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After many moons of entertainment, adventure, and mounting suck with the cloudbook, it mostly died. That is, it will boot up, run ubuntu, and let me log in, but only has a life of about 5-10 minutes before hanging. Not sure what exactly is going on; but subsequent attempts to install some alternate linuxes (or is the correct plural 'linuces'?) have hung as well. I'm not sure what exactly to do with it, but clearly it ain't getting the computing job done. The really rough part of all this is that the manufacturers, everex, stopped supporting the cloudbook completely sometime in 2008, and the company itself folded in mid-2009. Sic semper tyrannis, I suppose.

So my next-cube neighbor, Ben, and I have both been searching for possible laptops/netbooks/not sures for some time. We talked, hashed it out, etc, etc. For a long time. It's possible that Ben has an equally controlling Inner Cheap Bastard as mine. But... dell posted a pretty solid deal on the mini (buy computer X, get a mini for $150 more), we talked about it, talked some more... you get the picture.

Anyway, we now both have dell mini netbooks. I am typing this on it, in fact. Not too much crapware to uninstall, not too rough on the setup. The webcam ain't half bad, either. :)

I spent a good portion of the day doing something I had been putting off for a long time: installing a better linux version (ubuntu) on my cloudbook laptop.

It's interesting, some of the decisions that were made for the O/S that the cloudbook was bundled with-- it was an ubuntu flavor called gOS/Rocket (often mistakenly called "google OS", it actually stands for "good OS" and has nothing to do with the boys from Mountain View)-- when you have a machine that has a 7 inch display, you would suppose that real estate on the screen should come at a premium, be carefully thought out, and be configurable as hell. This wasn't really the case, as gOS/R had a combination launcher/taskbar at the bottom that took rather a lot of real estate, and tended to pop up or stay focused over other apps even when not wanted.

The other main problem with gOS was the network connectivity. It was erratic, would disconnect regularly, and was unpredictable in its connectability. Ultimately it was too erratic to be relied upon.

A third problem that struck with regularity was a blip that would occur in the windowing system, after the linux core was already loaded, but that would cause startup to hang. I'm hoping that is cured. It seems to be so far.

NOTE that I'm not certain whether the problems just mentioned lie with gOS in general or in the half-cooked version that everex slapped together to put in the cloudbook. It is quite possible that the straight-up unmodded gOS is quite stable, usable, and nice. But I'm not going to find out any time soon. I'm digging raw ubuntu at the moment.

I used this tutorial I found at teamteabag.com, which let me make a USB drive bootable like a CD. Very cool.

So I took the evening and got ubuntu installed, configured, and dancing. The network connection is now, so far, excellent. It hasn't kicked out once yet tonight.

Go cloudbook! I am very pleased.

[edit: postscript]

I meant to also point out how the USB-bootablifying absolutely failed when trying to create the thing on windows vista. Everything looked right, the drive was recognized, but when trying to boot from it, got nothing but a "partition not recognized" error every time. Did the whole process from XP, and everything went smoothly. Vista, Thou Art Suck.

plinking away on the cloudbook again, I can't resist messing around a little bit with this pathetic little webcam. This machine will ostensibly run skype video, but I just can't imagine how ridiculous it would look.

Ah well. That's bear in the pic with me. Two dudes watching the giants-redskins season opener tonight. Yeah.

Aerial shot of me, sick cat, and mess on coffee table from the cloudbook. Yep, that's Maya, curled up on the blankets on the floor there. She's already feeling somewhat better, you can tell. Yay veterinary medicine!

Still plinking around with my loverly little cloudbook here. Yes, as shown above, the webcam is mostly suck, and really the barest minimum they could bundle with and still call "webcam!" I've got it tuned for my basic needs pretty well already. Reports from various BBS's say it's pretty easy to install XP dual-boot on the thing, and I'm toying with that... thinking about prepping to do just that this weekend.

Anyway, still reporting mostly good things with the cloudbook; it can run a little hot sometimes; it runs particularly hot if you don't have it on a flat, heat-dispersing surface (like a pillow, or a carpeted floor). The only other bad thing to report is that when I took the thing to a panera to log into their free wi-fi, it could find the network but could not connect. Of course, I didn't try too much fiddling with things, so I'm not admitting defeat yet.

I haven't really screwed with openoffice apps yet; the thing I use for writing is a handy little tcl-based app called notebook (thanks, Will Duquette!)... and I only had minor tweaking to do to get that running under linux.

All in all, quite enjoying the little machine.

A level above POS.

probably.

eh. probably not.

Every now and then, my inner geek wins a battle over my inner cheap bastard. The carnage of past battles is often still visible years later. A digital camera, a few flash drives, and an mp3 player or two are still in play; a well-past obsolete palm m125 (complete with a folding keyboard attachment that is haphazard at best) and a hands-free phone set highlight the "gathering dust" list.

Now, however, my inner geek has scored perhaps its biggest coup ever. Behold, the cloudbook!

It's aptly named. At least, the book part. It's not very heavy, and it's barely two times as big as an Orson Scott Card paperback.

It feels sturdy as hell, too. Like holding it this way and typing one-handed wouldn't be a problem.

But the most interesting design point is the placement of the touch pad and the mouse buttons. They correspond to the placement of my right and left thumbs, respectively, in this picture. Supposedly the intent is to make this machine easy to use while walking, or... unicycle riding, maybe. I dunno. But it's different, and so far, I'm more intrigued than annoyed.

The thing is tiny (7 inch display) which, I confess, has provided some aggravation in the configuration and tweaking of the thing. The keyboard is most kindly described as cramped, although that's proving to be the easiest thing to deal with. So far.

It comes with gOS (google's frankenmodded ubuntu linux distro), which allows the saving of quite a few bucks from not installing any version of windows. According to various reports, it's relatively simple to get this guy to dual-boot XP and your favorite linux flavor, but I'm quite satisfied so far with the already-bundled gOS. It has built-in wireless and webcam. 512MB RAM, 1.2 GHz processor. 2 USB ports, battery life is ostensibly 5 hours. Four hundred dolla.

Why the hell would you want a machine that small? I hear you cry. Well, the tininess was really the point for me. I wanted something small enough that I could really type/browse sitting on the couch. Correction: in any posture, anywhere. While lying in bed, even. Hell, I could even lie on my back and type with this thing. The relatively new category this machine fits into is "ultra mobile," or UMPC.

Anyway. That's my latest toy. I'll keep y'all posted. Hopefully my inner geek will be sated for a while; my inner cheap bastard has a deep, deep wound to heal.