Archive - Oct 2008
After spending a week working with some Acer Aspire Ones at work, I caved and bought one for myself. Okay, I lied. It was two and a half days.
Anyway, that isn't the point. The Linpus distro of Linux (some Fedora Core 8 deirvative) was very quickly and easily replaced with Ubuntu 8.04.1 through booting from a USB. (Creating a Bootable Ubuntu USB key).
There are a number of hoops to jump though the get Hardy working properly, but not too much. Most things just work straight out of the box. (Install Ubuntu Hardy Heron (8.04.1) on the Acer Aspire One).
One of the updates that I've followed is putting on the UME-Launcher and the associated Window Picker applet. A simplified interface with much less clutter than a normal desktop. But not as stripped down as the Linpus. You get the main menu items from the Ubuntu menu down the left side. When you pick one the contents of the menu appear as icons in the main area in the middle for the screen. To the right is a list of nautilus Places (bookmarks, USB drives etc). However when you click on one of these a nautilus window opens. Might be nice if that could be integrated to display the contents in the center area too. They are both under active development, with new versions appearing every few days.
I've also installed Sun's latest release of VirtualBox 2.0.4. No, not the Open Source edition. I want to be able to connect USB devices, like my iPod, into it. I have an audible.co.uk subscription, so I need to use iTunes. VirtualBox is the only VM that I've found that supports passing through USB ports to the guest OS, and thus to iTunes. Unfortunately the Open Source edition doesn't include this USB support.
Not that getting the USB to work was straight forward, but thanks the fantastic documentation from Ubuntu, I managed to get iTunes to see my iPod. (VirtualBox USB).
An interesting feature I found with VirtualBox, is what it calls Seamless Mode. It's fairly simple what it does, but the effect is impressive and I'll find it very usefull at work where I have to work in both Linux and Windows environments simultaneously. What Seamless mode does is removes the Windows desktop background. You can see and click on the windows in the background. This simple change (yeah simple to describe, the developers might have a different opinion) allows Linux and Windows apps to run side by side. And with the performance I've seen with VirtualBox, it does it smoothly.
On a side note, I've noticed that sometime recently there must have been an upgrade to the touchpad driver in Ubuntu. Now when you slide up or down the right hand edge (about 20% of the pad area) this now simulates a mouse scroll button. Takes a tiny bit of getting used to, but it is so worth it. I must admit that I really miss the scroll button when I find myself on a PC that doesn't have one.
