Ask anyone that knows me and they’ll say that I’m highly adaptable. If I don’t initially know how to complete a task, I will by the end. Unless it’s impossible, in which case, I’ll find a solution via other means. There are no problems, only situations, challenges, opportunities. But the practicality of a resolution to a situation is my biggest obstacle. Not the What/Where/When/How, but the Why. I won’t adapt to a bad solution when something else better exists. If I don’t see the point, then there must not be one. Don’t misunderstand me; even if I can’t relate to a situation, I’ll attempt to empathize with it. But if I’m asked to answer a question that’s already been answered, I’m going to quote it and move on. Not for a lack of motivation, but because that work has been done. Sure sometimes things can be done better, and I’m all for advancement, but don’t ask me to hack something together, when a better solution already exists.

I’m only going to talk about reinventing the wheel here, as the internet is already a vast and wonderful wasteland of [mis]information. And, these guys do a pretty good job of describing the install process, as well as how to fix the audio post-install. However, they make one n00b move.. maybe it’s more of a chicken-egg thing, but, they tell you to use ubuntu’s usb-creator tool to build your bootable usb flash drive. Which you’ll need if you don’t have a usb optical drive. Here’s the thing, you need to do it FROM ubuntu, which you probably don’t have installed.. Anywayz, unetbootin will solve that problem for you, nicely.

Moving on, since I threw 2GB of ram in my mini, I really did my own thing with the hard drive partitioning. I’m kind of a connection junkie, as you’ll see in one of my following posts.. I opted for the 4GB SSD, which is currently 50% used. So I configured it with only one partition, mounted as /, without any swap partitions, using all 4GB. That’s right, no hibernate for me.

I must say, I’m amazed at how smoothly the Compiz eye-candy flows around this tiny screen. Check out Forlong’s Blog for a great walkthrough on setting it up. I’m absolutely enamored by the 3D Desktop Cube and Wobbly Windows. And you can emulate all of OS X’s flashy features too. Though I will say, the settings manager app could use some clarification.. It’s pretty much a trial and error guessing game. And after you maximize the window and click on something, you’ll need to unmaximize by right clicking on the window’s taskbar button, or alt-right-clicking somewheres on the screen and unmaximizing. PITA. I should probably look into Dell’s mini-ubuntu work around.

A couple other modifications:

In an effort to speed things up a little, and delay the inevitable death of the SSD by 1 day, I edited fstab to contain the following:

tmpfs /tmp tmpfs defaults,noatime,mode=1777 0 0
tmpfs /var/tmp tmpfs defaults,noatime,mode=1777 0 0
tmpfs /var/log tmpfs defaults,noatime,mode=0755 0 0
tmpfs /var/log/apt tmpfs defaults,noatime 0 0

Yes, I have no permanent logs. Watch this: :’(

As far as Firefox goees, I like is the Full Screen plug-in, I also modified about:config to push all the caching to RAM also. Imagine that.

I tried netbook remix for about 5 minutes, and unless you have never heard of ubuntu, the linux distro most easily adopted by windows converts, there’s really no point to installing it.

Well, that’s all I feel like blathering on about at the moment, so, I hope you enjoyed your stay. Stay tuned for more boring ramblings.

I’d like to thank Sal for getting me into the netbook revolution.  I’m almost ashamed to say that I paid very little attention to them prior to my very own eye-witness account of his eee.  After that I was hooked, and I settled on a Dell Mini 9.  Today the 10 was announced with a newer processor and 720p.. *sigh*

In any event, this mini is great, paired with my EVDO-enabled WM6 phone over bluetooth, even while sitting here in the exam room at the eye doctor’s, I’ve got very little to complain about.  Except maybe a misplaced dash or apostrophe key.

I’ll post a few pics in the near future, and also go through the process I used to Install and configure Ubuntu 8.10..

Oh Hi Doc.  Yes, it  is a small computer.  Good for when I’m stuck somewhere sitting around waiting for someone for 15 minutes.

And thus, I devote the first post to you dreamhost.  My one and only web host.  I hope that it’s simplicity pays homage to your nature, and that the total lack of information contain herein is of no consequence.  From the bottom of my bit bucket,  I :heart: you.  At least, until today, when you started sending me Internal Server Errors instead of the HTML I ask for.  What’s the deal?