The Everex Cloudbook is a new sub-notebook which will be sold by Walmart for $399. Despite its comparable configuration, it supposedly won’t pose a threat to the leader in the ultra-tiny laptop market, the Asus eeePC.

The specs:

• Display: 7″ 800*480px
• CPU: 1.2 GHz Via C7 chip
• RAM: 512MB
• HDD: 30GB
• Connectivity: 2xUSB, Ethernet & WiFi
• Extra: webcam

This thing’s design isn’t in any way impressive, neither is it blazing fast, but unlike the eeePC it does feature a workable 30 gig hard drive. That’s a lot more than the eeePC’s puny solid state drive (4GB if I’m not mistaken). It runs a modified version of gOS (which, in turn, is actually a modified version of Ubuntu) and comes factory installed with Firefox, Skype, OpenOffice 2.3 and a bunch of links to Google’s web-based services like GMail, Blogger, YouTube, etc.

Wired reports bad WiFi support and slow performance. And a clunky Mac OSX ‘inspired’  launcher. If not for the eeePC, the Cloudbook would have been a great sub-notebook, despite its quaint design.

While modifying my laptop’s hard drive I noticed there was a tiny partition present at the end my disk. I found the idea quite quaint, especially after Ubuntu’s installer returned an error message saying the FAT of this disk was faulty. It being near midnight I cancelled the installation and rebooted, hoping I hadn’t damaged anything crucial (like breaking the boot-sequence), whereas I didn’t really know what that plop of disk was for.

“Is it Dell specific? Does it have something to do with the recovery and diagnostic tools supplied by Dell?” After a quick Google I ended up on Dell’s own website to find out the partition belongs to another quaint application that comes factory-installed, called MediaDirect.

I had once mistaken the MediaDirect button for the power-button and my laptop booted into a custom environment that is able to play media like music and DVDs without having to fully boot into Vista. In itself a nice initiative, but in retrospect something no-one really needs.

I reckon I’ll just give it another shot and install Ubuntu anew, disregarding the error message (since the partition isn’t really necessary).

del.icio.us Tags: ubuntu , linux

(Citing from ArsTechnica.com)

“Artists and developers participated in a desktop theming specification meeting at the Ubuntu Developer Summit earlier this week. During the meeting, participants made plans for the visual refresh of Hardy Heron, the next major release of the Ubuntu Linux distribution.”

I agree it’s time for a change, or a least a refresh, in order to prevent the current artwork from becoming stale and uninteresting. Maybe it’s time to step away from the Clearlooks engine, too?

“The Ubuntu development community will likely select an existing theme engine on which to base Hardy’s visual style. The two options that were discussed during the meeting were Clearlooks and Murrine.

The Murrine theme engine is much more sophisticated and offers a wide range of nice features, such as glassy gradients and striped scrollbars. The meeting participants also discussed the potential for creating a GTK theme that leverages compositing capabilities.”

(murrine.netsons.org) Murrine is an Italian word meaning the glass artworks done by Venicians glass blowers. Murrine Engine is a Gtk2 engine that will make your desktop look like a beautiful Murrina (which is the italian singular of Murrine).

According to Murrine’s homepage the engine provides anti-aliased widgets, the Murrine Configurator, good speed of rendering and animated controls (progressbar, radiobuttons & checkbuttons).

“Hardy Heron will be moving away from Ubuntu’s signature brown look in favor of black and orange.

The name of the theme will also probably be changed to reflect the significant deviation from the previous look and feel. The default Ubuntu theme has been called Human for a long time. “Superhuman” is one of the names that was proposed for the new theme.”

Superhuman? Hmz.

Other artwork, like the bootscreen, the login, the icons and other details will also be redone to comply with the new look and feel and color scheme. I’m curious to find out what it’ll look like.

The past few releases of Ubuntu had become quite uninteresting, so this breath of fresh air is especially welcome. The standardization of the 3D desktop is a good thing because it’ll allow more exposure. If the plug-and-play functionality works as advertised, it could convince more people to try Linux, since the biggest barrier (aside from software incompatibility) is hardware malevolence. I’m behind Canonical on this.

clipped from www.news.com Some of the Gutsy Gibbon work involved introducing new features Canonical hopes to stabilize for Hardy Heron Take, for example, the “tickless” kernel, which is designed to reduce power consumption and improve server virtualization performance by letting the processor enter a somnolent state more often. Among other Gutsy Gibbon developments are snazzy 3D graphics for the desktop version, desktop search called Tracker and the first incarnation of a Ubuntu Mobile version for portable gadgets. “Ultimately we took the decision to take the risk and enable this functionality by default.” Among other Gutsy Gibbon desktop features are plug-and-play function to more easily install proprietary or missing software to play audio and video files; easy support for multiple monitors; the ability to read and write from hard drive partitions using Microsoft Windows’ NTFS file system using the Fuse software. Canonical plans to release “Gutsy Gibbon,” the Ubuntu Linux version 7.10

Canonical, the leading sponsor of the most successful community-driven Linux distro ‘Ubuntu’ and Linspire (another key distro) have decided to work together. Upcoming Linspire releases will be based on Ubuntu, instead of Debian. Linspire will continue to mix open source with commercial drivers and applications for a nice out-of-the-box feeling. Consequentially, Linspire has announced that Ubuntu will be the first external distro to benefit from its CNR technology.

Great news!

LinSpire/FreeSpire has announced they’ve developed an inter-distribution version of their CNR-technology, which should bring installing applications on Linux on par with Windows and the Mac. CNR is a website that syncs with the most popular Linux Distro’s (currently supported: Debian, Fedora, LinSpire/FreeSpire, Ubuntu and OpenSUSE) and shields the user away from dubious package managers and repositories — providing a uniform installing experience across any of the [currently] supported distributions.

Find more at cnr.com.
Everyone’s quite excited about this and can’t wait for it to be adopted by the mainstream Linux distros — and so am I. Now lets hope it’ll work as promised.

Good work.