Joel Perry Productions

Ok, so I have now posted more today than any other 2 consecutive days, and possibly more than any single week…  it happens…

Another short, but sweet post, I am looking at a netbook for my wife, but have been severely disappointed with most of the offerings available, as she complains about our current laptop being too slow (Athlon 64 x2 2.2GHz with 2gigs of DDR2) so that fact that she wants a netbook kind of scares me.  Well so far this is the best I have found for the price, wish I could get her into a 13″ laptop, but no go, and I’m pushing it with this 12″ one.  Plus I will have to get a custom graphics vinyl wrap done to cover the outside, as she wants it to be “pretty”

Asus Eee 1201N-PU17 netbook
sporting an Intel Atom 330 Dual-core
Nvidia Ion GPU sporting 1366 x 768 resolution
12.1″ display
2+ gigs of DDR2 8GB max
802.11b/g/n
Webcam
3.2 lbs.

Gizmodo article on it
Slashgear post on it
The Link UK benchmarking it against an HP 311 mini
Amazon.com order page

currently a search on the Asus website for 1201N yields nothing.  Intel’s spec page shows that it is a dual core Hyper-Threaded processor (4 total threads)  I think this shows it should be powerful enough to make my wife happy, for now…

Also, I’ve updated the site, so it should only show the 3 most recent posts, this should help loading times and some scrolling issues…  There should be an “archive” link on the right near the top to get to older posts click the next and previous links at the bottom… also you can use the Tag Cloud to find things.  sooner or later I’ll fix the right column so it doesn’t look like a woolly mammoth dropped a pile of fertilizer over there.  But, for now you are stuck with it the way it is.

More from Finndo

• couple of updates to the site…
• Sheeva plug updates…
• Somewhere in June 2009…

After this post I should catch up to the here and now pretty quick…

right, so I had (finally) Ubuntu running with all the hardware working, and started messing with wine and trying to get World of Warcraft and DDO to run.  no good that was.  both were requiring the newest video drivers from AMD (I think that was what was wrong, never quite figured it out…) the games would both load but would fail at some point, and have other issues… including not allowing me to login or play…   Well the video driver issue ended up being that (yes it did install fine) the on-board video on the laptop had just (and I do mean within a couple of weeks/a month or two) been taken out of the newest updates, and had been placed in the “legacy drivers” list.  mean while, before I actually figured this out, was installing dot net (nearly every version) into wine, and flash, and java, and all kinds of stuff.  I Was getting really excited, the laptop was working great, even if not with the OS I really wanted.  especially since I could not find this model on the inet anywhere as being functional in linux. (the wireless and audio is what normally fails to function, and I had both working in more than one flavor of linux)

then one day at work a co-worker was looking into selling an old IBM T40 laptop and we were shocked to see people paying $150 or more for them.  so I decided what the heck… I put my laptop on Craig’s list one after noon about 3pm.  I had 4 emails and 3 phone calls before 8pm that night.  decided to sell it to the first caller, they wanted win XP, so I wiped it (oh well, good learning experience) and set it up for them, then they had to postpone coming to get it, because of a dinner party they had forgotten about, then they were not sure if they could get it, and told me to not hold it for them anymore.  well I did not get it sold, and now had win XP barebonez’d on it and login ID’s setup for people who would never see it, let alone use it.

oh well, not sure if I mentioned this or not, but I started having some wierd HDD errors on my semi-new desktop PC.  failed writes, ticking noises while the drives were spinning, drives disappearing, then coming back after rebooting… it looks like I may have 2 or 3 bad HDDs.  I get all the data moved off the Seagate that was reporting bad sectors and I get an RMA setup, quick and painless… now I just need to find a box, or “original shipping packaging”  anyone who has not had this on hand and has had to look for it will know.  it’s not real easy to find a custom fitted HDD packaging that perfectly fits the box you plan on sticking it in, and has a minimum of 2″ of foam on all sides.  So I decided to ask around at work… I also submitted a tech help request with ECS, the manufacturer of my motherboard, as I was having both video problems AND HDD issues at this point.

on to the next issue that was going on…

so I had to go to Pittsburgh for training for work, 1 week, 2 semi-high level virtual server training courses taught by an IBM instructor (AU72 AU78 and AU73 the AIX Virtual I/O Server training.  I’ll check at work tomorrow and will update if wrong on those –updated).  had an awesome time in Pittsburgh, got to meet the team I was working with virtually, and learned a tonne of stuff. (I prefer the metric tonne to the American ton, so much more useful, and a conversation piece when used in writing… pictures are available on picasaweb there are not a whole lot of images (50 something), I was working (and no I did not take any images of where I was working, but there is a hint about for whom I do work.  sorry folks I might slip somewhere, but company policy severely “suggests” that I do not disclose anything about my employment that is not necessary…) most of the time (working that is, I got distracted and used one of my parenthetical explanations that I am overly fond of and are truly not necessary, nor wanted by most.  HOWEVER, and this is the good part, I am writing this, not you, and you are not paying me to do so!! SO!! I will use excessively long descriptions/mental overture if you will, at my discretion.  I sure hope Wordpress has a good spell checker, cuz I make up words all the time)  umm… now where was I?

oh yeah, I was working most of the time, and so only took a few pictures, now that I no longer have a semi-pro DSLR (Canon 20D) I am stuck taking pic’s with a semi-crummy Kodak 6mp point-and-shoot.  Back to the point.. The weekend I got back from Pittsburgh, and I had to move, across the hall from a nice 1150-ish sq ft 2 BR apt to a kinda cramped 950-ish sq ft 1 BR apt.   Things got switched around, and now my Sheeva Plug fails 80% of the system checkpoints during bootup (not that I blame the move, just that I had no problems with it before this).  it still functions (ie. turns on and I can log in via the console), except the network port interface is kaput… (defined as “ka·put also ka·putt (kä-p t, -p t, k-) adj. Informal. Incapacitated or destroyed.” at www.thefreedictionary.com/kaput )  (fyi I still have not gotten around to reflashing the ROM on it, which I learned back in early june, is necessary to allow the usage of SD Media Cards.) 

HA! not sure what I talked about in this one, was a little distracted (doing some things on my desktop in preparation to RMA the MB…) but I’ll go ahead and post it as I hit 1k words.

More from Finndo

• couple of updates to the site…
• bringing the past to the future….
• just some interesting news I found online…

Right, my Sheeva Plug showed up, I got it setup pretty quick and was using it to remote in from work, and access an HP Pavillion ZV6015us laptop I was trying to get up and running with any version of linux.  I tried many, FreeBSD 7.0, 7.2, 7.3?, DesktopBSD 1.7 1.6?(which unfortunately is based on FreeBSD 7.1 6.2, then Kubuntu 7.10 and 8.04, Slax 6.x, Puppy Linux, might have missed one… all were x64 when available.

ok, so ALL of the Linux versions listed above installed just fine (some took a couple of tries to get the drive partitioning correct, but eventually I got them working…)  the laptop was mostly stock, I had to replace the LCD inverter in it a few years ago to get the display to light up again after it stopped working, I also switched out the stock 5400 rpm 100Gig drive with (at the time the largest) 80 Gig 7200 rpm 2.5″ drive.  The main problem I was having, was getting the audio to work on some, and the wireless to work on all of them.

(the listed attempts below are not necessarily the order I tried them in)

Fedora I tried both the KDE and the Gnome desktop install versions.  I prefer KDE; however in Gnome the wireless and sound was working, but in KDE the wireless would not work.  I tried NDISWrapper, some manually created drivers (someone else’s I’m not THAT good…), and the default drivers.  Fedora Gnome worked fine, but KDE would not.

I tried Ubuntu 7.x, it worked with proprietary drivers installed with no issues, 8.x would not allow me to install the proprietary drivers for the wireless or the ATI onboard video.  Kubuntu did not even detect that I had a wireless adapter. and manually installing the ATI Linux drivers caused so many system problems I reformatted 3 times trying to get them to work.

Puppy Linux worked out of the box with no problems as far as hardware was concerned (it took some finagling to get the audio working), as long as I loaded it into ram, if I did not use the boot parameter “pfix=ram” the system would not display correctly and I would have to manually power off the laptop and restart.  The problem was, I could not get it to install on the Hard Drive, even when following the directions I found online.  The problem I was having was that I could not connect to any wireless network.  Mine and all of my neighbors wireless networks showed up, but I could not get the system to connect to any of them.

Slax also would not install to the HDD, although I managed to get it to install to a VHD.  But I could not get the wireless to work at all, and the video drivers would not install, so any 3D apps would not work either and could crash the system.

FreeBSD – could not get any GUI/WM to load other than XWindows, I spent almost 3 months trying to get this one working.

Desktop BSD – loaded great, but the linux kernel that it uses does not have support for the wireless card chipset.  everything worked great, but I could not get the wireless to work.  This I learned after many google searches was was because the FreeBSD base was older, and the reason this was older, was because FreeBSD made some major changes from 6.2 – 7.x and DesktopBSD had not yet moved on, which they have now, so I may try it again if FreeBSD 8.0 doesn’t suit my fancy!!

More from Finndo

• couple of updates to the site…
• bringing the past to the future….
• Lets start with March 2009