As before, the installation process was painless and everything works as it should (including wireless and broadband Internet). I can connect to my embedded broadband Internet provided by Orange with no trouble at all and everything is fast and whizzy.

To give you an idea of how much things are better, when Windows XP was on the 901, startup took at least 90 seconds (a minute and a half). Startup with Eeebuntu takes a mere 17 seconds. I now have a netbook that is usable within a much more reasonable time frame. Actually using Eeebuntu is wonderful compared to XP too. Even with four or five apps open I don’t experience the kind of slow-down that XP was exhibiting on the same hardware.

When you add the fact that Eeebuntu comes with OpenOffice and a bunch of other useful applications as part of the base install, it’s easy to see why I now feel my Netbook is useful again.

The only caveat is that there’s no webcam software included with Eeebuntu. This was quickly solved by opening up a terminal window once I was connected to the Internet and using apt-get to install Cheese. In case you need it, the command is:

sudo apt-get install cheese

Incidentally, this won’t work for any installation other than an Ubuntu-based distro.

The only other moan that I have about Eeebuntu is more a personal taste issue. I absolutely hate the Eeebuntu startup screen. I think it looks rather amateurish compared to some of the nicer distro startups that I’ve seen. I dare-say I’ll get around to replacing it with something more aethetically acceptable at some point. :-D

So – if you’ve got a netbook that runs like a dog, I advise you give a Netbook distro a go. They’re not all as pants as the Xandros distro that comes installed on Linux netbooks! ;)

I recently wiped the whole thing by using the factory restore DVDs that come with the laptop but that installed so much Sony bloatware that it didn’t really feel any faster at all. Just a whole lot emptier! ^^

I’ve been thinking of trying to use Linux for a while but the one thing that’s put me off is the fact that there are some Windows applications that I still have a need for (and a couple of games). It was a few months back when my interest was re-kindled by Haz’s laptop running Linux. He showed me that he’d got some windows applications running natively on the laptop by using Wine and it actually seemed to work!

So… I’ve downloaded the latest distro of Kubuntu (I prefer the KDE environment) and I’ve installed it on my laptop. I even destroyed the hidden restore partition on the HDD to make more space. I’ve downloaded packages useful to me (networking just works without any hassle at all) and I’ve installed Wine.

The result is amazing – it feels like I have a new laptop again. The speed is amazing, I can switch between various running applications with ease and I LOVE the 3D task selection view. I’ve fallen in love with my old laptop again because it works as it’s supposed to.

Now I’m just trying to install the Windows applications that I need. I installed Internet Explorer 6 earlier and that runs without any problems at all. Fun, fun, fun!

I popped into town this morning (mainly to get some milk and bread) and I thought I’d have a quick look around for a wooden frame for my digital frame project.

As look would have it, I found a nice deep 10″x12″ oak frame in Wilkinson’s for only £7. And with the recent VAT reduction, it only cost me £6.85! Hooray!

It’s almost exactly the right size for the LCD panel. I’ll just need to put a card mount in the front and fix the LCD panel in place with perhaps foam or wood along the inside edges.

More thoughts about operating systems

I was thinking about the OS for the frame and it occurred to me that while Puppy Linux works great in the frame, why don’t I look at using FreeDOS instead? I’ve written low-level graphics programs in the past and all my photo frame really needs to do is show a slideshow of images.

If I used FreeDOS (it requires about 2Mb of memory) and wrote a custom slideshow app to run in DOS myself then there’d be more RAM and storage space for the images.

This would limit me to images only (no video for example) and I’d have to write each image type handler myself… is it worth the extra effort? The hardware does have 128Mb of RAM and the CF card can be replaced with a larger one if necessary.