Home built laptop

After a long while and tons of fighting with myself I've decided to for go the home built laptop, for now; mainly because the wife just bought me a Eee PC!

I am now the proud owner of a 10.1" 1.6Ghz Atom 270 Blue 1005HAB Eee PC. Granted the thing comes with Win7 starter edition. In time I plan on loading a few different Linux distros onto it. I'm leaning towards using Ubuntu's Netbook remix and BT4, but this will come in time. I'm not sure that I want to completely remove the win7 OS for the device. The 8.5 hrs of battery life is hard to ignore. And I do know that Linux doesn't seem to be all the way up to par when it comes to battery life.

Google Wave

An invite would be nice. That is if anyone would be kind enough to send one my way (alburnett@gmail.com)

I now have wave; no need for invites.

Research for laptop

The other day I went looking at BestBuy at their Netbooks. I was interested in their keyboard sizes. And during this I found out that my long fingers don't work well with many of the smaller ones (Eee PCs) particularly the Netbooks with screen sizes under 10".

I've also been scouring the Internet for a platform to use as my basis; I've looked at many embeded system boards. And have found that I'm not sure on which to get/use. I'd like to use one based upon AMD CPUs, particulary the Geode.

Crazy Idea (aka Laptop)

I had a crazy idea the other day. Build myself a laptop, it couldn't be that hard, could it? I decided to go semi-embedded, a small LCD screen, CF flash storage and a huge USB for more storage. Sounded quite easy until I started trying to figure out how to use a battery to power the device.

I'll have to write more on this crazy idea when I start working on this more. Until then I'll be trying to figure out exactly what components I want and how to jam the together.

Catch up

So I was busy; blame the monkeys. I've recently decided to catch up on the whole social networking "thing." Facebook and del.icio.us; not a bad way to start, oh and starting my blog again.
Now all that I've got to do is find a way to keep up with some straggling family members that are using mysapce (god I hate that site).

All for catching up.

Megadeth, I want my Megadeth

The other day I picked up a new Megadeth CD, That One Night Live in Buenos Aires.The music is the same that is on the DVD, which by the way is awesome. But there is a "bonus"; each CD has all of the songs in the Ogg Vorbis format, as well as a couple others, and each also has a single file of the whole CD. I hope this trend keeps up; copy paste is a lot easier than Riping.

Desktop upgrade

The other day I finally broke down and gave in; I rebuilt my desktop computer (for something like the 50th time). This time, unlike last time, I decided to do a clean install, which seems to work a lot better than an upgrade; at lest in Fedora Core. All went well, but I must say I miss some of the flexibility in FC6 when it came to package installs.

But then came the glitch. After the install came the reboot; which FAILED! It seems that the DVD that I was using, obtained from Linux Magazine (http://linux-magazine.com/) a UK based magazine, some how decided to not use the correct hardware address for my root partition. The partition that I has set up was on hd0,0 where as the grub config file had hd1,0; last time I checked I was not using a CD-ROM as my /boot partition. Thankfully this is an easy fix. I popped in my Knoppix DVD, umounted hda3(?) and re-mounted it with read/write and edited the file by hand.

This does worry me a bit, I have used Linux for a while now, something like 7 years; and the fact that I also have a glorious job as a Solaris Admin. But the not so experienced user is likely to give up right then and there, pop goes in the XP CD. Just my quick thoughts.

None the less I do like FC7, it works quite nice, even if I am still messing around with what to use, there is 7 "Media players" and a few other packages that will play many formats as well.

cout << ("Hello world!");

Lets get this started.