Ronnie Tucker

Was tidying up my bedroom (a bit) today and came across an ancient relic from yester year, my first 486 CPU!

That’s right folks, a genuine AMD 486 DX4-120. Behold!

Packed under the hood of that small square beast is a whopping great 120MHz of sheer power. Gasp in awe! Back in them days you could even overclock it to 133MHz! Oooohhh!

The AMD site still has some sales blab about the Am486 range of CPU’s! 

Shame it has ‘Designed for Microsoft Windows 95′ stamped on it…

I made a couple of videos yesterday. One of the CECT 599 (iPhone clone) and one of the ASUS EEE booting eeeXubuntu and running Compiz Fusion.

Tried to upload them to YouTube, each is only a few minutes long, but after a looooong upload (on my crappy broadband) it tells me they’re too long!

I’ll put them on Google Video then! Hmf!

Google, I hope you’re having second thoughts about that purchase of YouTube. Sell, SELL, SELL!! 

my sentiments exactly! 

I’d been looking forward to the release of KDE4 for months then the developers announced that it’d be a late Christmas present and the release date was now early January. Bummer.

Today I decided to download the Kubuntu with KDE4 Live CD to give it a whirl on my laptop, a Compaq NX9005.

I downloaded the ISO and burned it to CD, popped it in to my laptop and booted it up.

My first impression was that the task bar looked unfinished. It has a black background with a grey border which has a black border round it! To me it looked like that outer black border wasn’t supposed to be there but, hell, maybe it’s a ‘feature’ (hope to God it’s not!).

I was eager to try out some of the much talked about widgets so added the analogue clock first, easy. Looks nice too. I’m on a laptop so I’ll add the battery meter. It seems, according to the battery meter, that I don’t have a battery in my laptop, which is nothing short of a miracle since the laptop is not plugged in to the mains! So what about the nice post-it notes I’ve seen in screenshots. Nope. It’s just the bog standard flat looking post-it notes in the RC2 Live CD. Boooo!

Also:

• You’ll notice there are no screen shots in this brief review. This is due to the fact that there doesn’t seem to be any sign of KSnapshot on the Live CD.
• I was going to write this post in Konqueror in KDE4 but after clicking Konqueror I get the bouncing gear icon below the pointer, a shaded box in the launch bar then nothing. Couldn’t even load Konqueror!
• After poking about in the Settings I found the Window Effects settings and enabled them to give me drop shadows et all. Nope, all I got was a light grey screen with the shadow of the window that should be there, but wasn’t. Couldn’t see anything, couldn’t click anything.

After that I turned the laptop off and had to take in the fact that KDE4 RC2 isn’t ready for the masses. I hope, I PRAY, that the developers can get all these little quirks ironed out in time for the January release date.

I can tell you this much: I will NOT be installing it on release day! I’ll wait for some other guinea pigs to step forward first!

Since the old blog was art only, it rarely got any posts. This new and improved blog is for the things I love the most: Linux, Art and Gadgets.

I’ve deleted most of the old posts as the majority were all art related. I’ve kept my most recent write up which was for the CECT 599 mobile phone that I bought the other week. It rocks!

So here’s to a new year (soon) and a new blog. Hoorah! 

After much tinkering with my Eee I’ve finally settled on an OS I like.
The Eee comes with a highly modified Xandros Linux which, on boot, makes your Eee look like a kindergarten toy. Not cool. But you can enable the IceWM menu (IceWM is the default window manager) but you can take it further by installing KDE on there too so you get a full KDE desktop with no big kiddie style icons on the screen. Cooler. Better still is the fact that you can install X/K/Ubuntu on there too! But the down side is that the wireless and wired networking don’t work and in some cases the battery meter is screwed. Not cool.

In comes eeeXubuntu (below). This is Xubuntu with patches applied to get your networking (wired and wireless) working! Hurrah! Not only that but all your other bits and bobs such as sound work fine! Cool!

Not only does eeeXubuntu work great on the Eee but you can pimp it to the max with Compiz Fusion! (below) Uber-cool!

So, the lesson is: Eee kicks ASS!

And to prove the point, here’s a quick Google Video of my EEE booting eeeXubuntu then running Compiz Fusion.

After much faffing around with Play.com I eventually went with Overclockers UK and got my ASUS EEE 701 Notebook.
I went with Play.com first because shipping was free but come the end of November my order went from Preorder to Accepted. Then within a day it went back to Preorder and dated 7th Dec! I can only assume the first batch wasn’t enough to cover all the pre-orders but a note/email to say so would have been nice! Anyway, looked about and found Overclockers UK had 10+ in stock so grabbed one, even though I was now paying for shipping. Booooo!

Now my only grief was with City-Link. Overclockers UK sent it Next Day courier on Monday. Well, come Tuesday City-Link must have knocked on the wrong door since they didn’t even leave a card and the only reason I know I didn’t get it was through their web site. Phoned them up and asked for a redelivery on Thursday. Fine. Not fine. Come Thursday afternoon I call up and ask about the status of my parcel. I’m told that there were some ‘problems in the warehouse’ and that my parcel wasn’t out on the road at all! Redelivery now Friday. *sigh* Come Friday afternoon no parcel and I’m now pissed off. Call them up and, again, it’s still in their problematic warehouse! Grr! So eventually I had to ask my dad to drive over ten miles to pick it up for me from City-Link. Swines! So needless to say I’ve written them a cheeky email letting them know what I think about their Next Week, sorry Next Day, ’service’.

Anyway… just tinkering with it out of the box (damn them for putting Frozen Bubble on it by default!) and will try and install Kubuntu on it later.

Couldn’t resist it. Ebay did tempteth me.
Bought a new mobile phone: the CECT 599 (which is basically an iPhone ‘clone’.)

I’ve written a review of the beast HERE.

For £80 I really can’t find any faults with it!