TuxRunner

It’s been a while since I’ve posted.  Hasn’t really been anything crazy going on in the world of Linux for me.  But things are starting to pick up again.  I finally, FINALLY got rid of my last Windows system at home!  (Well, not entirely true, I still have an XP VM floating around for a check printing program I use).  My Windows 2003 file server at home has been replaced entirely by a new DroboShare for the Drobo, and any apps that were on it are now running under Linux on my CentOS box.

I also, without giving her much notice, upgraded (haha) the wife from a Windows 7 Release Candidate, to Linux Mint 7 over the weekend.  She’s honestly pretty good with it.  Not too much for her to figure out.  I’m surprised at how well she’s adapting to it.  I’m trying to keep things as familiar as possible to her.  Luckily I’ve had her using a lot of cross-platform apps, so things like Skype, Firefox, and Picasa are already familiar to her on the Linux side. (continue reading…)

So far it looks like Ubuntu 8.04 LTS seems to be a winner on the original Everex Cloudbook.  Whatever changes they made in the kernel beyond 2.6.26 seem to definitely affect stability of the USB keyboard/trackpad on the Cloudbook.  I believe 8.04 LTS is using an 2.6.24 kernel.  Let’s hope they keep it like that for a while.

Only thing I had to configure was the e_powersaver module and get the OpenChrome drivers running.  E_powersaver doesn’t exist, so I had to compile it and add it in.  And I believe OpenChrome is installed, but just not enabled.  Just needed to tweak xorg.conf to get it up and running. (continue reading…)

Next attempt at getting a fairly stable copy of Linux on my Cloudbook: Ubuntu 8.04 LTS.  I decided to give this a try because of a few comments I found on the Netbook User Forums talking about some changes that were made into the 2.6.26 kernel and beyond which may have introduced more instability with the Cloudbook.  I’d really like to run the latest version of Ubuntu/Mint, but if it’s actually more troublesome than the older version…forget it, I just want a nice usable device.

Ran into a couple of gotchas already with just installing it.  First, I don’t have an external CD/DVD drive I can use to do the install.  So I have to resort to installing from USB thumb drive.  I found a great little program called Unetbootin which allows you to take just about any Linux ISO and make a USB thumb drive bootable and put a copy of that ISO on it.  It also has a decent list of “known” distros that it can automatically download the ISO for, and then create the bootable USB thumb drive. (continue reading…)