs on an Intel machine; however, any onboard by ATi or nVidia would easily cope with the game. I thought that the Ion netbook would solve my problem…

During the back end of 2008 Nvidia announced the Ion platform, which at the time looked like it would shake up the netbook market. Whilst it has managed to find its way in to nettops, not a single netbook has been released in Europe or the US which uses the platform. A few months back Lenovo announced the S12, the first ion powered netbook; however, they decided Europe did not need the Ion in their version. Still there are no signs of the Ion variant coming out in America. Next came OCZ, with an Ion powered Neutrino, the DIY netbook. Announced at Computex this June, but no sign has been seen of the thing since.

There are a few items in Asia that are interesting, such as a dual Atom powered machine with the Ion chip, but importing can cost a lot once you get stung by the duty fees. Even better you will find yourself with no support!

So just when will the Ion based netbooks start coming out over here! No-one seems to be able to get their act together and just release one, just paper release after paper release!

As ASUS are making a move to sell the Eee Pc with XP, I thought I’d post something to show that there’s nothing wrong with Linux — even for Windows novices. I, and many others, feel that ASUS simply chose the wrong distribution of Linux to ship with the Eee Pc. Xandros may be very much like Windows, but it has a relatively small user base and little support. Leaving ASUS to deal with the vast challenge of providing adiquate customer support for new Linux users, as there is no-where else for customers to go. In addition, the inadiquacy of the operating system mean opensource customised version of a popular distribution like Ubuntu in the first place. It’s strange why Everex have decided to fall into the same trap as ASUS.
The following text is from a review of the ASUS Eee Pc in general, eeeXubuntu, and the installation process, by Wyowind. The original source is from the EeeUser forums.

I have just received my black Eee PC 4G Galaxy and I am very very impressed. I bought it to be able to view some work related reference materials and stay in touch with my employer for work assignments. It seems like it will do a lot more.

It feels very sturdy. Heavier than I thought it would feel. The screen is small but I knew what it would be like from looking at some DVD players before I purchased it. It booted quickly! I didnt time it but it seemed very fast.

Like a lot of folks here I was planning on replacing the default O/S with somehing differnent. I did my research on what was available and even played with some of the live distro’s on my winPC before I picked one to try on my Eee. EeeXubuntu (r3) had about everything I would need, and the feel of an MS operating system that I was used to. I have found that a lot of the things work the same but have different names.

A disclaimer before I continue, I have never used Linux before in m life. I have some friends that use it and have always wanted to give it a try but never got around to it. I have used many versions of MS Windows for about 10 years now and consider myslf a novice user at best.

After playing with, and trashing, the xandros distro that came installed in both beginner and advanced modes I was ready to put EeeXubutu on. (This is a learning proccess for me)

I installed EeeXubuntu onto a 2GB thumbdrive just like the wiki instructed and it worked flawlessly. I booted it up on my Eee and played with it for about and hour and figured I was ready to wipe out my hard drive and install it.

The install was very straight forward at first. Pick a primary language and timezone then the partition/format section came up. I was lost for a while because I couldnt remember reading much about how to partition/format using the installation program. All I had to do was about 10 minutes of reading to figure it out. Long story short, you have to select manual and go though each aspect of the drives you have. There is plenty of help scattered throughout the forum on this. A suggestion for the guys that maintain the wiki is maybe you could put a more indepth guide for beginners to this proccess in the EeeXubuntu installation guide. Anyway, after I figured out how to setup for format I moved on to the next section.

(A tip for new people that havent used Linux before, choose a password with more than 6 characters. I found this out the hard way. It seems that if your password is too short it dosent allow you full access to edit things in root. This might be common knowledge to people familiar with linux but it took me a while to figure it out. One I did then everything else went smooth)

After I entered my personal info and password I was ready to install. The next part was fully automatic. It took about 20 minutes total time and was trouble free.

I booted up for the first time and it worked great. Imediately the update manager told me there were some 111 updates available. I had to manually connect to my wireless conection first but that was easy. (just click on the icon in the lower right corner and select your connection). I started the updater and it began downloading everyting to update my O/S. After about 15 minutes it asked for a reboot.

I felt like I was at a milestone. I was ready to try out EeeXubuntu for the first time in all its glory. It booted quickly and before I knew it I was at the screen to enter my login info. I did and it finnished the boot. My wireless connection was automatic this time. No problems there. If you make it to this point you are ready to go on with the list of know issues and fixes in the wiki. This is where I found out about the password problem. it wouldnt let me edit in root on mousepad. after I enetered the commands and my short password in terminal the mousepad would open with a blank page and the warning at the top about changes made inroot could be dangerous. It was s simple fix, I went into the system>users & groups> and eidited my account info to change my password, reboot and waaaalllaa. that fixed it.

It took me a while to figure things out but once I did, following the instructions to te letter in the wiki worked great.
(a warning to new people like me, you MUST use the exact keys/fonts as they are listed in the wiki. You cannot substitue upper and lower case letters)
I recommend going trough the list that the wiki gives you in the order listed. If you mess something up then its easier to go back and fix it.

I could write 10 more pages about the trails and tribulations of fixing the know issues of this install but I think everyone will have a different experience with this. In my particular case I was learning from the beginning and as I went along. Suffice to say that I have completed almost the entire list and EeeXubuntu is up and running strong. I can tell you that my confidence level has gone up ten fold in just a couple of days using linux. The installation seems scary at first but even if your a novice, newby, noob like me you can do it too.

I think you will like EeeXubuntu r3, I know I do so far!
I have also installed:

Open Office 2.3 & Konqueror (they work great)

Post Script:
I am writing this on my Eee using Open office Writer and testing the battery at the same time. So far the battery has lasted 3 hours and 15 minutes with full screen brightness and wifi on. The meter that was automatically installed for me seems to work well, it shows 13% remaining.

Credit once more to Wyowind.

It all goes to show, that with a little effort, the change to Linux isn’t really that hard. After a few months, you’ll find yourself reasonably proficient in the ‘duanting terminal’.

With around 3GB of the 4GB of space on the standard Eee, you’ll either be needing to buy some extra storage in the shape of an SDHC card or free up some space on the hard drive. Now there are a few tricks to free up space on your Eee’s hard drive — I must warn that I’ve not tried these on Xandros, as I don’t use it. Although, in principle, they should still work.I would recommend the first and third methods to most users, and leave the second one to advanced Linux users.

Tidying up apt-get

The first method is to simply clean up your apt-get cache. You will only find this usefull if you’ve installed and removed programs on your machine; otherwise, I doubt it will do a thing, as the cache will already be empty. Numerous users have seen large amounts of space freed up from this, whilst others have barely seen a change. Therefore it’s not too difficult to conclude that results will vary. This process is very simple and is, in theory, completely harmless and no issues will ever arise due to its use.

All you need to do is fire up a terminal and run the following two commands:

sudo apt-get autoremove

sudo apt-get clean

The autoremove command will remove any orphaned packages; packages that are installed, but are not used by anything and can’t be used on their own. The clean command will then clean out the package cache.

Removing unneeded drivers

Be warned, this is an advanced method and doesn’t really give you much space back. As the video driver folder is only 5 megabytes in the first place; but even 5 megabytes are precious when you only have 4000 in the first place.

Please note that removing drivers that are needed will cause serious problems to your system. So I’d leave this one to those who know what they are doing (so make sure you know what you doing!) To be on the safe side I believe all the drivers referencing amd, ati, s3, nv, and savage are removable. As the Eee Pc doesn’t use any AMD, ATI, S3, or nVidia components.

To get to the folder in question, with the permission to delete files use this command in the terminal:

sudo nautilus /usr/lib/xorg/modules/drivers/

Compressing the usr directory

You’ll notice the usr directory is massive, even without doing anything to the operating system. It will most likely stand around 1.5GB for most users, and even if this only gets a third of that back it will be a great improvement.

The following information was originally by Paul Battley, I’ve made the odd change here and there. As I found the original guide to be so good I decided to use it as a base for the information provided here.

squashfs lets you compress a filesystem, but it’s read-only. unionfs, meanwhile, allows you to overlay a writable filesystem on top to allow changes to the data. Obviously, the more you change the data, the more disk space is used, but it’s always possible to recompress and recover the space later on. So, you’d be better off installing and removing all the packages you think you will want, before running this process; in addition, it’s probably a good idea to run this process every now and again. Personally, I believe every 6 months will probably suffice, but this would vary depending on how much you change the installed components.

All the commands I’m going to give here need to be run as root, and I’m going to assume basic Linux competence. If it doesn’t make sense to you, you probably shouldn’t try it!

In order to run as root, run the following command

sudo su

You will then be asked for your password, please avoid using this command often. It makes it easy to break your system!

Step 1 is to install a couple of packages:

apt-get install squashfs-tools unionfs-tools

Then make a space for your compressed filesystem and overlay:

mkdir -p /.filesystems/usr/overlay

And compress your filesystem:

mksquashfs /usr /.filesystems/usr/usr.sqfs

Add these lines to /etc/modules:

unionfs
squashfs
loop

… and these lines to /etc/fstab:

/.filesystems/usr/usr.sqfs /usr squashfs ro,loop,nodev 0 0
unionfs /usr unionfs nodev,noatime,dirs=/.filesystems/usr/overlay=rw:/usr=ro 0 0

Next, reboot from a live distribution on a USB stick, CD, or SD card, mount the internal root partition, and move aside the old /usr directory:

mkdir /mnt/sda1
mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/sda1
mv /mnt/sda1/usr /mnt/sda1/usr.old
mkdir /mnt/sda1/usr

Reboot from the internal disk. Did it work? Then you can remove the /usr.old directory to reclaim the space.

Again thanks to Paul Battley for the compression information.

Just when you thought ASUS were under pressure for the ultraportable market, along come three more challengers to the Eee’s throne. Both Acer, MSI, and ECS are planning on joining ASUS and Everex in the booming affordable ultraportable market. The good news is all three companies are looking to amend the main issue with the ASUS Eee Pc — the screensize. Acer are looking to match the Eee Pc 900’s 8.9 inch screen; MSI are considering an 8 or 10 inch screen; whilst ECS plan on having a range of sizes from 8.2 to 10.2 inches. Even better news is the fact that the Acer machine will be cheaper than the Eee Pc 900; although, pricing for the ECS or MSI machine is currently unknown, but it would be a huge blow to ASUS if ECS or MSI could get a 10″ model to retail at the same price as the Eee Pc 900.

Very little details for each machine is available right now, but I’ve tried to gather as much information as possible.

Acer

• 8.9″ Screen
• Rumoured 800×480 resolution (WTF??!)
• 4-8GB of Flash storage, or traditional drive
• Estimated price $350-400
• May release

ECS

• 8.2″ to 10.2″ Screen
• Intel Atom Processor
• Intel 945 GSE chipset
• Upto 2GB of DRAM (Dynamic Ram)
• 3G Connectivity
• WiFi
• 56k Modem
• Bluetooth
• 4 in 1 Card Reader
• 4-6 Cell Battery

MSI ‘Wind’

• 8″ or 10″ Screen
• 1024×768 resolution (not widescreen?)
• Intel Atom Processor, between 1 GHz -1.6 GHz
• 1GB RAM as standard
• Choice of Solid State or Traditional 2.5″ drive
• Linux or Windows
• 7 Hour battery life
• Retail between £299 – £699 ($500 – $1400)

All information was gathered from the links in the article. I don’t make up FUD!

Things could look very interesting for the consumer this summer, as the many choices of ultraportable hit the market. I can see the price of the original Eee dropping, perhaps by £25-50 ($50-100,) and the 8GB model taking its current price. There would be little point in buying an Eee at the current price, as the Acer seems to be offering more for the same price. All this rivalry in the market is good for the consumer, and prices will fall. Who knows, we might even see an Ultraportable hit the magic number — £99 ($199.)

I couldn’t believe I got this working, but you can run Crysis on the Eee. For those of you running Windows XP or Vista on your Eee, this is a real treat. I don’t think you will have any luck running Crysis under Wine or VirtualBox as the Eee barely copes with the game in the first place.

First you need to be comfortable with overclocking to attempt this and have upgraded your memory. You’ll need to be up to 2 or 4GB of ram, as you need some of the space to install parts of the game on. Running directly from memory makes the game run much smoother.

Please check the post’s date.

With my ASUS Eee Pc at 630Mhz and Crysis on medium settings at 800×480 I get only 12 fps. Once I put the processor up to its true speed of 900Mhz I got the game going at 18fps. Finally with my Eee running at 1035Mhz I managed to squeeze out 20fps, just enough to make the game stable. This was done with numerous tweaks to the game.

Although the game is demanding, the small resolution of the Eee makes it playable. Desktops struggle as users attempt to play the game at resolutions about twice that of the Eee, which require far more power.

Anyway, I can’t write up a full guide now as it’s getting late. So enjoy the pictures. Click the links to open the 5 megapixel shots, you can see my monitors dead pixel in the last…

Crysis Eee Pc screenshot 1

Crysis Eee Pc screenshot 2

Crysis Eee Pc screenshot 3 (You can even see my Eee’s dead pixel!)

If you haven’t realised by now, this was an April Fools joke.

Whilst for some time the ASUS Eee PC 701 has been the lone affordable ultraportable laptop on the market, it won’t enjoy that priveledge for much longer. With the emergence of the Everex CloudBook the Eee has finally got some competition. Here are the specifications for this little machine:

• gOS Rocket operating system (Linux variant)
• 1.2GHz, VIA C7-M Processor (ULV)
• 512MB DDR2 533MHz, SDRAM
• 30GB Hard Disk Drive (3600rpm parallel ATA)
• 7″ WVGA TFT Display (800 x 480)
• VIA UniChrome Pro IGP Graphics
• VIA High-Definition Audio
• 802.11b/g WiFi
• 10/100 Ethernet Port
• DVI Port
• Two USB 2.0 Ports
• 4-in-1 Media Card Reader
• 0.3MP Webcam
• Headphone/Line-Out Port
• Microphone/Line-In Port
• 4-cell Lithium-Ion Battery

Now these are quite impressive when you find the Cloudbook will retail at $399 — the same price as the 4GB eee PC. For the same price a user will get a processor running at twice the speed (the eee uses a 900mhz chip, but it is factory underclocked to 630mhz) and just under 8 times the storage space. Sadly, well maybe not for eee users, there is a twist in the tale. The hard drive only spings at 3600 rpm, your typical desktop drive will run at twice this. This means, according to NotebookReview.com:

Both the average data transfer speed (read/write speed) and the average data access time (how long it takes the drive to locate data) for the 30GB hard drive where slower than either the internal 4GB SSD inside the Asus Eee PC or a 16GB SDHC card used as a second storage drive inside the Eee PC.

Now that is quite staggering information. Thus, one could overclock (techincally this would not actually be overclocking, as you will be simply making the processor run at its correct speed,) their eee then insert a 16GB, or soon a 32GB, SDHC card and have a, plausibly, superior system to the Everex; although, this would be more expensive.

Secondly, the operating system gOS Linux is just as poor as Xandros Linux on the eee. Neither machine comes with an operating system that the majority of users would be satisfied with. If either machine used something like Xubunu, or even a tweaked version of Ubuntu, the systems would feel much more complete. For reference I removed Xandros for Xubuntu on my eee in less than a week.

Now Asus will be releasing a more expensive version of the Eee, the Eee PC 900 that features numerous improvements:

• 9″ screen running at 1024×600
• Multitouch trackpad
• Integrated bluetooth
• 8 or 12GB solid state drive

Now all this on top of what the Eee PC already offers for only $100 more ($400) seems like a great bargin; although, the price starts to tred on the heels of larger machines with much higher specifications. This will probably cause the price of the 4GB 701 to drop, and the 8GB model move to the $300 price point. Otherwise, I can see the 701s struggle; I own a 701 and would be tempted with the 900 if the price stays at $400.

I know many people who are turned off the idea of the Eee or the Cloudbook, simply because of the 7 inch screen. Now with a 9 inch screen these people will have to think again about these laptops. If everything goes well, demand for the Asus Eee Pc 900 could even outstrip the current demand for the 701.

On the last day of November I recieved a truely wonderful parcel, within its cheap cardboard packing lay a marvelous peice of computing history: the ASUS eee notebooky thingy.

As you can tell by the time differential between the publishing of this article, either: I have been busy with coursework; the eee has stolen my soul; or someone has sneekily made good use of a ‘publish story later’ feature in their CMS.

The ATi Radeon HD 2600xt graphics card has taken quite some stick from the hardware sites when being reviewed by them. What is quite shocking is that there has been no ‘true midrange’ graphics card released by either nVidia or ATi. There has been no card that packs the punch that, for example, the GeForce 6600GT did in its day. A card that came in at around the £100/$200 price point and gave gamers great performance for their cash.

Tech Power Up! are reporting some interesting rumours for the specifications for nVidia’s next graphics card — the G92, or what would be more commonly known as the Geforce 9800GTX.