free as in blog

I broke down and got a refurbished Dell Mini 9. It arrived last week and I’ve been quite happy with it. It came with XP installed but I was able to easily install Ubuntu Netbook Remix (based on 8.04 LTS) and then got 8.10 installed with the same look-and-feel. The comments I got before purchasing it was that it’s pretty hacker-friendly so I can upgrade it later if I like, but that the keyboard sucks eggs. The keyboard part is right, it’s worse if you expect to do a lot at the shell as keys like ~, |, all the function keys, and {}[] all require you use a modifier to get them. I’m a touch typist, so my hands have been conditioned by 25 years of typing on regular-sized keyboards, so I type a lot slower on this kind of a keyboard.

All that being said, it’s quite impressive. My wife took to it instantly and we’re fighting over who gets to use it. I may even convince her to give up the Powerbook in favor of something much smaller and with better battery life. I guess time will tell on this.

On the plus side, it does pretty much everything I want. The USB ports can charge multiple devices, the bluetooth and wifi let me connect from anywhere, and while I couldn’t get my D40 to connect to 8.04, I have a bit of hope for 8.10. In any event, I can always just slap the SDHC card in and get to my photos that way.

I was able to get some photos of the mini 9 compared to the EEE, my X61, and a MacBook Pro. The MacBooks really look like monsters now.

I used to have some larger laptops (IBM Thinkpad T series) which had a lot of good things going for it. A few years ago I switched over to the X series and now have an X61 tablet which is pretty nice.

Lately I’ve had the desire to go even smaller, mostly so that whenI go on trips, I don’t need to take quite s much stuff as I usually do. I’d call myself a road warrior, but that’s not quite true. I spend a good bit of time traveling to and from work and we have frequent trips to NY to visit family, and I have a trip to HI for a wedding in February.
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I’m not a coder or a DBA, so getting answers like “look at the source” or “reset your counter” aren’t really answers. Looking for a common, yet simple answer is really difficult as well since there’s the possibility that the answer is so simple that everyone has the problem and then finds their own way to fix it without telling anyone.

I’ll tell you my problem and how I fixed it in the hopes it helps you out.
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It’s been a good trip, but I’ve almost had enough. At least on my portables.

I recently got a shiny new X61 tablet laptop with the kick-butt 1400×1050 screen, all in a 14″ frame. Oh, and the 4GB of RAM, 160GB SATA at 7200 RPM, core 2 duo, and wifi/bluetooth/fingerprint and it’s a tablet, so there’s a stylus and rotating screen.

I also have ‘ol sturdy, the X41 (non-tablet) that I’ve had now for about three and a half years. I upgraded it to Fedora 8 a few days ago and it’s mostly worked, but there’s a few dingleberries in the upgrade that I haven’t bothered to figure out what the problem is. For example, new applications start with the title bar underneath the top panel, so I have to move or hide the panel before I can move the new window. Also, my Fn-F5 key (which should power off the Bluetooth radio) suddenly stopped working. Some ACPI think that decided to stop working. Wireless with the atheros chipset is always finicky when coming back from resume, and bluetooth integration is still pretty sub-par, especially with my Treo 700p. It doesn’t help that the Treo itself is pretty finicky when it comes to bluetooth connections.

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I purchased a Treo 700p a few weeks ago as a replacement for my Sony T637 and my Palm T3.  The T3 died and just never came back.  I need to have a Palm device in order to share passwords with my co-workers (TealSafe is great for this). I didn’t want to be carrying two devices anymore, so I got the 700p.

The short review of the 700p:   It’s a palm.  I get some hangs, some strange behavior, but it’s otherwise very nice.  I can get Internet access form anywhere, and now that I’m taking the bus into work, that gives me a lot of time to catch up on my e-mail on my way in so I can plan my day (yay Chatteremail).

But now on to what I wanted to do in the first place – let my Fedora Core 5 laptop connect to the Internet via bluetooth to the Treo.  There’s a lot of links out there that say “Oh yea, works fine.”  Without actually giving directions or hints.

I just got it working.  See what I did after the jump. (more…)