A couple of nights ago I grabbed my Eee PC 901, which so far had been running a variant of Ubuntu 8.04, and installed vanilla 8.10.

As a side-effect, I also ended up drafting the notes for this post. Here’s why I did it, in five paragraphs:

1. I wasn’t very comfortable with the idea of running Ubuntu-Eee or a netbook-tweaked version. As much as I like the idea of a tight-fitting, fully optimized distribution, my money would be on the Acer Aspire One’s Linpus and not on Ubuntu – plus I don’t really like using a sub-niche of a niche OS.
2. In flaky and opinionated environments like Linux there is more security in numbers, and even though I have had very poor experiences with Ubuntu (and hate Debian), the fact is that it’s pretty popular right now.
3. I had plenty of independent confirmation that it would a) be painless and b) work with all the built-in hardware (this bit turned out to be only 99% correct, which just goes to show you how much Linux folk actually test things).
4. It was that or XP, and, to be honest, I wasn’t keen on having to tweak XP for SSD use.
5. I was watching Oprah (no, seriously) and realized that if I didn’t try to do something technology-related my head would explode.

Plus I don’t really use the Eee for much more than browsing and the occasional e-mail. It’s a weekend/casual use machine, not something I rely on, so I can fool around with it without fear of wasting time.

Even then, I was parsimonious with the time I had – the whole thing took around an hour, and most of it was idle time watching TV and reading while stuff installed (actual keyboard time was more like 15 minutes)

Basically, I went through this piece, which was fairly comprehensive and had a non-sucky and short list of steps.

The Steps

I’m reproducing them here for my own reference (even though the likelihood of my doing this again for 8.10 is remote), since I did a few minor changes.

What I actually did was:

1. created a USB boot disk on another machine (around 20 minutes, including grabbing the ISO).

2. Set up Ubuntu using my current partition scheme (root and a few MB swap¹ on the 4GB SSD, /home on the 16GB one). That took another 20 minutes or so.

3. Added the array.org repository key:

wget http://www.array.org/ubuntu/array-apt-key.asc
sudo apt-key add array-apt-key.asc

4. Added the following software source with the GUI tool:

deb http://www.array.org/ubuntu intrepid eeepc

5. Installed linux-eeepc-lean and eee-control:

sudo apt-get install linux-eeepc-lean eee-control

6. I also tried to remove all the junk associated with the standard kernels:

sudo apt-get remove linux-generic linux-image-generic linux-source-generic linux-restricted-modules-generic

This, despite the original claims, does not prevent you from getting the stock kernel updates – you still get security updates sent to you².

I then went through this other piece and did a few of the tweaks (I skipped some things because I like browser cache to be persistent and would rather save RAM).:

7. Replaced relatime with noatime on all /etc/fstab entries.

8. Added a tmpfs line to /etc/fstab:

tmpfs /tmp tmpfs defaults,noatime,mode=1777 0 0

I don’t really like this much (since I sometimes need to have fairly large temporary files), but it’s fairly harmless for web surfing.

9. Added elevator=deadline to the kopt line in /boot/grub/menu.lst

The rest was humdrum stuff (reinstalling a couple of local apps plus Citrix, setting up eee-control for sane hardware management, etc.).

UNIX diehards have always known that keeping your home partition separate ensures that 99% of the stuff you had running previously will find and use your old settings, so in practice I’ve had to re-configure, um… pretty much nothing on my desktop, browser, or mail client.

The Results

So far, things feel marginally faster than 8.04.1 (probably due to the disk tweaks), and suspend/resume seems to be cleaner. All the hardware seems to be properly set up, and 3G support mostly works out of the box, too – I still have issues with our custom APN and username format setup, but haven’t really looked into it and it shouldn’t affect “normal” users³.

The Catch

I do have some issues with audio (I had to fiddle with “Line In” to get decent audio playback, of all things, and seem to be unable to set audio gain for recording and Skype) which are nagging but not critical in day-to-day use (i.e., I don’t use Skype for anything but testing).

Afer a couple of days of some research and poking around these audio issues seem to be a consequence of the (recurring) flakiness of Linux audio, so I filed a bug on it.

More on this later, if I find the time.

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¹ Yes, yes, I know. Swap is supposed to be evil on SSDs, etc., etc. But I don’t buy into that. ↩

² In the end I decided it wouldn’t hurt to keep the stock kernel around in case of flakiness, but it bears mentioning. ↩

³ Plus I can always install the Vodafone Betavine packages if I really need full support. ↩

As years go by, I find myself less and less interested in fancy gifts and valuing the simple things.

I mean, it’s not as if I couldn’t go through my Wishlist and tick a couple of items off. I know I can afford a spanking new MacBook, and finally get a decent, lightweight laptop with a backlit keyboard. Or I could splurge on a big monitor. Or maybe do something crazy and order myself something like the Rovio.

But given the current state of affairs, it simply wouldn’t fit my lifestyle. Between my family (with whom I elected to stay home today) and work (which is, as usual, something I’d rather keep separate), I would have very little time to enjoy any of them, and the investment would hardly be sensible considering that I have a bunch of perfectly good (if slightly dated) computers and have, of late, been living and writing out of my iPhone and that Eee that I got a few months back¹.

Plus they say that good things come to those who wait, and I’m a professional waiter of sorts².

Then again, sometimes you just can’t wait. A week ago, anticipating my birthday, I got myself a copy of Little Big Planet and although I have had few and short occasions to fool around with it, I can confirm that it goes against the tide of stupid and unoriginal PS3 games that I found so lacking in comparison with the Wii experience³.

Little Big Planet isn’t perfect, but it is thoroughly enjoyable and easy to get into (even for a casual gamer like myself, who will probably never have time or stamina for creating new levels from scratch).

There is already a lot of controversy regarding banishment of custom levels based on copyrighted designs (and others not so obviously so, which is plain silly), but on the whole, I find the game to be a more than adequate antidote to my previous (pre)conception that the PS3 could never be as fun as the Wii.

It’s certainly a less social experience, but I’ve barely started doing online play.

In case we meet, I’ll be the sackboy in a suit and glasses with an obvious nickname and a silly grin on his face (or the occasional grimace when I’ve had another Dilbert day at work).

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¹ More on that later, by the way. It’s not a qualified success, but it is definitely something I’m developing very strong opinions about. And it involves my dissing Linux, so the zealots can start sharpening their tongues. ↩

² This is an in-joke, but the gist of it is that I’ve watched a lot of things come and go in the industry, and besides being an internal consultant of sorts, I’m one of the few that’s still around. ↩

³ I’ve also downloaded the Mirror’s Edge demo, but find it marred by a somewhat flaky control scheme and uncertain hold points for some things (like pipes). Then again, nothing will ever be as fluid for me as bunny-hopping through q3dm6 while railing the bejeesus out of the opposition, so it’s probably me. ↩

As always, there’s a lot left unsaid here regarding mobile phones.

Last year I picked up a Nokia 6210 for my vacation, and spent quite a good while using it throughout the rest of the year (up until I needed to use a Blackberry again, with a brief upgrade to an E51).

This year, I have an iPhone 3G, which I have used pretty much uninterruptedly since July. And this is construed by many people as a Mac site, so it naturally follows that it should be the phone of the year, right?

Well, not really. Because, you see, I’ve been using two Nokia devices since early this year that have struck my fancy, and that cater to two distinct segments.

The first (and arguably the better if you don’t care much about e-mail and believe the megapixel hype) is the Nokia 6220 Classic. Despite a plasticky feeling and the usual cluttered and confusing S60 UI (no, Nokia hasn’t fixed those five things yet), the camera is pretty good (if still too slow to start up), and it is a very nice weekend phone – good battery life, ability to record short videos, decent GPS, etc.

Just don’t expect it to be very good at messaging (it will run Mail for Exchange, but the native mail client still doesn’t make good use of screen space) or to be speedy – it’s Nokia’s attempt at squeezing N95-grade functionality into a smaller form factor, and it carries over some of the slowness and compounds it with irritating (and slow) graphical transitions.

The second is the E71, which, feature-wise, I consider to be the second-best business phone currently available short of the Blackberry, which still bests anything else if you need Exchange integration as much as I do.

The calendar is pretty good (somewhat cluttered and hard to navigate in some views, but functional and responsive), the browser is passable (even though I found myself using Opera Mini for most things pretty quickly) and the camera does auto-focus (somewhat badly at times, but better than nothing).

But, for a Nokia, it’s pretty fast. Some people think it’s better¹ than the iPhone, and I would agree with it being a better phone than the iPhone, but don’t think they have a leg to stand on in terms of browser and e-mail functionality.

The thing is, I don’t really think of the iPhone as a mere phone. I won’t wax lyrical about it like John Gruber did (it’s not that life-changing for me, merely better than the things I used before), but the iPhone is, for me, a pocket computer that just happens to make calls and have ubiquitous Internet connectivity.

As such, being able to do a gazillion different things on it that are not commonly possible on a “normal” mobile phone is, well, not unexpected at all.

A phone (for me at least) is something that excels at making calls and reaching out to people with the least bit of fuss – and the iPhone, with its rather pedestrian phone applet, utter lack of basic functionality like voice dialling and hands free operation², simply isn’t good enough.

The E71, on the other hand, is an excellent phone. It is a passable Internet device, a poor media player, and a rather pedestrian e-mail client³, but it has none of the annoying limitations of the iPhone (as a phone, of course) and doesn’t get in the way of talking to people – whereas I have more than occasional trouble placing and answering calls on an iPhone due to its fiddly phone applet, the E71 just works.

It isn’t that user-friendly and will never be as flexible as the iPhone as a platform (even though it multitasks properly), but for 99% of the people out there, it will likely be a lot more satisfying to use as a phone.

So if I had to pick one phone to recommend this year, it would certainly be the E71 – it is, as far as I’m concerned, the best device Nokia has produced yet (better than the E90 in everything from usability to build quality), as well as surely better than the vast majority of the phones that I know will be available before Xmas.

And I’m glad to see that the E63 will bring some of its features to a lower (and arguably more sensible) price point.

I also think that S60 is an evolutionary dead end and that if Nokia wants to compete with Apple on usability, they’re going to have to toss everything out the window (including some prejudices) and start again from scratch.

It may seem like a strange thing to say, but truth be told that Symbian was once a much simpler and better OS. Over the years, they kind of lost it.

But that’s another story – and it doesn’t mean the E71 isn’t good enough right now⁴.

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¹ Ironically, they do so and simultaneously confess to not owning one or trying it out extensively, basing their comparisons on trying out the devices over less than adequate time (in my case, I actually use the things more than six months – and sometimes much more if I consider prototypes). Hey, that’s the kind of ridicule that idealistic, unfounded “highway blogging” exposes you to. ↩

² I will never, ever, be able to understand why proper Bluetooth audio services and car integration aren’t present. And I don’t even drive to work. ↩

³ Update: I actually forgot about it being an almost stupefyingly bad cameraphone due to the idiotic “feature” that requires that you hold “T” to focus instead of having proper auto-focus (as we had the opportunity to demonstrate to John Dvorak over dinner.) ↩

⁴ It just means they’re both playing in different ballparks. If you want more than a phone, the iPhone is the best personal electronics device money can buy right now. But the vast majority of people don’t need (or can’t afford) what it does. ↩

It’s been a good while since I posted about what I’m reading, not because I haven’t been reading much (which I have), but rather because the times at which I read have shifted slightly, and I often find myself computer-less when I feel like jotting down something regarding what I’ve just read.

I’ve also been spending a good while reading e-books in Stanza (mostly ancient Sci-Fi that has gone out of print), but these are the “dead tree” books I have on my nightstand right now:

Making Money	An Instance of the Fingerpost	Un Lun Dun
Although it follows the same pattern of having The Patrician pulling a bit of the cast’s strings, Making Money is a great follow-up to Going Postal – it adds a little depth to the main character, fleshes out his background story a bit more, and considering that I finished reading it mere days before the stock market started falling around our ears a while back, it was almost prescient (even if the book is only about coinage). A con artist – retired – makes for a great main character, and Pratchett knows how to exploit the character flaws (and their influence on plot twists) masterfully. As always, an entertaining and relaxing read.	One of the books my readership recommended to me a good while back and that was boxed away for almost a year while we renovated the flat, An Instance of the Fingerpost is taking me longer than usual to read, for despite the excellent narration and detailed depiction of the era (seeing England through the eyes of an educated Italian during the first chapters casts an indelible impression) that is accentuated as each character adds his own narrative, the plot, in and by itself, is re-visited rather too often through their contradictory viewpoints, which makes it hard to read casually (or, in my case, piecemeal over several weeks). Good, but demanding.	Un Lun Dun is a rather different affair from other China Miéville books I’ve read so far, in that he applies his consummate skill at creating dark and surreal worlds into sketching out (literally, for I gather the illustrations in the book are also his doing) a sort of children’s story for grown-ups that may well be this age’s Alice in Wonderland. Adopting a sparser but flowing and very readable style that is quite unlike his other books, Miéville draws you in to his world in such a way that you cannot help but wonder how many more tales he could weave within this amazing book. Heartily recommended.