[Coco] VCC6809 on Linux?

[Joel Ewy]

On 10/21/2010 06:11 AM, Rogelio Perea wrote:
> On Thu, Oct 21, 2010 at 5:52 AM, Mark McDougall<msmcdoug at iinet.net.au>wrote:
>
> On 21/10/2010 7:21 PM, Rogelio Perea wrote:
>    
>>   One of the first things I did when I bought my 701 EeePC a while ago was
>>      
>>> to
>>> strip Xandros and install Ubuntu. A couple of years after there is a
>>> Netbook
>>> Ubuntu distribution (http://www.ubuntu.com/netbook) that makes it easier
>>> to
>>> install and run on these small computers.
>>>
>>>        
>> I never got around to installing Ubuntu on mine, but I did grab some
>> scripts which configured the standard desktop, and maximised the screen
>> space in firefox and thunderbird.
>>
>> Is Ubuntu worth the effort?
>>
>> But the screen resolution is still a major PITA. After using it on several
>> OS trips for internet and photo backup (to USB drive), I think it finally
>> proved itself inadequate when it was taking 10s to open the photos from my
>> Nikon DSLR... :(
>>
>>      
> The full install of Ubuntu on the 701 far surpased the stock Xandros, With
> Ubuntu I had "everything Linux" in that little box, so for me it was well
> worth the effort to install, just had to do some fancy USB stick footwork
> back in the day to get it running - nothing major and actually needed to get
> by the constraints of the EeePC.
>
> The screen resolution, as you note, is the biggest hindrance on this
> netbook. I did try it once with an external monitor and was a complete new
> ball game, albeit at the loss of the extreme portability the 701 inherently
> delivers.
>
>    

I just installed Ubuntu Netbook Edition (10.04) on my sister-in-law's 
MPC netbook and it worked pretty well.  They have simplified the USB 
footwork, so that part should be pretty easy.  I was able to boot a live 
installer image from a USB memory stick easily.  There were a couple 
quirks about UNE:
1.  The way they have the desktop set up may take a bit of getting 
used-to.  It makes sense for a machine with limited screen resources, 
and reminds me of something like a PDA or smartphone.  Everything comes 
up full-screen by default, and the application's title bar is integrated 
into Gnome's top panel.  There isn't a panel on the bottom.  This is 
less wasteful of the display space, but it does make drag and drop file 
management with multiple Nautilus windows a bit awkward, though I 
figured out how to do it.  (That memory is swapped out at the moment.)
2.  For some reason that defies my comprehension, they have it set up 
with a single workspace.  Now, on a machine that is already cramped for 
screen real estate, fewer workspaces is the last thing you need.  Maybe 
they didn't think there was space for the workspace switcher, but they 
could have found a different way to do that, like on the left or right 
edge of the screen.  (I don't understand why, on all these modrin' 
computers with these wide screens, the people doing the user interfaces 
don't put more controls on the sides.  It's ridiculous that we have this 
aspect ratio going way off the horizontal deep end and people end up 
with all these horizontal toolbars stacked on top of each other, and a 
narrow little strip of content area about 20 lines high.  Then they have 
their applications maximized, so there are huge swaths of screen space 
taken up with empty margins on the left and right.  Yes, I know, people 
think they want to watch movies on their computers and nobody ever 
writes more than 140 characters at a time anymore...)

To make matters worse, they made it less than straightforward to change 
this broken behavior, though Google can yield up some solutions.  I got 
it worked out so that she had 4 workspaces, but she had to use the 
keyboard to get to them.  Let's hope that gets better in a subsequent 
version.

Aside from those issues, UNE worked fine and the installation was a breeze.

JCE

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