Coredump

It’s been a while since I last handled the eee.

I haven’t gotten around to changing the default Xandros OS to either Ubunty or Fedora. Frankly, the OS works just fine for me. And as long as I can get a command-line and an internet connection, I’m a happy camper.

But it’s been an unusually quiet weekend so I decided to focus a bit more on this cute little monster.

First off, an upgrade. It was a simple matter of doing a sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade. The bad side is, since the OS uses unionfs, the 4GB storage is now down to only ~260MB free (or around 83% in use). I’ll have to look at the repackaged updates from the XEPC project, if the storage factor becomes critical, but for now, I can live with this.

Next, the OS change. I did attempt to install Ubuntu Hardy Heron on the eee, but hit a snag while creating a USB bootable flash disk. I had a spare 1GB flash disk at hand, and was able to dump the netboot image from the Ubuntu archives. For some reason, the eee cannot recognize it. Again, I’ll have to dig into this later, but as I’ve said, Xandros works fine for me for now so I’ll stick with it at the moment.

Since I cannot change the OS, I opted to optimize whatever I have for now. One major “annoyance” is the screen real estate (i.e., the lack thereof). Firefox, for example, have large chrome properties that need to be slimmed down. I’m using the basic display mode for Xandros, so there’s desktop screen space is not a primary concern. Since I mostly use the eee for browsing, I need to trim the fat off Firefox.

I had to download the TinyMenu extension. This reduced the menu to a vertical one, which is nifty since I was able to move the navigation bar buttons alongside it. I reduced the space even further by using a minimalist theme called Mini Firefox. I then hid navigation bar buttons that are currently disabled through some tweaks in userChrome.css:

#back-button[disabled="true"], #forward-button[disabled="true"], 
#stop-button[disabled="true"], .search-go-button-stack { display: none !important; }

The result:

Everything is far from being “broken” as you imply, and you will find that grass may not necessarily be greener on the other side — just different flavours of the same weed.

From the Fedora development mailing list, on Eric S. Raymond’s switch to Ubuntu. (Alan Cox has a more succinct reply.)

I haven’t gotten around to uninstalling Windows XP Media Center on Mathilda. In fact, I may not want to. See, I’ve come to — gasp! — like Mathilda’s utterly backward (Windows? Shame on me!) but totally slick Media Center UI. But I’m still a Linux guy, so there has to be a compromise. So…

Mathilda, meet Evey. Evey runs on Ubuntu Breezy. She’s a VMWare Server instance, of course — a clone, actually, of a readily available image from the VMWare Community site. I’m doing things on her that will give her a personality all her own. For one, she’s now my staging server for testing Drupal themes. A quick sudo apt-get install whatever will morph her into a full-blown Linux sys-ad platform.

Mathilda and Evey work well together. I’ve alloted half of Mathilda’s RAM to Evey, and they’re sharing it very well. I haven’t installed an SMP kernel on Evey yet, but I’ve prepped her up to recognize the Core Duo, too.

(If the anthropomorphism is getting to your nerves, please don’t. I’m used to naming my boxes. My previous desktop was Iris. My test servers at work are Hiraya, Mithi, Padme, Arwen, Galadriel, and Eowyn. In my previous work at PhilRice, the servers were Maui, Sabel, and Ligaya (named after the branches). When I was in NIA, I had an HP/Compaq Proliant ML370 named Leia (srv-win2k-dc-01 was just too boring). My first PC — an XT machine with a whopping 16MB RAM — was called Chico, after the now-defunct Pinoy clone brand.)

She’s spiffy and shiny. And she’s got a Core Duo and 1GB RAM. I love her already.

She runs Windows XP Media Center Edition (whatever that is), though. But in a while, I’ll be giving her the respect she deserves — nothing less than a Fedora Core 5 or Ubuntu Dapper will do for her.

She’s a Dell Inspiron E1505, by the way. Pics to follow.

Fragged my Ubuntu LTSP install.

Details over at the network janitor’s log. [via Network janitor's log]