But then I looked closer at the Wikipedia article on MacBooks, the System Profiler on my machine and just what I was paying for. It was then I realized that my MacBook already has a Core 2 Duo T7200, as well as 802.11n support. With most of the economical Dell options still using T5xxx series processors (with it’s 2MB L2 cache, compared to the T7200’s 4MB), it became clear I was mostly investing in more RAM and a larger hard drive. A quick look showed I could take my system from 1.5GB RAM to 4GB for $50¹ and could go from the 120GB stock hard drive to a 320GB model for $100. And with the extra drive space I could comfortably run Ubuntu as my primary operating system, retaining the Mac OS X partition until I have all the apps replaced.

So that was my task for yesterday. Unfortunately things didn’t go quite as well as planned. When I put the new hard drive in and tried to power things back on… nothing. No chime, no video, no spin up. Nothing. Sigh. I managed to get an 8 AM appointment at the Apple Genius Bar, but I was pretty bummed about it last night. This morning, however, things turned out OK. Not fantastic but OK.

Brian, my assigned Genius, suggested that the problem might be the “top case”—literally the top of the case, containing the keyboard and power switch. After pulling it off and putting on a new one, things fired right up. So another $150 later, all is well.

Brian was actually really nice and helpful about the whole situation (almost making me regret calling Apple the “corporate asshole du jour” on Saturday, but not quite). As I write this I realize how strange it is that I consider this a surprising exception. Next up: Ubuntu installation and configuration.

¹ I had one 2GB SO-DIMM already lying around in my Eee PC.

I have to admit, however, that my first thought to hearing the news was “who cares?” I’ve realized lately that Microsoft has become completely irrelevant to my day to day life¹. We don’t use Windows on our servers at work. I don’t run Windows on my work (Ubuntu) or personal (Mac OS X) laptop. I don’t use Microsoft Office on either machine. The people at work who use Windows (a minority) are pretty much on their own. And when I heard Microsoft had released a new version of their Office CC licensing plugin (as noted in the CC blog) my response was an enthusiastic “Eh, ok; good for them.” So from my [probably myopic] perspective, Microsoft is last year’s news, a has been, and Apple is the corporate asshole du jour.

So while I’d like to think I’m right and that this is just a corporate behemoth in its death throes, Bruce is probably right; it’s probably too early to count them out.

UPDATE Another perspective on the announcements from Michael Tiemann of the OSI board.

¹ Well, not completely; shopping for a new laptop I still have to consider how willing I am to pay for an operating system I won’t use.

What were they thinking? I bet VB is far easier than this.

— “Exercises In Masochism 1: Writing OpenOffice.org Macros”

I said it two years ago. And all I can say is “plus one, my friend; plus one.”

Things I’m hoping to see this week:

• lots of attention paid to identi.ca, not just as an alternative to Twitter but as a first step towards truly open services,
• lots of discussion about how free software can enable user autonomy,
• corporate suit-types excoriated for not giving back (or for expecting us to build our “open” systems on theirs (I’m looking at you, Sourceforge 2.0 Atlassian).

So I’m probably just dreaming when it comes to the last one (maybe all of them, particularly with my qualifier of lots), but for the first time in a few years, there are actually talks I want to go to scheduled against one another. Maybe I’ll have to revise Yergler’s Theorem of Conference Value. But probably not.

Shortly after purchasing my Eee I installed eeeXubuntu on it. This configuration actually worked pretty well. Combined with an additional 4 GB of storage in the form of an SD card I carried the Eee with me as my sole computer for a week in Europe in January. Upon my return, however, the Eee saw less and less usage. In retrospect I’m not sure that the decline had anything to do with the Eee at all—all my non-work computing declined dramatically during the first half of the year. The small form factor of the Eee still called out for use, so I dabbled with it periodically. One weekend I tried installing a Sugar shell (successfully, for some definition of success, I guess). Another I tried updating my eeeXubuntu installation from 7.10 to 8.04, without success (disk space issues). When I saw Ubuntu Netbook Remix, I decided I wanted to try that on the Eee. The combination of a focused, single window user interface and specialized launcher seemed like a good combination for the space constrained display.

Today I successfully installed Ubuntu 8.04 and the Netbook Remix on my Eee.

The steps were actually pretty straight forward:

1. I installed Ubuntu 8.04 using a USB stick. When it came time to select tasks, I didn’t select anything to get a minimal installation.
2. Added the Array.org repository and installed a kernel with Eee-specific customizations.
3. Added the Netbook Remix repositories and fired up aptitude. At this point I just picked my way through the packages in the ubuntu-desktop task, picking those I wanted. In particular I omitted things related to Bluetooth or CD support (since I have hardware for neither).

1. Installed the ume-launcher and other Netbook packages.

   If these instructions seem a little thin it’s because I mostly just followed the instructions of others, both found in the excellent Eee User wiki.

   • Getting 8.04 Running on an Eee PC

• Installing Netbook Remix

  I’m heading to OSCON next week so I’m going to play with the installation this week to determine whether I can use it as my sole machine for that trip.

  ]]> http://yergler.net/blog/2008/07/13/ubuntu-netbook-remix-on-the-eee-pc/feed/ http://yergler.net/blog/2008/04/22/openweb-2008-slides/ http://yergler.net/blog/2008/04/22/openweb-2008-slides/#comments Tue, 22 Apr 2008 21:43:24 +0000 Nathan Y. http://yergler.net/blog/?p=550 As promised, slides for my OpenWeb talk, Deploying the Semantic Web with ccREL and RDFa, are available. And while we’re talking about the Semantic Web, note that the slide page is using another low barrier Semantic Web tool, Semantic MediaWiki.
  ]]> http://yergler.net/blog/2008/04/22/openweb-2008-slides/feed/ http://yergler.net/blog/2008/04/14/openweb-2008-vancouver/ http://yergler.net/blog/2008/04/14/openweb-2008-vancouver/#comments Mon, 14 Apr 2008 18:26:34 +0000 Nathan Y. http://yergler.net/blog/?p=547 I’m in Canada (O! Canada!) for the OpenWeb Vancouver 2008 conference today and tomorrow. I’ll be speaking tomorrow morning on Creative Commons licenses and the Semantic Web—specifically about how things like ccREL and RDFa allow us to build a real life, scalable, extensible Semantic Web deployment without really thinking about it (“It’s SemWeb! And I helped!”)

  OpenWeb Vancouver is a community run conference, much like PyCon. And much like PyCon it looks like it has a really great value proposition (unfortunately much like PyCon it also seems to have crappy wifi... sigh).

  I’ll post slides soon (read: when I actually write them).

  ]]> http://yergler.net/blog/2008/04/14/openweb-2008-vancouver/feed/ http://yergler.net/blog/2008/02/15/strong-security-for-everyone/ http://yergler.net/blog/2008/02/15/strong-security-for-everyone/#comments Fri, 15 Feb 2008 17:34:49 +0000 Nathan Y. http://yergler.net/blog/2008/02/15/strong-security-for-everyone/ I received some press-release-spam this week that I actually didn’t mind. TrustBearer Labs, a home-town startup has released their new OpenID provider, TrustBearer OpenID. What makes this interesting is that it utilizes their browser-based authentication hardware support to instantly provide strong, token-based security to any OpenID enabled site (application?). Their browser software is interesting in and of itself—cross platform (Windows, Mac OS X, Linux), cross browser (Safari, IE, Firefox), and capable of interfacing with USB smart card readers and authentication tokens. This is a great demonstration of what open standards really allow—innovation that benefits everyone who utilizes the standard.
  ]]> http://yergler.net/blog/2008/02/15/strong-security-for-everyone/feed/ http://yergler.net/blog/2007/02/22/heading-to-pycon/ http://yergler.net/blog/2007/02/22/heading-to-pycon/#comments Thu, 22 Feb 2007 19:11:54 +0000 Nathan Y. http://yergler.net/blog/2007/02/22/heading-to-pycon/ I’ve spent the first part of this week in San Francisco for some face time with the rest of the Creative Commons staff and participating in what I believe are our first all-staff meetings¹. This afternoon I’m flying to Dallas for PyCon 2007. The program looks really strong this year, and I’m looking forward to a few days of what you could almost call a vacation. A really, really geeky vacation.

  My goal is to blog the sessions I attend, but that’s been my goal every year and I usually end up doing about 25%. We’ll see just how well it works this time around.

  ---

  ¹ “All-staff” including San Francisco, Berlin, South Africa, Boston, and (of course) Fort Wayne.

  ]]> http://yergler.net/blog/2007/02/22/heading-to-pycon/feed/ http://yergler.net/blog/2007/02/19/a-feisty-macbook/ http://yergler.net/blog/2007/02/19/a-feisty-macbook/#comments Mon, 19 Feb 2007 22:55:46 +0000 Nathan Y. http://yergler.net/blog/2007/02/19/a-feisty-macbook/ After the HP woes (which are incidentally ongoing, and if they didn’t make me so persistently pissed and angry I might actually write about them) and a nice tax refund check have caused me to go notebook shopping. After some looking I decided on a Black Macbook. After picking it up from Sweetwater, I promptly set about getting Linux loaded on it. I had done some looking before purchase, and knew the process wouldn’t be exactly seamless. It ended up being easier than expected in some areas and harder in others.

  I primarily used the Community MacBook instructions from the Ubuntu wiki. Some brief notes on deviations when installing Ubuntu 7.04 (Feisty) Herd 3 on a new Macbook¹:

  1. You can skips steps 6 and 7 completely. When you reboot after the installation completes you may receive an error message when selecting Linux. Just reboot, and select the rEFIt boot option to “enter rEFIt shell”. You’ll see the “do you want me to fix the MBR?” message; select Yes, reboot and you’re up and going.
  2. The wifi chipset on the newest MacBook (and perhaps MacBook Pros) is currently unsupported by MadWifi (bug report). However, ndiswrapper is able to wrap the Windows driver just fine. One report I read said to use a DLink driver. That worked for the most part, but caused intermittent kernel panics. Switching to the Lenovo driver, as described here resolved that problem improved the situation. (update 20 Feb 2007: the Lenovo driver is better, but still causes a kernel panic when I connect to a particular network; not sure what’s up with that)
  3. The latest Feisty kernel (2.6.20-8) seems to bork the keyboard and trackpad. I just set grub to use 2.6.20-6, and all is well.
  4. Speaking of grub, you don’t seem to actually have keyboard support in grub… not sure what’s going on with that, since it works just fine in rEFIt.
  1. Getting the double/triple-tapping to work on the Trackpad (as described here) requires loading the appletouch module before usbhid. Not being one to really crave fucking with initrd, I just wrote a little script and installed it as /etc/rc2.d/S03appletouch. It’s a bit of a blunt instrument, but I fully expect that it’s just a temporary fix until things are fixed upstream:

     #! /bin/sh
     /sbin/rmmod appletouch
     /sbin/rmmod usbhid
     /sbin/modprobe appletouch
     /sbin/modprobe usbhid
     

     Overall it makes a great Linux notebook: sleep and hibernate work out of the box, the sound is good, and the battery life is pretty decent too. Oh, and it’s pretty. Always important.

     ---

     ¹ This is going on my blog and not my site because I imagine this is something of a moving target. Ubuntu 7.04 Herd 4 is already out, and I imagine lots of work will be done in the next 6 months. Your mileage may vary.

     ]]> http://yergler.net/blog/2007/02/19/a-feisty-macbook/feed/