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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.