Probably no surprise to anyone, my home desktop computer runs Linux.



I recently posted Heatsink Bracket and Clips for new CPU cooler so I thought I ought to post more details about that system.


Here are the specs:

This Zalman is too loud:



Here is the funky bracket the Zalman uses:

I'm sure that other sites will do a better job of reviewing the Droid in-depth, so I will just give some impressions and post a few pictures.

Here are the first pics (note: Jabba is not to scale):

The Droid sitting next to my semi-ancient work-provided BlackBerry:

A few weeks ago I bought my first netbook, an Acer Aspire One AO751h.  Today these are selling at NewEgg and elsewhere for under $300, but if you intend to run Linux today you should try a different model.

** Update June 2011:  The AO751h really sucks at running Linux.  I continued having the issue where it would not resume from suspend every time, sometimes wireless would not re-activate, etc.  Eventually I put Windows back on it and gave it to my brother. **

I wanted a netbook because it would be light enough to take "everywhere" and due to cost. Ultra-light notebook computers are still over $1000 which is more than I wanted to spend.  I chose the AO751h because the case comes in various non-generic colors (I chose blue), it has a nice big keyboard, long battery life, and the screen is 11.6 inches with a resolution of 1366x768.  The large hard drive (250 GB) allowed me to double- and triple-boot while I tested various Linux distributions.  This netbook is great for web browsing, running vim/emacs, SSH, git, and Remote Desktop. I bought the Windows Vista version of this netbook in order to get the included 2 GB of RAM.  The AO751h includes a 6-cell battery and lies flat on the table, unlike some of the netbooks that have an ugly battery sticking out the bottom that raises the back of the netbook up.  I need proper ergonomic keyboard angle to help avoid wrist problems.  I plan to do a lot of typing on this computer.

Sadly, the AO751h and Ubuntu are not yet a match made in heaven.  After some struggle, I did manage to get a usable Ubuntu 9.04 system,  Enough quirks remain that I continue to dual-boot with Windows.  Windows Vista was very slow on this hardware, so I replaced Vista with Windows XP which runs very well.

Here is the Ubuntu wiki page for this system:

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/AspireOne/AO751h

There are two major Ubuntu compatibility issues with this hardware that require tweaking... the video resolution and Suspend/Resume.  Wireless works out of the box although sometimes the device takes over 15 seconds to re-activate after Resume (and occasionaly wireless never comes back and I have to reboot).  The function keys for brightness do not work in a fresh install but seem to work ok after installing the psb-kernel-source package for the Intel Poulsbo (GMA 500) graphics.

Detailed hardware info (including lspci output) is at the bottom of this post.

The other day I stumbled upon a web page that attempted to take control of my browser. I saw a series of pages and had great difficulty making them go away.

I happened to be sitting in front of a non-critical Linux desktop, so I figured it would be interesting to see what this web page would do:

Some serious scare tactics going on here.

The next part of the site pretended to scan my hard drive for viruses. It pretended to find many serious problems on my computer:

When I finally grew tired of this malicious web site, I tried to close my browser tab. The web page threw up a wonderful warning that tries to scare the pants off the poor visitor and also started a download of a windows executable:

If you refuse to check your system, press "OK", and you agree to be responsible for all the system malfunctions, erratic behavior, and data loss.

Wow, that's scary! What poor computer user wants that much responsibility?

Lucky for me, I am using Linux and Firefox, and in fact none of the Win32 viruses really existed on my machine. The site is very convincing, however, and it is easy to see why there is an epidemic of malware-infected Windows computers all over the Internet.