Matt Daubneys Blog

This week my prize from the Ubuntu UK Podcast and started playing. The preloaded version of Xubuntu Hardy really didn’t like my 19″ widescreen monitor, so after several hours of mucking about with xorg, I gave up and installed Xubuntu Intrepid Alpha 6. Which liked my monitor straight off!

There are a few things that should be mentioned, to get the machine to boot, the option acpi=off must be added to the boot line in grub, and it’s also a good idea to add pnpbios=off too.

Installing took forever from a USB key. The only USB ports on the machine that are bootable are the 2 USB 1.1 ports on the rear of the machine. It took about 4-5 hours + to install Xubuntu Intrepid from my pen drive.

Other than these little niggles, it’s a bit slow but I expected that. It’s quite a nice little machine. It’s very quiet, but the LEDs are a bit too bright (soon to be fixed with some tape and some a black marker pen). It does get a bit warm, but not excessivley so.

Next on the list of things to do with this machine is install motion and get my webcam security stuffs working, then the USB missile launcher. After I’ve done all this, it’s going to be my django learning server, and maybe something else too… but more on that another time……