While I’m on the subject of system updates, here’s another I want to talk about: Ubuntu Linux, which is what I have on my Dell Mini 9 netbook. At the end of October Ubuntu officially upgraded from 9.4 to 9.10. (Or, according to their whimsical naming scheme, from “Jaunty Jackalope” to “Karmic Koala”. I wonder what will happen when they get to Q?)

Though I was warned against trusting the automatic update process from 9.04 to 9.10, it worked just fine for me. All my data, settings, and apps were still there. (I still backed up my data first, though. Only a fool doesn’t back up before a major change.)

While the improvements aren’t as dramatic as the Blackberry upgrade, there are some nice ones. Probably the biggest one from my point of view is that the faulty driver for the Mini-9’s graphics chipset has been fixed. It’s not as dramatic an improvement as I was hoping, but it does make video run more smoothly. Flash is still problematic, as it apparently is for all Linux flavors, but it’s a bit better than it was.

Firefox 3.5 is now part of the default system. There are a lot of other apps with new versions as well, like Open Office. The login screen is improved, with some language and accessibility options you can set before login. You can now turn off Bluetooth from the menu bar instead of having to open an app and type in the superuser password. File windows have a slightly more compact arrangement, a new icon set, and multi-tabbing capability. On new installations, the much more efficient Ext4 filesystem is used (but not on upgrades, so I didn’t get that.)

I’ve been using it for a week now, and I haven’t seen any problems. I’ll let you know if any show up.

Back when the university cellphone policies were changed, I took advantage of it to get myself a Blackberry Storm. I was tempted to get an iPhone, but ultimately decided against it because of the hoops you have to jump through to install third-party apps. I got spoiled by my old Palm, which had a huge developer community and tons of great apps you could install without worrying about approval from Big Brother. I’ve given up on the Palm for other reasons, so the Blackberry platform seemed to be the best remaining choice.

I picked up the Storm because I wanted a nice big screen and I’ve never been a fan of the tiny physical keyboards and trackballs on the other Blackberry models; the Storm seemed like it would be the easiest conversion from the stylus-based operation of the Palm. The device seemed pretty cool from testing a co-worker’s newly arrived one. So I plunked down the money and ordered one…

When I actually got the thing, after the initial excitement, I was kind of disappointed. Sure, it was miles ahead of my old Palm in things like web browsing and file storage, but it was also laggy and required frequent reboots because of memory leaks. The on-screen keyboard was really slow, and the camera almost unusable due to a three-second delay between clicking the button and the actual picture being taken. And for me the biggest deal was the poor text editing capabilities; I was so used to being able to quickly jot stuff down on the Palm, easily update notes when I needed to, edit large text documents, work with a nearly full-size add-on keyboard, and so on. In this respect, the Blackberry Storm was nearly crippled. At least it was better than the iPhone, which at the time didn’t even have copy and paste!
Clearly, the Storm had been released before it was really ready.
Thus I joined the thousands of Blackberry fans eagerly waiting for an operating system update that would fix these problems. The company was working on one, and I saw various leaked versions and almost installed several of them, but ultimately decided to wait for the official release. When it came a few months ago, it helped, but not really enough. The phone was more usable, required fewer reboots, cut a second off the camera delay, and had slightly better text editing, but was still annoyingly laggy too much of the time.
By then I had my netbook, and just used that for all my documentation and editing needs when I was on the go. The Storm was pretty much just my phone and calendar, unlike my old Palm. I stopped monitoring the Web for more Storm updates, and resigned myself to the situation. After all, I was lucky to have as much as I did, right?
So then late last week I hooked up my storm and out of the blue was told there was a system update ready. I went ahead and did it without paying much attention; I figured it was just a minor bugfix for some program, like I’d seen before. Much to my surprise, it was a full update to the brand spankin’ new Version Five OS. It’s a huge improvement! The camera now works almost instantly. The keyboard is much faster. Selecting text is no longer a trial-and-error process. The much-improved predictive text function saves a lot of keystrokes. There’s flick-scrolling to move quickly through long documents and lists. The new Files app makes it easy to navigate large document trees and preview your files. I’ll still have to practice a lot to get my text entry speed up to what I could do with the Palm stylus, but now the effort actually seems worth it.
So I’m actually happy with this phone now. Imagine that.

My new keyboard got here yesterday and I installed it without much trouble. This mini is far easier to upgrade than any laptop I’ve ever worked with — just unscrew two screws, lift the keyboard, pop a couple of little latches and unplug the cable and the old one’s out, then reverse the process and the new one’s in. The ribbon cable was a little hard to get lined up right, but I got it after a few tries.

The new keyboard is much, much better than the old one. The keys are offset like a standard keyboard, and the punctuation keys are in their normal places rather than shoehorned into odd corners or converted into function-key combinations. My typing speed is way up, even though the keys are slightly narrower. Here are pictures of the old and new keyboards together that someone posted to a forum; the topic includes instructions on how to get and install the keyboard.

I’ve also been delving more into Linux. Like I said a few posts ago, it’s a lot easier than it was in the past — however, all the geeky stuff is still there under the hood, ready to be poked and prodded and reconfigured. More on that later.

My 2GB memory module arrived today (thanks Joanie!) and I installed it in all of two minutes, one of which was spent finding the right screwdriver. This machine is incredibly easy to upgrade. The keyboard will be nearly as easy to replace as the memory, though there’s a couple of persnickety little tabs I’m going to have to be careful with. The keyboard isn’t going to arrive until after Memorial day, though.

Oh, and I got VirtualBox installed without any of the finagling Michael had to do on his mini; Ubuntu 9.04 seems to have almost all the prerequisites installed already. Now I just need to figure out how to get a legal Windows CD and a drive that connects via USB– Dell makes good machines, but even they couldn’t squeeze a CD drive into this tiny box. It would have filled half the insides, even without the bigger power supply they’d have to put in.

Did I mention this thing doesn’t even have a hard drive? Well, technically it does; it’s just a solid-state one, like a USB stick. That means the machine doesn’t have to burn a lot of power spinning a stack of metal platters, which in turn means I get over four hours of battery life even with the dinky little four-cell 32WH battery Dell put into the machine. It also means there’s no need for a built-in fan, though I’m a little worried about the machine overheating and killing my battery (you do not want to get Lithium-ion batteries hot; leaving one in a car on a summer day can permanently destroy most of its capacity. For more on this see Battery University.) Ive taken to popping out the battery and running on AC only when I have a plug available; probably a bit paranoid, but I like this thing and you won’t be able to get batteries for it forever.

I sprung for the extra-big 16GB drive, which may sound small compared to normal drives, isn’t even a quarter full even with a full operating system, Open office, and a metric boatload of other programs. Put that in your cache and smoke it, Windows. If I ever start running out of space, there’s an SD card slot for more space, plus I can always use some of the metric boatload of USB sticks I’ve accumulated over the years.

And I guess I’m old, because I remember when it was totally awesome that you could get a hard drive with 20 whole megabytes on it! Like, you could never fill that up for years, man! It was the size of a brick, and weighed about the same as one too. Now a thousand times that much fits on a couple of chips, and seems like not very much room. The eighties were a long time ago, and we live in the future now.

You know that keyboard Dell told me was out of stock? Yeah, you guessed it, not really. I called their spare parts department (1-800-372-3355) and they found one in under five minutes. That is all.

A couple weeks ago, Michael Ellis clued me in on a nice little deal from Dell; through their Faculty/Staff/Student purchase program, they have great prices on their mini laptops, also known as netbooks. (If that link doesn’t work, go to www.dell.com/epp and choose Higher Education from the menu.)

Just for being part of WOU, you get a 7% discount at any time, though to take advantage of it you’ll need to create a dell login and give them your V-number to prove you’re really associated with WOU. They also have $50-off deals that come and go on various systems from week to week; if you don’t see the deal on the model you want, wait a few days and look again, and repeat until you do see it. Make sure you’re logged in with your dell account, or it might not show you the deals!

You can find their netbooks on this page. I got the Mini-9, and I’m happy with it except for the narrow keyboard which has several keys in odd places. The brand-new Mini-10v is almost the same price, but with a slightly wider screen and a more normal keyboard.

I’ll probably be posting more about this thing as the days go by.