Saturday, February 20th, 2010
A few weeks ago, I won an Acer Aspire One D150 on Ebay. For anyone not in the know, it is a netbook with a 10.1 inch screen. Apparently, the machine was an unwanted Christmas present and the owner had not used it very much, if at all. The machine was listed on Ebay with a relatively low starting price and it attracted very little attention. I ended up winning the machine for £155, which was a bit of a steal. In fact, I felt kind of guilty for winning it at that price and so I sent an email to the owner asking him if he would like to relist it. He replied saying that he was fine with the result of the auction, but I could tell his reply was written with gritted teeth.
Anyhow, I should get to the purpose of this post; as far as I am aware, the Acer Aspire One D150 is currently only available to purchase with Windows XP pre-installed, there is not a Linux version available, at least I have not been able to find one. So, if anyone is wondering whether or not Debian or Ubuntu work on these machines, I can confirm that they do, and very nicely too. I am currently running Debian Squeeze on my machine and everything works just fine, I cannot recall having a single issue with it. I have also tried the latest Ubuntu Lucid alpha release and that also works swimmingly.
As for the machine itself, I am not going to attempt to write any type of review, but I will say that for the price, it is a great bit of kit and it is perfectly usable as a day to day system. Having said that, I actually wanted this machine to act as a cheap replacement for an existing power-hungry home server, a role which I think it will serve quite well.
Saturday, October 11th, 2008
Roughly three weeks ago I decided to take a little swim upstream. I swam for a few hours and found Sid. I played with Sid for a day or two and I had a great time. However, even though Sid had grown on me, I could not help but feel there was something unstable about our new relationship. I did not experience any craziness first-hand, it was more of a gut feeling that things could go screwy at any time. Having just swam from a place where things tend to get somewhat turbulent every six months, I was keen to find something new, yet stable enough to build a future on. The idea of a future with Sid was really beginning to freak me out, so I decided I had probably swum a little too far.
I said a fond farewell to Sid and started floating back downstream. I was not floating for long when I came across Lenny. For a brief moment I thought I must have been caught in an underwater current and been dragged back upstream, Lenny looked and behaved in a near identical manner to Sid, though Lenny lacked the unstable aura. Lenny and I have been getting along really well since. Sure, I would probably still classify our relationship as being in "testing", still, I do not think it will be too long before it can be reclassified as being truly "stable". I am looking forward to it.
Saturday, November 10th, 2007
Today has been a busy day. As well as running my personal campaign of terror, I've also moved this site "crunchbang.org" to a new hosting provider. The new server has a whole host of goodies for me to play with and I'm really quite excited about it. Also, the new server runs Debian as opposed to CentOS — as an Ubuntu user I feel much more at home using a Debian system.
Hopefully there shouldn't be any noticeable disruption to my site. Having said that, if you do notice anything funky please do let me know. Thanks.
Wednesday, October 10th, 2007
Seen today on Planet Debian:
I may be a little behind on the times here, but it was in his post that I first saw the Iceweasel logo. While it’s graphically hideous, I kept thinking, “That weasel is humping the earth. I feel soiled.”
I had to chuckle at this - nice one Aaron :)
Wednesday, October 3rd, 2007
In a previous post I briefly mentioned my experience of using the "Goodbye Microsoft" installer for Debian. Since then Aaron has kindly pointed me in the direction of Wubi:
Wubi is an unofficial Ubuntu installer for Windows users that will bring you into the Linux world with a single click. Wubi allows you to install and uninstall Ubuntu as any other application. If you heard about Linux and Ubuntu, if you wanted to try them but you were afraid, this is for you.
The project looks interesting and I'll have to spend some more time looking into it. From what I've read so far it differs to the Debian approach in that it takes care not to modify the users disk partitions — whereas the Debian approach goes for a proper [for lack of a better word] installation.
The Ubuntu wiki page for Wubi can be seen here: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/install.exe/Prototype
Friday, September 28th, 2007
This is a cool installer for Debian Linux. A Microsoft Windows user can download and run a small application that will set-up their system to install Debian the next time they boot.
I've tried this and it works very well. It has to be the easiest way to install Debian — maybe the Ubuntu crowd would benefit from creating something similar?!