Today was a very long day of meetings, made even longer due to some insomnia… I didn’t get to bed until after 3 am and I was in at the office around 7:45 am.  Not my idea of a restful night’s sleep!

It seems that this is operating systems week… I am going to take advantage of the Windows 7 Beta to see if they’ve raised their game.  The only reason I’m even looking is that its free, and I’ve heard some relatively good things about how it runs on netbooks.  That means future versions of my Eee PC might come with Windows 7 stock, and I have to know what my options look like.

Since I just got Easy Peasy working properly I am not going to tempt fate… instead I am going to dual-boot my Dell laptop with the Windows 7 Beta to see how its feature set handles.  I don’t have an extreme amount of hard drive space on this laptop (just 51 GB when you factor in the restore partition) so I get to exercise 7’s ability to run in a smallish footprint of 16 GB or so.  I might pad that out to 20 GB just so I can try some of my favorite apps, we shall see.

I think I’m going to hit the hay early tonight, hopefully I will wake up refreshed and happy tomorrow!

I woke up with enough soreness in my lats that I elected to stay home from karate tonight, I tested myself a bit during the day by throwing a few punches and blocks and found my range of motion with my right arm was so hindered that I found it best not to push it.

So I stayed home and installed Easy Peasy v1.0 on my Eee PC.

Installation went very smoothly, the only near hangup was trying to decide what partitioning setting to use.  Everything else was dead simple.

First, the annoying things:

After I installed successfully, I restarted the system and was greeted by… the installation prompt again?  I cancelled out of it and went about my business.

The first thing I tried out was Skype, and I found no audio.  I tried some testing sounds from the OS, and I could hear them VERY faintly.

It seems that both of these were known issues, and once I thought to check the forums my problems were quickly solved.

The other annoyance was the freaking logo.  The guy that runs Easy Peasy went through a labor intensive process of rebranding his OS (previously Ubuntu Eee) to Easy Peasy.  I found the name… well… very stupid, but someone came up with a somewhat charming lemon logo and theme to go along with it.

They remastered the logo VERY poorly for the background, and it came complete with jagged edges and poor masking that doesn’t make it look smooth or nice at all on the brown background color.

If you took all the time rebrand your operating system to something silly, hold a huge contest to select a logo for a prize, and then capture it that way for the main background of your OS, you fail at life.  Out of the pool.

The Good Stuff

Once those settings were fixed (I changed the background to a different stock Ubuntu background), I found the Operating System extremely good.  Its solid, the camera quality seems better in Skype this go around, and my wireless Internet came up immediately!

For Linux, that is a real accomplishment.  Newer, fresher versions of the applications I like is always nice, and I think I’ll be happy in this stupidly named Operating System.

Today my favored Linux distribution for my Eee PC has been re-released.  Unfortunately, it’s been rebranded to one of the most embarrassing possible distribution names: Easy Peasy.

It appears that there was some sort of contention between the Ubuntu foundation regarding the previous name of the distribution, which was Ubuntu Eee.  It seems to carry the “Ubuntu” name you must be officially sponsored by the Ubuntu foundation, which this project was not despite being based largely on Ubuntu Linux version 8.04.  (That’s ok because open source is free.)  I find this name very stupid for many reasons, however this is the best configured version of Linux to run on the Eee PC platform.

The new version is based on the updated Ubuntu Eee 8.10, but it is optimized to work best on the Eee PC hardware.  My last installation was a considerable pain in the butt, I’m hoping they’ve worked out some of the hiccups.  For those of you that choose to Skype me, I may be unavailable for 1-3 days depending on how badly this goes.  I will post a status update when I intend to begin, so stay tuned here for further details!