https://www.bennee.com/~alex/2009-12-01T13:40:00+00:00the wanderings of a supposed digital native2009-12-01T13:40:00+00:002009-12-01T13:40:00+00:00alextag:www.bennee.com,2009-12-01:/~alex/blog/2009/12/01/weekend-and-travels/

<p>The weekend was a relatively quite one. I took advantage of the temporary loan of my Dad's bike to pay a visit into town and tick of a number of tasks in preparation for Christmas. This included by first every cut-throat* trim of the Winter Beard to prevent it going …</p>

<p>The weekend was a relatively quite one. I took advantage of the temporary loan of my Dad's bike to pay a visit into town and tick of a number of tasks in preparation for Christmas. This included by first every cut-throat* trim of the Winter Beard to prevent it going too wild. Other tasks included buying a present for Fliss and fetching silicone sealant for the repair to the show pan. All fairly mundane stuff.</p> <p>I did reformat my laptop and after a little struggle with generating USB install keys massaging a version of <a class="reference external" href="http://www.debian.org/releases/testing/">Debian Testing</a> onto one of the partitions. I've skipped Gnome and gone for a more netbook friendly <a class="reference external" href="http://www.xfce.org/">Xfce</a> for my desktop environment. Suspend and resume sort of works although seems to introduce an odd bug when trying to login on fresh virtual terminals. I suspect there may be screwy events being sent to X as well although existing applications still seem to be usable. It will give me something to do on the flight I suspect.</p> <p>This time I've kept a spare partition free on the disk. I did attempt to get the latest Fedora installed but the installer was very confused. I may try the latest Ubuntu just to see how much difference there is between Debian and Ubuntu.</p> <p>I'm up at denial a.m. tomorrow to fly to Budapest in Hungary. I have two days on a customer site to see my software being put to real use (and answer questions on its future). If I'm lucky I'll get Friday morning shopping before flying back. This week is likely to literally fly by.</p> <p>* with disposable razors these days, sign of the times</p> 2008-12-29T15:35:00+00:002008-12-29T15:35:00+00:00alextag:www.bennee.com,2008-12-29:/~alex/blog/2008/12/29/i-have-found-what-im-looking-for/

<p>Unlike U2's abortive attempts I have found the netbook I'm looking for. I went into town to play <a class="reference external" href="http://www.samsung.com/us/consumer/detail/spec.do?group=computersperipherals&amp;type=mobilecomputing&amp;subtype=netbook&amp;model_cd=NP-NC10-KA01US&amp;fullspec=F">with it</a> after my Dad pointed out the review in PCW. Sure I was wanting to go for an SSD based machine but who can argue with the battery life even if …</p>

<p>Unlike U2's abortive attempts I have found the netbook I'm looking for. I went into town to play <a class="reference external" href="http://www.samsung.com/us/consumer/detail/spec.do?group=computersperipherals&amp;type=mobilecomputing&amp;subtype=netbook&amp;model_cd=NP-NC10-KA01US&amp;fullspec=F">with it</a> after my Dad pointed out the review in PCW. Sure I was wanting to go for an SSD based machine but who can argue with the battery life even if it is rotating disks? To be honest even though SSD's are getting bigger I can carry a lot of distributed source tree's with me. The salesman at the shop kindly instructed a techie to let me boot my <a class="reference external" href="http://www.sysresccd.org/Main_Page">USB key</a> on it so I could check out the hardware. It's pretty much all Intel chipset stuff apart from the wireless which is an Atheros chipset. Thankfully that should be handled in <a class="reference external" href="http://lwn.net/Articles/300758/">recent kernels</a>. No all I have to do is see if I can source it without Windows Tax.</p>