Memos From the Cube

Long time, no update. This is actually the first post I’ve written in advance – all others have been made on a “as I feel like it” basis and posted immediately.

This week I’m without proper Internet access, and instead I’m playing the part of Nurse Nightingale (or, perhaps, Typhoid Mary) helping my girlfriend after she had all four wisdom teeth extracted. Damn painful by the looks of it, but the hamster cheeks are adorable. In any case, that means I’m away from my home laptop – and that means no access to my local primary SVN repositories. While I still have Internet access over Wifi at University during the day, at night I have to content myself with the latest Stargate Atlantis and Scrubs episodes.

However, I’m still able to access my public SVN mirror over at Google Code – so any work I do this week will have to me merged back in when I get back home. However, that’s also made me realise that the current codebase is a little broken due to a commit I haven’t synced up yet. For anyone getting compile errors on one or two of the demos, just hang on and it’ll be fixed when I get back.

This week is actually a great experiment for me, on two parts. Firstly, it’s the first week that I will be using my new Aspire one exclusively. Normally I use a mix of my main “big” laptop when at home, and my AAO while at University, but this week I’m running solely on my Netbook. So far I’m loving it – while typing on it is a little uncomfortable after a long period of time, I don’t feel at all restricted by it. The extra battery life from the 9 cell battery is definitely worth it here, so if you own an AAO and are on the fence about it, I heartily recommend it.

Not everything is rosy on the AAO front however. I’ve already had a corrupt partition due to playing “loud” sounds through the inbuilt speakers. This is a well-known problem now where the internal speakers can corrupt the hard disk due to either vibration (unlikely, the internal speakers are abysmal and don’t have much volume at all) or power rail sagging. No doubt Acer will be looking at either a large class-action suit or a lot of repairs in the future.

Nevertheless, I’m thrilled to now have a triple-boot system on my AAO, consisting of the original XP Home installation, build 7068 of Windows 7, and the newly released Ubuntu 9.04 – installed in that order. First up, I’m very impressed with Windows 7 – it’s a great update to polish up Vista into a form that works fantastically on even my low powered netbook, and the new interface changes are suprisingly effective. If Microsoft put Windows 7 onto the itsnotcheating.com.au website when it’s release as they have Vista now, I’ll have to purchase a license or two.

But having played with Win7 for a couple of weeks, I decided to give Ubuntu yet another go. Ubuntu and I haven’t had a great relationship in the past, with it failing miserably on all the systems I’ve tested it on since the 6.xx releases, each exhibiting a myriad of deal-breaking issues. However, despite all that I gave into my masochistic instinct yet again and installed in on my AAO. The results are..well…surprising.

FINALLY, Ubuntu is into a state where it is usable for me. No more manual kernel recompiles each time the kernel is patched to get Wifi working. No missing drivers. No thermal shutdown due to it being unable to control the motherboard fan. In fact, I’ve had very little to complain about with 9.04 at all – I installed it two days ago and I haven’t booted back into Windows since (indeed, I am writing this post in Open Office within Ubuntu). Since installation, I’ve been apt-get’ing like a madman to install Wine, avr-gcc, restricted-extras and a bunch of other packages to get all the functionality I want.

Not everything is perfect – the brightness applet shows the incorrect values, the email clients can only synch via POP to my Hotmail account (this is more of a Microsoft problem, however) , a few maximising bugs and I can’t figure out how to map my left physical button to a middle-click. Still, I’ve managed to manually repoint the package repositories to my ISP’s mirror, install packages, customise the interface and do much, much more without too much trouble. I only wish that the different apps standardised some basic shortcuts – remembering that “f” is fullscreen in one app while alt+enter is fullscreen in another is tiresome.

I’m also astonished by how well WINE works – I was able to “install” programmer’s notepad without a hitch. Tomorrow I’ll be installing Windows Live Mail and Office 2007 into it, so I can get my preferred mail client and office suit back.

I’ve got a few questions to post to the Ubuntu forums in the next week or so, but I’ll definitely be keeping both Ubuntu and Windows around (and using both heavily) in the future.