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My in-laws have an awesome back yard and against their above ground pool I found a mom and her baby spiders hanging out in their web. After finding an improv light source of an upside-down steel dog bowl for a mirror and a watering can as the mirror tripod, I had an impromptu photo shoot. Only four or five came out OK. I aspired to make them as good as Hans’, but no luck. Where’s my DSLR and macro lense?!
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I know, I know you have been waiting to hear how it is going with new OS on the netbook. Well my dear readers, I have some good news and some bad news.
First the bad news. The bad news is that Meego really felt snappier and more polished. Though there’s a lot of overlap in software like Evolution is standard on both, something about the simplicity of Meego won out. Both come with a simple window manager and both can be easily extended with new apps, but Meego was more of what I wanted and less of what I didn’t. Example: auto hide task bar on Meego is nice because screen real estate is so precious. This I want. Ubuntu entire open office suite, this I don’t want. Also, Meego loads apps faster (eg Chrome) and boots waaaay faster.
Now the good news: the sleep problem is fixed and AIM totally works. The sleep fix was very satisfying, just follow the included script on superuser totally worked. Snap the lid shut and it goes right to sleep. Click the power button and it springs back to life in under a second. In general Ubuntu is quite nice.
I wonder how EasyPeasy is doing these days?
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Meego, as I mentioned before, is really really cool. I was able to get all my apps installed and even managed to get my Google calendar, mail and contacts syncing by just adding it via the email client under IMAP (BTW – Meego, you should really highlight that feature!). All the apps even appeared as a native icon alongside the pre-installed ones which is a really nice touch. Alas, the lack of a working AIM client is just too much. It’s my primary IM network and it just bugged me that it didn’t work. Which is too bad, because Meego is so close to being perfect. Well, too about AIM and about sleep.
So, what to do? After reading Mr. Doctorow’s latest post, I was reminded about good ol’ Ubuntu. Sure enough, there’s a Netbook remix. Let’s give it a whirl! USB key is prepped and primed and install is imminent.
Also – I love love love (yeah, 3 times) Pendrivelinux.com!. This is a super easy way to create bootable USB drives (aka live “CDs”) of your local linux distro. The old days of some crazy fdisk silliness is gone. Now it’s just point and click. Love it.
Stay tuned for my Ubuntification!
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A bit ago I read a post about Meego 1.0 being available. I had a Acer great netbook that was suffering from a slow slow install of XP. I’d been thinking of going to Linpus, which originally shipped with the Aspire Ones. However, Meego had great live, bootable USB download which allowed me to give the whole OS a spin on my hardware. Everything just works: webcam, USB bluetooth dongle, wifi, NIC and internal SD Card.
Last night, I took the plunge and installed it over XP.
Today, I’m happy to report I’m never going back to XP on this lil’ guy. I got Dropbox, KeepassX, Synergy and sshd all working with out a lot of hassle. The boot time is insanely fast. Google Chrome is WAY faster than FF3.6 in XP. I am a very happy camper.
Go Meego today! Full disclosure – sleep looks to be broken :(
Update: It looks like AIM is broken too. That’s a real bummer because it’s my main IM network.