Wednesday, October 13, 2010

Got to keep Moblin on...

I came into posession of an HP Mini 2140. Now, in general I don't really get the purpose of thes netbook. Personally, I think its too small to be useful and too big to be portable, but that's the opinion of a person whose fingers are too fat for a full size keyboard. Now that I have one, I figure I might as well see if my opinions are correct.

I had to load an OS, since HD was cleaned before I received it. It comes with a Windows 7 licenses, but whats the fun in that? So...my plan is to load various Netbook OS's and see if I get to the point that I change my opinion. First up in the little experiment is Moblin

Moblin intrigues me, its got a user interface that is different from the other netbook OSs. So I downloaded and installed it using the instructions on the site. The installation was straight forward and in an hour I went from a blank netbook and no idea what I was going to do with it...to a Moblin netbook.

The only piece that didn't work out of the box was the wireless card...which is a show stopper for a netbook. I mean...the whole point is the portability. Luckily it just needed the Broadcom drivers...the instruction can be found here: http://slaine.org/_slaine/Dell_Mini_9.html

So far so good...still getting it set-up and customized. I did post this blog from it using blogtk. Which showed a bit of a bug when inserting a link, the link windows pops up in its own zone. Other than that..its seem like a decent OS, but not a easy to use as I had hoped. The menus seem like they might be easier to navigate on a touch device.

I'll keep playing with it...but I'm also looking for the next OS to try. Looking at OSX86, unless chrome os comes out before then.

(Note: I ended up cleaning up this post...still getting the hang of BlogTK)

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