Tuesday, April 07, 2009

Netbook redux

Jaunty Jackalope Netbook Remix on an Acer Aspire One

IT was a long slog rather than a jaunt. This weekend, I installed the beta version of Ubuntu 9.04—otherwise known as Jaunty Jackalope--on an Acer Aspire One netbook with 1 gigabyte of RAM and an 8GB solid state drive. Since I had been satisfied with how Version 8.04 ran on the same model, I was eager to see how the latest release would play. To keep things interesting, I decided to install the Netbook Remix edition, which is specifically tailored to run on small format laptops. Unfortunately, the process took longer than it did the last time, and it was dawn by the time I figured out how to get the Aspire One’s built-in Wi-Fi card to work.

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Tuesday, January 29, 2008

Changing the game

The Asus Eee PC on top of a 13-inch MacBook.

WHAT’S the best-selling notebook computer on Amazon.com? If you guessed the new MacBook Air, guess again. Five of the 10 best-selling notebooks, including the top three models this weekend do not run Windows or Mac OS X. In fact, they are different models of the same diminutive notebook the Asus Eee PC—that runs on Linux. The significance of this development is easy to miss, particularly if you have your head buried in the Windows or Mac OS X world. (The other five models on Amazon’s list over the weekend were versions of the MacBook; there were no Windows machines in the top 10.) For the first time, a Linux-based consumer product is making waves, not just among geeks but among buyers.

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Tuesday, January 15, 2008

Going mobile

Every once in awhile, it’s nice to be able to check e-mail or read the news online without having to stop by an Internet café or whipping out your notebook. It would be great, too, not to have to pay through the nose for such access. Happily, with the right mobile phone and service provider, these are not such outlandish wishes.

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Monday, October 22, 2007

Dealing with laptop theft

LAST week, the entertainment editor of Standard Today lost his notebook computer—an Apple MacBook Pro—when thieves smashed in the window of his BMW, which was parked at the Greenhills Shopping Center. Some time ago, a colleague at the university where I lecture suffered a similar fate, when he left his notebook unattended at an upscale coffee shop in Quezon City just long enough to go to the bathroom. Unfortunately, incidents such as these are likely to increase as more people buy laptops.

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Monday, August 13, 2007

Linux in my pocket

For the longest time, I’d heard of people running Damn Small Linux (only 50 megabytes!) or PuppyLinux on flash drives. But a cursory look at these distributions convinced me they were a bit more spartan than I would like. Recently, I found an easier way to install a full-featured Linux operating system, and all you need are three things: a USB 2.0 flash drive with at least 1 gigabyte, a copy of Pen Drive Linux (a variant of Debian); and a Linux PC.

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