Archive for the 'Linux' Category

OSX on a Lenovo Ideapad S10-2 - again

Published
by
blogmywiki
on January 22, 2010
in Linux, MacOS X, music and operating systems
. 4 Comments

triple boot on a par five hole

(behold my - working! - boot-up options, using the old-skool classic GRUB bootloader)

I’ve given up trying to get the audio to work on OS X on my IdeaPad’s msiWindOSX install. Could not get Audieee to work. A 10.5.5 update trashed the OS. I re-installed msiWindOSX and the fricking Terminal app wouldn’t run! I think a retail copy of Snow Leopard might be the way to go.

A colleague and I last night both reminisced on how much time we had spent getting out Bondi Blue iMacs to sync with out Palm Pilots by infra red. We reckoned about 2 weeks’ work. Some things are just not worth the effort. Besides, the current versions of Spotify and WINE play nice, so I can use my free Spotify account in Ubuntu!

Anyway, here’s a list of what I’ve tested and does work in msiWindOSX on a Lenovo S10-2:

  • Screen, including brightness function keys.
  • Wifi - with a little patch
  • iTunes to manage my Mac-formatted iPod - but there’s no audio though, and I had to download new versions of QuickTime and iTunes to work with my iPod Nano
  • Adobe Illustrator CS
  • Webcam in iChat - but not in PhotoBooth
  • The SD card reader slot works a treat - OS X can natively handle Nikon RAW NEF files, so OS X could be a useful tool for photography.
  • FlickrUploadr
  • Trackpad - but no gestures or 2-finger strolling
  • Networking with other Macs over wifi (ethernet is not supposed to work but I’ve not tested it)
  • USB devices such as memory sticks and Microsoft optical mouse
  • TillyPaint!

Not yet tested:

  • Bluetooth
  • Ethernet (not expecting this to work)
  • External VGA monitor

Triple-boot OS X, WindowsXP and Linux on a Lenovo Ideapad S10-2

Published
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blogmywiki
on January 5, 2010
in Linux, MacOS X, Ubuntu, WiFi, Windows, computers and operating systems
. 0 Comments

The aim: to get my Lenovo IdeaPad S10-2 netbook to allow me to boot into Mac OS X, Windows XP or Ubuntu Netbook Remix as and when I need each OS - and to get a nice clean Windows install at the time, free of all the crud that comes with a factory-installed OS.

Ingredients

The easy way to do this would be with a USB DVD writer. I couldn’t get one (not one that worked, any way) but I did have an old DVD ROM drive and a USB IDE caddy/enclosure gizmo. I also used:

  • 2 blank DVDs
  • 2 blank CD ROMs
  • A G4 PowerBook to burn the discs on - any computer with a DVD burner will do
  • A 4GB memory stick
  • an ethernet cable
  • A copy of MSIWindOSX
  • A few files you’ll find mentioned on this web page - stick them on a USB stick
  • A nice, cheap, large new 3.5″ SATA drive (optional - if you want to keep the original WindowsXP drive). I got a 250gb one off Amazon for around 30 quid.

First up - you need to prepare about 4 discs you’ll need. Do this with your working normal XP machine.

Download MSIWindOSX.iso off the interweb - of course I didn’t do this as this would be very naughty. Do (or rather don’t) burn it onto a DVD. It’s just under 4GB (which is why I needed a 4GB USB stick).

Then copy all the drivers in the DRIVERS folder on your IdeaPad’s D: drive onto another DVD-ROM. They don’t quite fit on a CD-ROM.

Next make a live CD of your Linux of choice - I chose Ubuntu Netbook Remix.

Last, but not least, you need to make a WindowsXP Home Edition install disc. This is fun. Well, okay, it’s not fun. It takes ages and will have you screaming at Lenovo for not supplying a Windows disc with the IdeaPad. Basically I followed this method:
http://forums.lenovo.com/t5/IdeaPad-S-series-Netbooks/Guide-Create-Recovery-Media-for-an-Ideapad-S10/
and this method (bearing in mind you need to include Service Pack 3 as well):
http://www.howtohaven.com/system/createwindowssetupdisk.shtml

But that’s not enough. If you make a disc this way, it should boot but it won’t find the hard drive as it’ll be missing the drivers needed to see a SATA hard drive. There are two ways round this: you can fiddle with the BIOS settings and change the SATA controller to compatibility mode and change it back again when you’ve got the right drivers installed. I didn’t fancy this so I used a bit of free software called nLite to tweak the XP installer I made to include SATA drivers. There should be some info here. I think this is totally legal as I have paid for a WindowsXP licence, the licence sticker is on the machine I’m installing it on - it’s just that Lenovo are too cheap to supply a disc so you have to make your own.

As I didn’t have a USB DVD writer, rather than burning the disc on the IdeaPad, I made an ISO image which I put on a USB memory stick and burnt the image using Disk Utility on my PowerBook G4.

Okay. Survived that? Now back up everything you want to keep off your IdeaPad. Go to bed, wake up the next day and do it again because you will have missed something.

Method

I tested my discs in my USB DVD reader to check they booted - press F12 at startup when you see the Lenovo splash screen and choose the USB disc as the boot device. If they boot - good news. Don’t install anything. At this point I replaced the 160GB hard drive with a cheap 250GB from Amazon - it was marketed as being for a Playstation3 I think and was only about 30 quid.

replacing the hard drive on a Lenovo Ideapad S10-2

Unscrew the large panel underneath, remove the single screw holding the hard drive in, and pull to the left using the plastic flap. Unscrew the drive from its caddy, replace and re-insert.

Phew! Time for a cup of tea.

Mac OS X

Then I put (or rather I didn’t) the MSIWindOSX boot disc in the USB DVD-ROM drive, plugged it in, turned the IdeaPad on and pressed F12 at the Lenovo splash screen and chose the USB disc drive from the boot menu.

DSC_7068

I more-or-less followed these instructions:
http://www.netbooktech.com/2008/10/13/guide-to-installing-os-x-on-lenovo-ideapad-s10/
but some things were different…

First of all before installing OS X I used Disk Utility on the install disc to make a 40GB MacOS Journalled partition on the drive. I left the rest blank - the plan is later to make a roughly 150GB NTFS partition for WindowsXP and a 40ish GB partition for Linux. The idea is to make the NTFS partition the largest one as I plan to use this as a data volume, hoping that both OS X and Linux will be able to mount it. I also used the Advanced option in DiskUtility to choose a Windows style bootloader. Not sure if this was required, it just seemed like a good idea.

Bienvenue a OS X

I didn’t have the problem mentioned on NetbookTech about getting stuck in a loop - I said I didn’t have a Mac to transfer information from and it all went ok. I followed the instructions on getting WiFi working and that worked ok. I tried to do a system update but rather than updating from 10.5.4 to 10.5.5 I was offered a 10.5.8 combo update. This KILLED the OS X install and I had to start again - so don’t update to 10.5.8!

There’s no audio, but there is a workaround for this, though it does need Developer Tools installing which you’ll need to get off an install disc or download.

When I’m cleaning Windows…

making Windows partition

To get Windows installed, I repeated the process, booting off the Windows CD I’d made. I used the installer to make a 150GB NTFS partition to put XP on, and left the rest blank. When installed, I copied all those files that were in the DRIVERS folder on your original D: drive back onto the C: drive and installed them to get the WiFi, graphics card, sound card etc working properly.

Now that's what I call a clean Windows install!

There’s a nice clean Windows install! Next - time to get some Linux cooking.

Ubuntu: brown is the colour!

Installing Ubuntu Netbook Remix

Last of all I booted from my Ubuntu Netbook Remix CD and installed this flavour of Linux on the remaining unformatted drive space. As mentioned before, you need to use the ethernet cable to connect to the internet to get the restricted Broadcom driver in order to get WiFi to work.

Here’s what I ended up with, the choice of WindowsXP, Ubuntu or OS X at startup:

choices, so many choices

UPDATE: After installing Ubuntu, OS X doesn’t want to boot. Lots of scrolling text then stuck on a pale blue screen of death. Ho hum. Will try to re-install OS X!

UPDATE TO THE UPDATE: Yay! I got it working again. Re-installing OS X didn’t work, so I replaced the GRUB2 bootloader that comes with Ubuntu 9.10 with legacy old-skool GRUB. There’s a guide here. Legacy GRUB is much simpler to manually configure and get OS X booting OK.

During the process of retro-grading GRUB I made a note of what my partitons were numbered (yours will probably be different):
disk = /dev/sda
sda1 = HFS+ (Mac OS X)
sda2 = NTFS (WindowsXP)
sda5 = Linux
sda6 = Linux swap

Then when legacy GRUB was working I added these lines to menu.lst in /boot/grub. Note that your root settings will probably be different depending on your partition scheme and also I had to reduce the partition numbers by 1 - the WindowsXP partition hd0,1 is actually sda2 and the OS X partition hd0,0 is actually sda1 - confused me when it all went wrong the first time!

title WindowsXP
root (hd0,1)
makeactive
chainloader +1


title Mac OS X
root (hd0,0)
makeactive
chainloader +1

I left the automagic kernals stuff to look after booting into Ubuntu, and didn’t add a line for that. (Well I did actually - it didn’t work, so I took it out. I found it easier to configure GRUB for OS X than for Linux!)

The other thing I would have done differently in hindsight is to create a 4th common data partition for music, photos and videos in FAT32 format - I think this would be more easily accessed for reading and writing by all 3 operating systems. OS X doesn’t want to write to the NTFS WindowsXP partition - it can read it just fine, though. Ubuntu doesn’t have many qualms about writing to NTFS disks but then I have had problems with this when I was using WUBI, so maybe OS X’s caution is wise.

Next I’ll try and get audio working using Audieee. And annoyingly, I noticed the Ideapad’s built-in web cam works in iChat but not in PhotoBooth (I’d rather it were the other way round).

Having installed OS X I am slightly left wondering why I did it. Like climbing a mountain and saying “well the view’s quite nice but was it really worth the bother…?” It was an interesting challenge and quite exciting to see the OS X Finder on my IdeaPad but I am struggling a bit to think of a Mac-only application that makes it worthwhile. Most of the software I use is already free and cross-platform. Possibly iPhoto (which I don’t have!) - but then Cheese in Ubuntu is fine and it has the benefit of actually seeing my webcam. Would an iPhone development kit work on it? OS X also makes networking my Lenovo Ideapad with my other Macs much easier. But that’s about it…

Ubuntu Netbook Remix on a Lenovo S10-2 IdeaPad

Published
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on November 12, 2009
in Linux, Ubuntu and operating systems
. 4 Comments

say cheese

Having played with the Ubuntu Netbook Remix (UNR) OS on a USB stick, I was keen to get it installed on my Lenovo IdeaPad to give myself a break from WindowsXP. However, I was very keen to keep Windows as I’ve paid for it, and as we know the big drawback with the Lenovo IdeaPad is that they don’t ship a Windows system restore disc - so not trashing my Windows partition would be desirable.

So here’s how I did it:

I downloaded WUBI - this lets you install Ubuntu from within Windows. It doesn’t repartition your drive, keeps Windows safe and makes it easy to remove Ubuntu. This now gives you the Netbook Remix as an option. I installed version 9.10

Having installed that, I rebooted, gulped a bit as it said it was making partitions - but it didn’t harm WindowsXP at all. You just get an option to boot into Windows or Ubuntu when you switch on. WindowsXP works just fine as before.

Then I found that in Ubuntu the wireless networking didn’t work, which was pretty much a deal-breaker. Manually updating to the commercial Broadcom driver didn’t work after a reboot - the old drivers reloaded and it wouldn’t let me blacklist them as suggested on the Broadcom instructions. I got round this by connecting to the internet via old fashioned ethernet and going to the Synaptic Package Manager under ‘System’ and installing the Broadcom driver listed under ‘restricted’. This seems to have done the trick and my wifi is now working.

getting wifi to work

So far so good… audio playback seems to work ok. Trackpad ok, and scrolling works ok. The SD card reader works a treat; it even recognised my Macintosh (HFS+) formatted iPod Nano 4th Gen when I plugged it in - it was mounted read-only, but I could play music off it and frankly I wasn’t expecting anything at all. Not tested its power modes yet to see if sleep works - I think that might be a no-no in WUBU. Firefox seems to be wasting some precious screen real estate where the Favourites were - I had to turn the bookmarks toolbar off. This is odd, as the UNR is supposed to be tuned for small screens and the default web browser doesn’t seem to be that well set up in this regard. Looks like there’s no Flash support in Firefox by default either, but that’s a simple fix with installing a plugin within Firefox; pity it didn’t have Flash support out of the box, though. I found it was a good idea to get the ‘panel’ at the top of the screen to auto-hide, to save some more precious screen space. The panel is the thing like the OS X menu bar or the toolbar at the bottom of the screen in Windows.

One other odd thing in WUBI is where to find the partition you installed it on. I put it on the C: drive as this was the largest partition, but it doesn’t show up as a drive in the file manager. Annoying as all my photos and Windows software are on the C: drive. Well, it is there but you have to hunt for it - it’s under File System > host.

where to find your Windows C: drive

I’m going to play with UNR on the Lenovo IdeaPad for a few days and see if I miss Windows at all. I was suprisingly happy with Windows - after all I was mainly using free software which is cross-platform. But I was nervous about Windows viruses and Windows seems to have a very heavy overhead in terms of virus-scanning and the like, which slows it down awfully.

Update: got Spotify working - yay! I think that deserves a ‘yay’. Used the Ubuntu software installer to get WINE installed, then had to follow the specific WINE audio settings given on the Spotify web site: http://www.spotify.com/en/help/faq/wine/

Update to the Update: adverts don’t work on Spotify running under WINE. This might sound like a good thing, but if you have a free Spotify account, as soon as it tries to play an advert it grinds to a halt. Bother. Restarting it doesn’t fool it either, Little Boots remains in limbo, waiting for the Lexus advert that never comes. Back to WindowsXP for Spotify then :-(

Why is Windows WiFi so slow?

Published
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on October 19, 2009
in Linux, MacOS X, Ubuntu, WiFi and Windows
. 0 Comments

A friend of mine has just bought a netbook - a Samsung… I tell everyone I love my Lenovo and they buy Samsungs anyway - and he noticed how slow its wireless networking was compared to his MacBook.

I fired up my Lenovo Ideapad S10-2 and my ancient G4 PowerBook and I found the same thing too.
I used broadbandspeedchecker.co.uk and did each test twice. My friend and I both have 02 broadband and I’m guessing we have the same router.

Lenovo Windows Netbook - 1.66GHz Atom - via 802.11g wifi running WindowsXP
5872 kbps download
788 kbps upload

Old Powerbook G4 - OS X - 1.66GHz PowerPC - via 802.11g wifi
11144 down
793 up

Lenovo Netbook - WinXP via ethernet
13936 down
772 up

But here is the really interesting thing…

Lenovo Netbook running Ubuntu Netbook Remix off a USB stick:
Download speed 11950 Kbps
Upload speed 927 Kbps

So with the same hardware, the Lenovo netbook’s wireless networking appears to be twice as fast under Linux - and Linux running off a USB stick to boot. I tried fiddling with the Broadcom settings in WinXP but it didn’t make any difference to the reported speeds. Very, very odd. Maybe a virus checker or firewall is slowing WinXP down?

Hands on with the Lenovo IdeaPad S10

Published
by
blogmywiki
on September 13, 2009
in Apple, Linux, MacOS X, Ubuntu, WiFi, computers and hardware
. 2 Comments

Lenovo IdeaPad

Times are hard and my Apple PowerBook G4 is on its last pixels… its Firewire port doesn’t work, I think the Bluetooth is bust and the final straw was the screen - most of the time two thirds of it has bands of grey or garbage across it and I have to fiddle with the screen for ages to get a picture, like messing with a set-top aerial on an old TV. I can’t afford to replace it with a MacBook let alone a MacBookPro, so I turned my attention back to netbooks again.

Price Barrier

I was on the verge of buying the Samsung NC10 - it’s quite cute and the battery life is excellent - when Amazon shoved the price back over the psychological £300 barrier. I think netbooks should cost under £300, preferably closer to £200. Amazon then sent me some spam about the Lenovo S10 and I couldn’t believe the price - £255 inc VAT and shipping.

In many ways this is a very ordinary netbook - small, 1024×600 display, WiFi, WindowsXP Home Edition, ethernet, webcam, 3 USB ports and an SD card reader. But it had a few features that made me make an impulse purchase: its 160GB hard drive - the same size as my £1700 PowerBook’s - is removable, which is neat as it’s the thing most likely to go wrong. It also has Bluetooth and a PCI Express card slot, which is unheard of for a netbook this cheap.

It’s possible Amazon made a mistake with the price, as I then saw it listed at £320. But it is a lovely machine. Best of all is the display, which is very bright and crisp. I know my PowerBook was getting a little old, but it’s like someone has cleaned my glasses. Not that I wear glasses. The keyboard is fine, the trackpad better than some I’ve tried - not as good as an Apple one I grant you. It has a switch on the side to turn WiFi and Bluetooth off, useful if you are on a plane, want to save power - or you’re just paranoid.

I put this solidly-built little machine to good use yesterday, perching it in the kitchen, playing stuff off Spotify all day and keeping me entertained while I did battle installing the world’s most fiendish dishwasher (if Ikea made dishwashers, it would be the Fisher and Paykel DishDrawer, but that’s another story…)

Little boots

It boots fairly quickly into Windows, but I discovered that it also has a button marked QS; this stands for QuickStart, and boots the machine very quickly into a Linuxy SplashTop kind of OS, giving you a basic web browser, Skype, photo manager, MP3 player etc. It’s possible this will do enough to hold me off putting Linux on this machine… but…

I am the Cheese Photo Booth

The Linux Question

Now, I’m no fan of Windows, but I do admit I find it quite useful that I now have my first ever WindowsXP machine of my own and I can run all sorts of software. I want to keep XP on here, even if I add Linux. This should’t be a problem, but it brings us to one big drawback with the IdeaPad. Lenovo do not supply a system restore DVD or a Windows install disk. There is something called One Key Recovery - a button that rebuilds your machine, but this relies on code stored in a separate partition on the hard drive. Clearly if you add a new OS, you risk trashing this backup. Not good, expecially as you have paid for a legal XP licence - the key is stuck on the bottom of the machine.

So what to do? Firstly I need to get me a USB DVD writer and back up the hard drive and make a bootable Windows recovery disk - there are a few ways to do this, but frankly I shouldn’t be doing this, Lenovo should supply one. Another option is to get a new SATA drive, keep the old one intact, and muck around with a factory fresh one and then I can go back to Windows and the SplashTop Quick Start OS if I want. A third way is to use WUBI - this a Windows installer for Ubuntu that installs Ubuntu inside Windows without altering the disk partitions, although I fancy using the Ubuntu Netbook Remix and there is currently no easy way of installing this netbook-friendly Linux from WUBI (I was running it off a USB stick in the screenshot above).

Cake and eating it

And then there is OS X. Yes, OS X. Some people have got OS X running on the IdeaPad, admittedly with no audio and no ethernet but they do have graphics and WiFi working. This seems quite astonishing to me - I could have the best of both worlds: an insanely cheap and an insanely great laptop.

Messages! From Outer space!

Published
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on January 27, 2008
in Linux, OLPC, Sugar, computers and thrift
. 0 Comments

OLPCI finally got to play with a pukka One Laptop Per Child laptop on Friday. I’d heard sniffy things about it, and indeed I bought an Asus eeePC for myself as you can’t buy the OLPC in the UK. I expected to be unimpressed, but it’s a very nice machine - and the display is brilliant. Turn the backlight off and you get a very, very crisp monochrome display that can be read in direct sunlight. It even folds back on itself to become an ‘ebook’-style tablet. The OLPC and my eeePC made a very sweet couple sitting side-by-side.

I got to play with one thanks to Tom Hannen in the BBC World Service, and good luck to him in trying to get folk there to do something for it - it should be right up the World Service’s street. He’s written a great little Speak and Spell toy for it, and I fancied having a go at writing a simple program myself. So I’ve been messing around with emulators - sadly it’s too slow to be useful on my old Apple G4 PowerBook, but I got it to fairly fly on a WindowsXP laptop which can take advantage of having an Intel / X86 processor.

This is a bit odd, though… check out these weird symbols that appear VERY briefly twice when you shut down the OLPC. It’s like something out of Lost:
olpc warning

Setting the Asus eeePC clock using NTP

Published
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on January 16, 2008
in Asus eee PC, Linux, Xandros and computers
. 2 Comments


For some mad reason the Asus eeePC doesn’t have any option to set its time and date using an NTP server - not even when running in the advanced desktop mode.

Here’s a quick way to add the function if you are running in advanced mode. You don’t need to install any software - the command line tool you need is called ‘rdate’ and it’s already on your eeePC.

In your advanced desktop, go to the Launch menu, Applications > System > Menu Editor. Expand the Applications list and highlight Utilities. Click on File > New Item.

In the name box type something like ‘Set clock’ and in the Command box enter something like this:

sudo /usr/sbin/rdate ntp2d.mcc.ac.uk

replacing ‘ntp2d.mcc.ac.uk’ with your local NTP server of choice (I picked my alma mater for sentimental reasons rather than geographical proximity…)

Untick the ‘Enable launch feedback’ box and save and close. It should then do some system updates and then you should see a new item in your Launch menu under Applications > Utilities that when you click on it, updates your eeePC’s system clock. Now why couldn’t Asus have just left the NTP option alone in its Xandros version of Linux?

TillyPaint on eeePC

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on December 12, 2007
in Asus eee PC, Linux and Xandros
. 0 Comments

tillypaintI got TillyPaint working on my eeePC - it’s a very simple finger-painting program wot I wrote aimed at very young children. The idea is that you can make a mark without clicking the mouse, which almost all paint programs require you to do. You can find versions of it for MacOS X, Windows and Linux here.

The Linux version isn’t quite right - it clearly doesn’t run full-screen like it should and holding down the shift key doesn’t stop it drawing like it should, but the basic idea works.

To install it, I just downloaded the ZIP to my personal folder, right-clicked on it in the file manager to unzip it then did the same to change its permissions (under properties) to make it excecutable and then launched it by double-clicking on it in the file manager. This is probably a hideous crime against Linux, but then I’m no Linux power-user let alone developer… :-)

eeePC - the photographer’s friend

Published
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blogmywiki
on December 4, 2007
in Asus eee PC, Linux, Xandros and photography
. 12 Comments

gimp on a eee pcThe Asus eeePC is great for the photographer on the hoof - especially if your camera uses SD cards which you can just pop in the slot in the side. The default image viewers are okay but leave a bit to be desired if you want to do anything slightly unusual… I tried a couple of others such as Google’s Picassa and Digikam but they weren’t quite for me either… specifically I wanted to be able to crop images to a fixed aspect ratio for making wallpaper. I was pretty sure that The Gimp would do the trick - using it is easy for anyone familiar with Photoshop. I had a look at this interesting post on eeePC tools for photographers - worth noting that to install it I had to press ctrl-alt-T to get a terminal and then type
sudo apt-get update
(note ’sudo’) and
sudo apt-get install gimp
to get the install to work. (Thanks to Eric for pointing out my error here, now corrected).
When running the Gimp for the first time (type ‘gimp’ at the command line) the install wizard buttons will be off the screen, so hold down the alt key and click and drag the window up to get at them. You can use this trick to make sense out of the crowded Gimp screen too!

Less is More - the Asus eee PC

Published
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blogmywiki
on November 28, 2007
in Asus eee PC, Linux, Xandros, commuting, computers and thrift
. 6 Comments

OR: NEVER MIND THE $100 LAPTOP, GET A LOAD OF THE £200 LAPTOP!

log in on a tuppenceI’ve had my Asus eee PC for a couple of days now, and can set some thoughts down… as you know this is a tiny £200 sub-notebook computer, that almost perfectly fits my long-held dream of a tiny laptop with no hard drive which would boot quickly enough to allow me to write something on a short train journey, let me get on the net using wifi, write that coruscating best-seller!

It really does fulfill my dream. It boots in seconds and wakes from sleep even faster. The screen is a mere 800×480 pixels but it’s very sharp - quite high resolution - and most web sites look just fine. Quite a lot of scrolling required but BBC News and Flickr work ok. You can hook up an external monitor via VGA and get some pretty huge resolutions - I did this at work today and it was hard to believe that this tiny box was producing a great big picture.

The keyboard is a bit clackety, but I’m typing this on it now without too much trouble. The trackpad is surprisingly good - not up to my PowerBook’s but it does have a scroll strip on the right which is almost as good as Apple’s 2-fingered salute. Frankly I thought the click button was faulty until it dawned on me that it does left or right click depending on which side you press - double-tapping the trackpad is easier for a left-click.

It’s got 3 USB 2.0 ports, which is one more than my PowerBook that cost 10 times as much. It’s got an ethernet socket, a built-in web cam and stereo speakers and headphone and mic sockets - along with a built-in mic at the front just underneath. There’s also a slot for additional memory via SD cards, which I’ll need. My unit has 4GB of flash storage, much of which is taken up with the OS and 512MB of RAM.

Although you can install WindowsXP on it, it comes pre-installed with a special version of Xandros Linux. There’s a huge range of useful open source software included - Firefox, of course - which you can add an FTP plugin to. OpenOffice for word processing and whatnot. The media players do a nice job of playing MP3s and have coped with the few various video files I’ve chucked at them. There’s also Skype - not open source but potentially makes this device worth the money on it’s own. I’ve got the Skype 2.0 beta running using the web cam - this machine is so tiny you could just leave it on in the kitchen and use it for phone calls and checking the news headlines and train times.

Of course as a Linux machine you’re a bit limited in what peripherals you can use - no problems with my Kingston memory stick but when I plugged my Nikon D40 camera in (without much hope) oddly it mounted a drive called ‘D40′ but couldn’t see anything on it. No great loss as I can plug the Nikon’s SD card straight into the eeePC’s internal card slot - in fact this little gizmo means that if I carry it with my camera I can file pictures from anywhere I can snaffle some WiFi connectivity.

But peripherals are hardly the point - a memory stick goes a long way. You can even boot off a USB keyring if you want to try an alternate Linux flavour without trashing the default configuration. One mad fool has even got MacOS X running on one…

There are a few niggles so far - the WiFi is a bit flaky at first and nowhere near as easy to set up as a Nintendo DS (which is my gold-standard for simple WiFi configuration - those guys make Apple look sloppy!) - a couple of times I’ve just bitten the bullet and rebooted, but that itself is so quick and Firefox opens all its tabs just where you were.

Other oddities are the fact that this is a single user Linux - amazingly you cannot have multiple accounts without installing another Linux distro, which I don’t want to do. This is a pity and tragically means that I can’t let the kids have the eeePC after all, what with the lack of parental controls as well. Oh well.

Also they seem to have stripped out the option to set the clock from an NTP server, which is very very odd, especially as it’s mentioned in one of the help pages. Annoying thing for them to have dropped - quite handy when you’re out and about, to get the right time off the interweb!

But all in all a lovely dream machine… it is, as Stephen Fry would say, my mother, my lover, my strumpet of the boudoir. If only I’d managed to get one in black…