I have not used my HP 2133 for a few months now. I used to use it a lot for writing documents and stuff on the bus or train during commutes, but that was only after I got a larger battery for the laptop. The original battery was for all intents and purposes useless. For a laptop that was designed to be used as a “netbook”, being connected to the internet when away from home, (the marketing deparment? at) HP decided it was a great idea to put a 3 cell battery in the unit.

So in a little over an hour you go from full charge to nothing just by using the laptop the way it was intended to be used. So despite its small size, the 2133 was never really designed to be too far away from a charger for too long. It is almost like having a car like a Honda Jazz with a petrol tank the size of a coffee cup. “Yes it is frugal, sir, but it will only go for a half a kilometre no matter how you drive it.”

Recently I discovered the wonderful Linux Mint 8 (Helena), while searching for a desktop linux distro to install as a virtual machine on my MacBook Pro. Despite all the misgivings that I have had in the past for the various Linux distros, I must say that they have been improving all the time. The last time I tried to install Linux on the 2133 was when Ubuntu 9.10 came out. What a disaster that was. Wifi did not want to work, then I went back to 9.04 but found that I could just not get my Vodafone Prepaid Mobile Broadband stick to work (K3520). In the end, out of frustration and spite I decided to whack XP back on and because I needed a little mobile word processor.

Linux Mint seems to run with a little bit of lag sometimes, but overall the experience has made my faith in Linux desktop distro strong again. Using Helena I could use my Vodafone Prepaid Broadband to connect to the net and wifi worked right out of the box.

If you need a decent desktop distro that looks half decent (who like brown anyway?) and works well out of the box for your 2133, then I can recommend Linux Mint 8 (Helena).

2133 · broken · hardware · hp · netbook · open source · ubuntu

Recently while I was on the run I needed to find a location on a map and of course I immediately fired up my trusty new netbook and launched Firefox. Lo and behold, I could not get Google Maps to display whatsoever. I tried refreshing the page, I tried relaunching it and finally I had to fire up Internet Explorer to access the map. Since I usually avoid using Internet Explorer at all costs, this was really an exception.

I thought it might have something to do with my connection setup, but after a little bit of digging and retracing of my actions, I remembered that I had just updated Skype and I noticed that it installed an add-on onto Firefox. After I disabled this add-on from Skype, Google maps loaded effortlessly. Since I do not know what this add-on does and why it is there in the first place, I am probably not going to miss it.

So if your google maps not loading in Firefox 3.0, do not hesitate and disable that plug in to get your maps back. Someone at Skype needs to check this.

add-on · broken · firefox · google · google map · location · maps · skype