Easy Peasy Update - 9.04

As promised I've been fiddling with this for a little while now. While the interface and boot process have been tidied up somewhat I've found several things that I do not like. The touchpad has gone from being perfectly balanced in response and speed to slow and clunky and making me cranky. I've fiddled with the settings but can't get it back to being as smooth and precise as it was with 8.04. Grr. Nevermind - it's OK now. When scrolling in the main screen if there are more options available than space, it scrolls between desktops. This is *not* what I want it to do and it's very frustrating.

I do like the colours and some of the updates are nice. If you've got a eeePC or a similar netbook, then Easy Peasy is a great OS replacement. It's performance leads me to another post - why is Linux so freakin' slow nowadays? It used to kick Windows butt all over the place but I can get comparable performance from a well crafted Windows XP install as an Ubuntu install. Something to ponder in that....

Adventures with eeePC: Enter EasyPeasy

Recently I attempted to enable the Advanced Desktop on my eeePC. I'm not *exactly* sure what I broke, but I broke my little netbook good. Damn. I could get it to boot but had no desktop. No icons, no information nothing. Very, very disappointing. So I thought that perhaps it was an opportunity to have a look at a few other things. Hunting for a new netbook operating system found me looking mostly at Linux offerings, with some websites advocating Windows 7. Eventually I found my way to Easy Peasy (http://www.geteasypeasy.com/) which uses Ubuntu 8.04 as its base and builds upon that with a myriad of customisations and clever manipulations of the system. I love Ubunutu - it's basis in Debian means it's rock solid with tonnes of terrific applications. The installation was a bit nervy - I didn't want to brick my netbook. The website has an excellent walk through and after a few USB memory key issues I finally got things going in the right direction.

The interface is great. Speed is great. I still have a grip about Mozilla Firefox though. It seems to pause (and hold up everything else) every now and then. It disrupts my flow and annoys me. With the recent release of Easy Peasy 1.5 I hope that will be fixed. I'm downloading it now so I'll find out very soon I hope. Generally it was been excellent though. All the devices worked perfectly and although I've had a few problems with a bluetooth mouse I've got, it's been fine otherwise. The particular mouse in question is *very* sensitive to the devices it connects to. The addition of the 8GB SD card has made storage a non issue and I have a 160GB external disk with a heap of stuff on it if I require the extra disk space.

I'm installing the updated version now - it's based on Ubuntu 9.04 so I'll post another note about it when it's completed. Let's hope it goes well!

Review: Sun VirtualBox

Recently I've had to find a virtual machine emulator. Given my limited budget (read: zero) I was hunting around for various different pieces of software. Microsoft have their virtual machine software: Virtual PC which is a polished bit of software. It is, however, not up to par with what I want to do. Because I run a host Windows machine and want to use Linux as a guest operating system, VirtualPC has all sorts of issues with it. I tried it and didn't like it. I stumbled upon VirtualBox (www.virtualbox.org) which appears to be sponsored by Sun. Given Sun's previous support of Open Source, I decided to try it.

The installation is very simple and straightforward - it installs extra network adapters, DHCP servers for the internal NAT'd network and a few other bits and pieces. The guest OS support it offers is excellent. In a *very* short amount of time I had a copy of Debian running from the netboot cd, installed and configured an FTP server and I was very happy. My host operating system was Windows Server 2008, which isn't 100% supported but does the job very nicely anyway. I've run it under Windows XP too and it works very well (especially on my Dell D610 Latitude with a 1.6GHz Centrino processor and 2GB of RAM). I'm going to test OpenSolaris on it and see how it goes under the installation.

Some years ago I ran VMWare Desktop to have many virtual machines for testing and other purposes and I found it to be rock solid. The VMWare gear is very good. I have found, to my considerable pleasure, that VirtualBox is as solid and feature filled as VMWare was. It's free status is even better and I love the fact that it supports Linux so beautifully. I'll be experimenting with various other guest OSs in the next few days and I'll let you know my progress as I play with it.

Review: ASUS eeePC 701SD Linux

I recently picked one of these machines up for $279 bucks at the local computer shop. This is under their buy price so I figure it's a pretty good deal really. I've been interested in the netbook scene for a while and the eeePC was the one that caught my imagination first. Although I have had the Dell L400 it still wasn't a netbook. The specs of the 701 are readily available on the net - for the purposes my work I've upgraded mine in the following way - swapped in a 1GB RAM DIMM and installed an 8GB SD card to double the internal 8GB SSD's storage. I don't really intend on using this PC to watch movies and the like and I've only got a minimal amount of data to store on it so the 16GB of storage is more than adequate.

I love the lightness of this machine - I store it in the top part of my camera bag (a Targus one) and it fits easily without increasing the overall bulk of the bag. I take it pretty much everywhere - the ports available are exceptionally useful - 3 USB 2 ports, Ethernet, wireless Ethernet and SD card port too. Being able to quickly bring up a terminal windows (Ctrl-Alt-T) is really handy for the work I do when I'm network testing. The LCD is nice and bright and readable, the speakers aren't bad either for their size and the keyboard is fairly responsive.

Probably my biggest gripe, no definitely my biggest gripe - and one I can't really complain too much about - is the keyboard size. The width of my hand makes it hard to touch type on and I spend a fair amount of time looking at the keys. I've been spoilt by using a Microsoft Natural Keyboard 7000 at work, and a 4000 at home and these keyboards are lovely. The eeePC - yeah not so lovely but still quite usable. Typing in IRC can be a little bit of a trick - I really have to remember to review what I've typed prior to hitting the return key. That being said, I'm getting used to it and I am getting higher accuracy results with the keyboard. This entry, for example, has been typed on it and I find it no less accurate than the handwriting translation on my HP tablet. Bit of an ache in the fingers after a while though I must say and I would *not* like to be typing on it all day.

Battery life is pretty good - around the 3 hours, which I find to be more than adequate. If I'm doing work on my eeePC for more than 2 hours, I'll get my tablet out and use that instead - it has a much nicer keyboard and is a lot faster.

The RAM upgrade to the eeePC has made a huge difference - the speed of the system is greatly enhanced by having the additional memory available and it is much more acceptable to use. Prior to this upgrade I found that it sometimes lagged in responsiveness.

Updating and installing new software is very easy and there seems to be quite a bit of software available for this device, all installable via single click from the ASUS website. Given it's Linux OS once you drop into a command line and use apt-get it's even easier to install software :-) X forwarding and the like all work and monitoring servers and things is very easy on this device. In short I like it a lot and I'll probably upgrade to an eeePC 1000 or something similar once I'm in a buying frame of mind again.

Career Changes

I've been in the IT gig for 12 years now. I've seen the changes in the way computers are used, their prominence in business and at home change immensely. I started using Netscape Navigator to browse the net when a 14.4kbps modem was high speed and saw ADSL 2+ hit our humble homes (not to mention cable and everything else!). But now I feel it's time for a change.

But change to do what? This is where I find myself at the moment - caught in a quandry between what I already do and am not happy about, and knowing I want to do something different but having no idea about what I want to do. Whatever I do I'll be successful in - I'm not concerned about that. I'm more just confused - as if there are too many options out there for me to choose. I recently re-read Steve Pavlina's blog <- specifically that post there - How to Discover your Life's purpose in 20 minutes. I haven't gone through the exercise yet, but I have every intention to - well once I'm somewhere quiet and peaceful where people won't see me cry :-)

Because I've been thinking about this a fair bit, I've noticed there are people around me who feel the same way, yet refuse to do anything about it. They are putting up with an unsatisfactory and lame occupation that brings them no joy and certainly no meaning to their lives. Why bother I think to myself - and ask them when I have the occasion. It's like being in a relationship which is completely unsatisfactory - where one or both partners are not happy and the synergy between the couple is broken. The synergy between myself and IT is broken. I no longer want to fix computers/servers/networks. 

So what do I want to do? There are many wonderful tools out there for trying to decide what to do with your life. I've been trying them out - looking for something that will help me discover the underlying desire I have for my life. Ideally I'd like something with appointments or some sort of pattern to it. Currently things happen in a very laissez-faire sort  of way that I find annoying and unfulfilling (in addition to the actual tasks I'm performing).

One of the tools I'm going to use is very simply to write what down what I enjoy - what I'm interested in and what I think there is a market for. No point doing something that I won't get paid for - even as my own boss I want to have a certain income at any point and I think that's important too. Understanding my own worth is something that I have to work on - how many of you out there know how much you are worth? My experience has been that most people settle for less. Those that have an exact understanding of what they are worth are often seen as arrogant or demanding and potentially they are both at times. There are, naturally, those folks who take it to the next level and are kidding themselves. But there are a *lot* of people being paid vast sums of money for what they do so why shouldn't we want what we're worth? It's crazy not to.

I'll keep you updated with my progress on this - it's going to be an interesting ride. Let me note for the record too, that I'm very grateful for the work I have right now - without it life would be even more challenging!

Windows 7 RC - ongoing thoughts

I've been playing with 7 for a few weeks now and I have to say, I'm both impressed and annoyed by it! Odd in a way, but here is the reason for such a strange dichotomy. It's notably faster than Vista and handles pretty well. The crappy PC I'm testing it on runs smoothly and is usable for my daily tasks which is terrific. It has given the box a new lease on life and the only cost has been an upgraded video card. The driver support so far has been good and everything works.

Now for the bad - I recently joined the system to my Windows Server 2008 based domain and the log on time - from boot to three finger salute and login blew out enormously. I checked a variety of things that it might have been - often I find that DNS issues cause slow downs here, but my DHCP assigned IP addresses use my 2008 server as their primary DNS server so it isn't that. The system is on a gig network, and both server and client have gig networking cards in it. At first I thought it was only initial log in problems, but I have now come to realise that it does it *every* time. As I started a deeper investigation the hard disk that the system resided on failed which throws yet another variable into the mix. I'm yet to add the system back to the domain.

After the re-install (which has worked flawlessly) the system has run very smoothly and I'm very happy with it. I look forward to further updates for Windows 7 - particularly flash which doesn't seem to work. Software I'm using successfully with it includes Microsoft Office 2007, latest Firefox and Chrome and Adobe Reader. The interface is quite nice - I have the Aero effects on my crappy PC still handles it pretty well. Turning them off does give a noticeable speed increase. I look forward to putting it onto a more powerful system and seeing what it can really do.

Windows 7 RC - First Thoughts

Being a Technet Direct member is a great thing. I downloaded Windows 7 RC yesterday, burned it to a DVD and then started encountering difficulties. My test machine is a whitebox Celeron 2400 with 2GB of DDR RAM and 3 Western Digital hard disks. This wasn't the problem. The onboard video card and network card are, however. The initial installation of 7 blanked out as it booted - the LCD monitor I have was unable to display the horizontal resolution so it turned off. Eventually I got to a point where I could see stuff and I installed Windows 7.

After installation, the same problem occurred - no video. So I plugged my PC into a venerable 17" CRT monitor and I was able to see things on the screen. Unfortunately, after changing the video settings, the damn thing did exactly the same thing again when I plugged it back into the LCD. So I found myself an NVidia GX5500 or something similar - nothing special but does the job. So I can see Windows 7 in all it's glory, except that it doesn't recognise the onboard NIC so I replaced that too. Yay! Now I have networking. Time to use this baby for some actual stuff - better install Office 2007.

Part way through the installation - BSOD. Gone. Unrecoverable error. Reboot - same thing. After several tries I gave up and re-installed the system. We'll see how it goes this time :-)

On the plus side, Windows 7 is much quicker than Vista could ever hope to be. I mean, it's actually usable on a Celeron 2400! Resident memory usage is quite low, under 500MB which leaves plenty for actual software to run! Exciting I know. Further updates to follow once I get it re-installed.