1. The K3520 Vodafone dongle does not get recognised by the network manager anymore. When I plug it in, it shows up as a CDROM drive, but does not get unmounted an then used as a modem like it was with Linux Mint 8 (Helena).
2. The Interface seems to be really slow as to make it nearly unusable. The delay between clicking on a program to launch it and the actual launch is around 3-5 seconds. This is unacceptable.

To keep myself sane, I think I will just go back to Helena for now and be happy that everything works well enough to use the netbook on the move.

Sure, I have had a few funny formatting issues that have cropped up every now and then when I upload and convert microsoft document formats such as PPS and DOCX, but they are minor issues compared to the convenience of having your documents accessible from anywhere and the ability to instantly edit and share them with people of your choice, think collaborators and people who might want to know what your thoughts are on a particular document.

The recent ability to upload any kind of file has added an extra level of convenience. I have been able to upload zipped packages containing documents and images for particular events and classes without having to convert them to Google Document format.

The convenience of editing your documents at home and then downloading and distributing them where you need them (such as lesson plans and tutorials for my students in the class room) has been the winning feature for me. It definitely beats even carrying them on USB sticks and HDDs wherever you go. If you have not yet been using Google Documents for managing your documents, then you definitely should!

For the sake of simplicity, I decided to just build around a motherboard from Foxconn with an Intel Atom processor 330 (dual core) built-in, or rather soldered onto the board. The model number for the board is 45CSX and it has 1 slot for DDR2 RAM with a 2GB ceiling. To house the board I also bought a Foxconn RS-338 case which comes with a 150W PSU and enough space for a 3.5″ HDD and a DVDRW drive. Since RAM is so cheap these days, I bought the maximum 2GB size for $40. All up, the rig cost a little under $300 and I decided to mate it to a 24″ widescreen 1920×1080  LCD from ViewSonic.

After installing Windows XP SP3 (yes, I know I should have installed Linux, but I wanted to test the performance of the CS3 suite on this rig), I installed the Adobe CS3 suite to test the machine and see how it performs. Upon running Photoshop CS3 and even together with AfterEffects CS3, I came to the conclusion that this machine is not as bad as it’s been cracked up to be. Photoshop launch seems to be quite snappy and AfterEffects seems to run just fine (takes just as long to launch on my MacBook).

Everything seems to work fine and yes, there was a performance difference compared to my MacBook with a C2D 2.16Ghz processor, but for something that costs a little over a quarter the price I think it is a quite acceptable trade off. So unless you work with Photoshop and AfterEffects in a heavy-duty production, I can recommend this setup as a secondary machine.

In case you are interested, I tested Photoshop on this machine with a file that has 134 layers, each with a mask of its own. AfterEffects was tested with a six layer 1:30:00 length animation.

At the completion of my install of Jaunty Jackalope (Ubuntu 9.04) on my netbook, I found that Aptana just would not load. It would show the logo for a couple of seconds then it would just come up with an error. After scratching my head for a little while, I tried to look up an answer on Google and I found this thread on the Aptana user forum.

So basically, the issue is the version of xulrunner that Jaunty comes with. Currently it is version 1.9, while Aptana needs version 1.8. To fix this issue you need to download xulrunner 1.8 and unzip it to /usr/lib, so its path would be something like /usr/lib/xulrunner/. Then you create a script which looks like this:

#!/bin/sh
MOZILLA_FIVE_HOME=/usr/lib/xulrunner-1.8.1.3
if [ $LD_LIBRARY_PATH ]; then
LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$MOZILLA_FIVE_HOME:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH
else
LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$MOZILLA_FIVE_HOME
fi
export MOZILLA_FIVE_HOME LD_LIBRARY_PATH
~/aptana/AptanaStudio -vm /usr/lib/jvm/ia32-java-6-sun/jre/bin/java

Make the script executable and then on your panel add an application shortcut to point to this script file, mine is called “aptanastart”. Oh, and you need to have Java installed, since Aptana requires it.

The only issue that can be noted is with the wifi connection manager. It seems after a few hibernates that the connection is stuck at the “getting ip address…” stage. This can be quickly fixed with a reboot. Other than this issue, I have not found any major ones to mention. Sound works flawlessly, Bluetooth works normally and the webcam works with Cheese (I have not tested it to work with Skype or anything like that).

Recently, I also purchased the 6-cell battery for the Mini-note, which makes the notebook (or netbook, if you like) much more usable. Since I use this notebook mainly for writing text, coding and web browsing, I have found that having that extra amount of battery capacity makes the notebook a little easier to use. No longer staring at the battery icon every few minutes to see if I will have time to finish what I am doing. It puts the usability of this little notebook on par with my MacBook and my Dell Inspiron laptop. Using it with little power management and with wifi on seems to give around 3-3.5 hrs of uninterrupted use. What joy!

Had this notebook shipped with Jackalope instead of Windows Vista Basic (standard on all Mini-notes shipped in Australia), it would have been a winner from the start. A 6-cell battery, even though it adds a little to the price should have been standard on all models.

Right after I had had enough of Knoppix in a PMI (poor man’s install) configuration, I decided to look for something better. While Knoppix was a great beginning and an eye-opener to what could be achieved in a well-configured Linux laptop, it was not enough. It did not allow for software install (well, without a lot of difficulties anyway) and everything I worked on had to be saved onto an external USB drive.

There was no way I was going back to Mandrake 10.0 with its desktop oriented architecture. Even though Mandrake, could be configured to run well on a notebook, but it simply could not match what Windows had to offer in terms of efficiency. As common with a lot of Linux distros at the time, neither Mandrake or Knoppix really offered much in terms of power management for the notebook users. I found that with a fully charged battery (which I could get 3hrs + with on Windows XP SP2), I would be lucky to get around 1.5-2.0hrs on Linux.

Right about this time, I am not sure how, I stumbled upon Ubuntu. I think it might have been getting a little bit of coverage at that time and I somehow thought it was the possible cure to my problems with Linux. I think the first version of Ubuntu that I installed was version 5.10. Like when I installed Knoppix, Ubuntu was an eye and mind opener. I simply thought it was brilliant.

It had a great set of software and for the first time ever, I had installed a Linux distro that could almost recognise all the features of my notebook. It also auto-mounted any drives that I could plug in, including USB Flash drives and my external USB hard drives. It recognised my wireless cards, sound cards, the selectable CPU speed feature of the BIOS and just about everything else I had on the notebook. The only things that did not get recognised was the SD card slot (ENE?). This was simply great.

While everything was great, Ubuntu still seemed to have a problem with some of the power-saving features of my notebook. I partly blame this on Toshiba for making a notebook that featured proprietary hooks (DMI) for the BIOS features through which software could be used to set the level of screen brightness and other features that can normally be accessed through the function keys, as well as things such as the cooling fan.

When Ubuntu reached version 7.10 (Gutsy) I decided that it was now time to dump Windows altogether and just use Linux for my day to day computing (at least on this notebook). This proved to be quite a challenge, especially when it came to power management. Even though Linux support for notebooks had matured by this stage (Dell was offering ubuntu pre-installed on some models), there were still issues caused by the lack of transparency from the hardware vendors which prevented Linux drivers from being able to work properly with some.

To make the function buttons work (at least F7 and the screen dimming keys) I had to install the omnibook kernel module which could access the DMI interface of the BIOS to dim the LCD and to control the fan, wireless switch, etc. This was not a straight forward process. As is common with Linux distros, I had to trawl through numerous forums, blogs and other articles online to discover more information about this problem. Even though in the end I managed to install it, the official stable version of the omnibook module just would not compile on Gutsy.

To get the omnibook kernel module to work in Gutsy, first I had to switch to the Generic Kernel instead of the standard Ubuntu i386 kernel. As well as having to switch kernels, one also needs to install the kernel source (linux-source in Synaptics). With those two things done, I was then able to compile the omnibook module but there was one other catch. To get omnibook to compile on Gutsy you also had to grab the latest nightly build from CVS. To discover all this information, I had to trawl Google and the forums nightly for almost four weeks (Ok, I had to also work in between searches).

While the overall experience on Gutsy was quite pleasant and straightforward, to make a complete install that took advantage of the power management features of my notebook I had to really get my hands dirty with compiling source codes, etc. This might be fine for someone with a little bit of technical aptitude such as myself, but for a lot of other computer users out there, this could be a problem. I hope this article will help those people that have come across the same problem.

On the subject of power management on notebooks, I should also mention an excellent little tool called PowerTop. I was able to bump up my battery life from just under 3 hrs with one battery to about 6.5 hrs with two batteries, screen dimmed and powertop helping me optimise processes running on the system to minimise the power footprint of the system.

My advice is, if you are buying a new notebook and wanted to have Linux installed as your default OS, make sure you purchase it from a vendor such as Dell who will send you a completely pre-configured system from the factory.