Uber Geeky!

Since I’m always keeping an eye out for good deals on Netbooks, I stumbled upon this great little budget Toshiba laptop. It’s a Toshiba Satellite Pro L300 (PSLB9A-02L001). Not exactly what I’m looking for, but I decided to order one for my folks. For just $600, you can’t really go wrong. Here’s the specs…

• Mobile Intel® Celeron® M 585 Processor (2.16GHz, 667MHz FSB, 1MB L2 cache)
• Mobile Intel® GL40 Express Chipset
• Genuine Windows Vista® Home Premium 32bit SP1(OEM)
• Hard Drive: 160GB 5400rpm 2.5″ SATA
• RAM: 1GB DDR2 667 expandable to 2GB# (one slot used, one slot free)
• Video 15.4″ Widescreen XGA TFT Active Matrix 200NIT (1280×800) resolution
• Video Card Intel® Graphics Media Accelerator GL40
• DVD SuperMulti Dual / Double Layer (DVD±R±RW,DVD±R(DL) DVD-RAM) Read: CD-ROM(24x), DVD-ROM(8x) Write: CD-R 24x, CD-RW 4x
• 10/100Mbps LAN
• Integrated Atheros 802.11 b/g WLAN
• Express card slot, RGB, 3 x USB 2.0, Headphone & microphone port, Bridge media Reader/Writer slot (SD, MMC, Memory Stick/Memory Stick Pro), Integrated microphone
• Integrated Web Camera
• Intel® High Definition Audio Sound
• 6 cell Lithium-Ion battery (up to 3 hours)
• Dimensions 362mm(W) x 267mm(D) x 33/37.7mm(H)
• Weight 2.6kg

The processor and video card are lame I know, but considering Mum is currently using an 8 year old PC with Windows 98 on it, I don’t think she’s going to notice. Still, this thing is badly under spec’d for running Vista. All the reviews I’ve read indicate this thing is going to be pretty hit and miss as far as getting a fully functional distro installed without too much bother, so it’s getting delivered here and I’m preparing to have some geeky fun with it. I’m also getting an additional 1GB of RAM delivered, so plan B is to just revert to Vista and surgically remove the guff to get some reasonable performance out of it before handing it over. Having successfully avoided ever touching Vista thus far, I’m actually curious to give plan B a go.

The main reason I still bought it despite the bad Linux reviews was some guys down in Melbourne who offer support services over the phone for this model and have listed “Linux Compatibility” as “Excellent”. My plan is to install the latest Ubuntu and then what ever doesn’t work, I’ll contact them and ask them to book me some time for a phone support call to sort out the rest. I’m happy to pay $40 for 1/2 hour of support, that’s more than reasonable if it saves me half a day.

What really bugs me is that I’m still sponsoring Microsoft out of all of this. I’m still indirectly paying for the crappy OEM Vista which is no doubt the main reason these laptops are now so drastically reduced in price. There is no refund available to me if I don’t want to use it. Hell, apparently I can’t even downgrade to Windows XP. Microsoft was advertising that as an option, but apparently it only applies under very strict circumstances. So this poor laptop has to suffer Vista on the consumer electronics market and hence it’s doomed to perform horrendously. Ok, I’m making a few assumptions based on very little at this stage (considering it hasn’t even been delivered yet). I certainly smell a follow up post or two.

This morning I checked my phone only to find a message about updates downloaded and ready to install. That’s an odd thing, since I’ve got modded firmware that should have disabled such behaviour to prevent conflicts. I was a bit worried, but an ADP G1 wielding colleague pointed me to this notice… http://andblogs.net/2009/07/otas-in-jfv1-51/

I followed JF’s 2nd and 3rd suggestion and so far so good. Here’s the exact steps I took to disable the update.

1. Download and extract JFv1.51 ADP firmware and copy build.prop to the sdcard. Or use this build.prop (freshly extracted for your convenience).
2. Mount /system on the G1 as read/write. Two simplest ways to do this is either install “DroidSans Tweak Tools” or run “mount -o rw,remount -t yaffs2 /dev/block/mtdblock3 /system” in a terminal.
3. Replace build.prop and make the permissions the same as the old one with something like:

   $ su

   # mv /system/build.prop build.prop.bak

   # cp /sdcard/build.prop /system

   # chmod 644 /system/build.prop

4. Find the update in the /cache directory and “chmod 000″ it…

   

5. Now I actually clicked on the “restart and install” option on the update dialog. The phone rebooted, and the update failed. I rebooted with Home+Back and haven’t had the update prompt as yet.

So far so good. One odd thing I noticed is the update is gone from the /cache directory.

While searching around to find out why-oh-why I’m not allowed to have files on my Desktop in KDE4 (and hopefully how to re-enable it), I found this… http://aseigo.blogspot.com/2008/05/no-more-desktop-icons-in-41.html

This looks to me like the root of the problem. This KDE developer, in all his infinite wisdom, just simply ripped out the code that supports file icons on the desktop. Apparently it just doesn’t look nice to him or something. Too bad if you don’t like the whole widget based desktop experience, this guy has just forced us to either take it up or switch to Gnome. Suffice to say, when I read his article I was fairly taken aback by the action.

In all fairness though, he doesn’t see it the way I do. Yes, this post was originally fueled by rage. I quickly changed my initially confrontational title of this post to something a little nicer. Aaron’s intention appears to be to create a more flexible experience for the user (by culling features?!?). My tinfoil hat keeps telling me it’s really just a Microsoft conspiracy (joking of course).

One of my machines was recently updated to KDE4 via the Kubuntu Intrepid distro upgrade. I’ve been using it everyday, but I haven’t been liking it. The version that came with Kubuntu Intrepid is not nearly mature enough. Personally, I love KDE3 and I’d like to stick with it as long as possible. I don’t need the new Plasma features and many old features seem to have been dropped. Thankfully, I found this… https://wiki.kubuntu.org/Kubuntu/Kde3/Jaunty which should allow me to keep my systems up to date without having to touch KDE4. I’ll try the process out tomorrow on my work Kubuntu 8.04 machine.

Update:

You can re-enable the normal desktop behaviour in Jaunty simply from a desktop right click menu. But not Intrepid. In Intrepid you could try editing $HOME/.kde/share/config/plasma-appletsrc replacing plugin=desktop with plugin=folderview, but that didn’t work for me.

Another Update:

You can’t drag and drop your icons on to multiple screens. It only works on the primary because it’s still some kind of crappy complete waste of resources full screen widget.

Was just talking today about the future of Flash, considering the G1 and iPhone don’t support it. Hell, I spent a good hour or so getting my tag cloud to look good both with and without Flash support so this blog maintained good compatibility with those handsets.

Looks like they could be making up some ground at the moment with Bsquare porting Flash Lite over to Android for the upcoming release of Dell netbooks. I predict now it’s just a matter of time before it’s ported to these handsets.

I think you’ll agree it’s been bigger-better thinking for such a long time for most of the big players in this industry, particularly Adobe. How massive is their PDF reader theses days? It’s ridiculous. I uninstalled it after version 7 was released and switched to an alternative reader because I couldn’t take it any more. The industry is still catching up with the concept of people wanting more of the desktop experience on less powerful devices. I still suspect Microsoft’s approach is to get a strangle hold on the distributors to ram their outdated wares down our throat rather than actually improve their product, but I have no proof yet so stay tuned. As soon as I find out why there are only Windows netbooks for sale in this country I’ll post it.

Actually, while I’m back on the netbook OS topic again, I stumbled upon this little gem which appears to have no OS whatsoever! The Astone UMPC netbook. The specs aren’t too bad for the price, but mostly I admire their balls for releasing a bare metal netbook to the public. Viva!

Thanks to Gizmodo for the rather flashy heads up!