Paul Howard

23
Jan 2010
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after moving all the home media components

via twidroid

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06
Jul 2009
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apple and the worst customer support, ever

Yesterday I noticed my macbook battery (model no: A1185) had started to swell. This was troubling as it was performing well and only a month or so ago I tested it using coconutBattery and found it to be working perfectly. 

 

 When I called Apple support today I was shocked and quite angry to find out that not only would they not be replacing my battery, despite it having only had 34 power cycles, but that two of their support staff told me that the swelling battery was a "safety feature" and the batteries could not explode. After an hour or so on the phone I decided to call it quits and just email a complaint to their customer services dept. This is the first time I have ever had to call Apple support, despite having owned Apple products for seven years or so. All I can say is that if this is the level of support you can expect, I will be switching back to Linux next time I buy a computer. OS X is a fantastic OS but if you have to run it on hardware that's so badly supported I'll forgo the Apple tax next time.

UPDATE: 10th July 2009 Still no word from Apple customer support. 4 days now and no reply. In this economy I would have thought customer services would have been their top priority to keep customers.

UPDATE: 31st July 2009 After a lot of moaning Apple gave in and decided to send me a new battery. The new battery arrived today and is installed and working perfectly. I still think it's a shame that you have to moan so much just to get decent customer service though.

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13
Jan 2009
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running eeebuntu on a eeepc 701 4g

I've had an EEE PC 4G for about 4 months now and until recently had been happy with the stock Linux install that it came with. The OS was limiting in several ways but for day to day surfing, email and Skype chat it was fine. The biggest problem, I had with it was the version of rdesktop that came with it only seems to allow you to connect to a Windows 2000 server. As I use mainly Windows 2003 servers at work I had to find a workaround. To start with I just added the standard Debian repositories and reinstalled rdesktop from there. After adding a new icon to the desktop to connect to the servers everything was working fine. That was until I did a software update and installed a few more bits of software and the desktop link disappeared. After this I decided the stock Linux install was no good for me and I started looking for alternatives. The two main contenders were Linux distros specifically designed for the EEE PC, Eeebuntu and Easy Peasy. Both are built on Ubuntu and both look easy to use. After reading some of the reviews and forum posts I opted for Eeebuntu.

Eeebuntu offers three flavours of install. Standard, which is a full desktopinstall, Netbook, a smaller install with an interface designed specifically for a smaller screen and Base which is also a full standard Gnome based install but with almost no apps installed as default. Since my EEE PC only has a 4GB SSD drive I opted for the Base install and would add extra apps as I needed them. It is worth reading the FAQ page which gives basic details of how the OS works. Their documentation could be clearer and more concise but you will get the general gist of it. Installation is a matter of downloading the ISO file, then creating a bootable USB stick. Instructions for this oddly not found on the main site but in their forums. They have posts detailing how to create the bootable USB stick in Ubuntu and Windows. After booting from the USB stick the install was pretty much a standard Ubuntu install. Nothing surprising at all. The beauty of running Eeebuntu instead of a standard Ubuntu install is the Kernel is preloaded with the drivers to get the most out of the EEE PC. The webcam, sound, SD reader and WIFI card worked straight away with no configuration needed. The only thing I had to do was go into the BIOS of the EEE PC andenable the webcam, which for some reason was set to disabled. I had been in the BIOS previous to the install fiddling around so not sure if that is a standard step or just a problem with my pre-install fiddling. The initial Gnome desktop looks good. A nice blue swirly background with minimal taskbar icons.
The standard desktop manager works well but I wanted to test Compiz. This was as simple as dropping into a terminal and typing: sudo apt-get install compiz compizconfig-settings-manager After a reboot I had full access to all the wonders that Compiz offers. I wasn't sure if the EEE PC would be able to handle a lot of the graphical effects like Expo but it handles it all perfectly. So far all the apps I have installed have worked as expected as long as you respect the limitations of the screen size. As my EEE PC has a 7 inch screen some apps and indeed some dialogue boxes do not fit on the screen. This is where the ability to run mutliple virtual desktops comes in. I have set up the virtual desktops in a square pattern (currently 4*4). If a dialogue box overhangs the bottom of the screen I just go to the screen below the one I am on to access the rest of it. The only real problems I have come up against are the Fn keys. The volume controls works as advertised as do the brightness controls. Num Lock works but scroll lock doesn't. Snooze is fine but the External Monitor switch doesn't seem to do anything. I also found that if you look at the stats for the battery it shows it as having a design charge of 42.4 Wh and a current charge of 0.8 Wh. Although the battery seems to last almost as long with the full Eeebuntu install as it did with the factory installed OS. Overall impressions so far are very favourable. I have not come up against any show stoppers and the amount of apps available to me has increased dramatically. Anyone with the slightest amount of Linux knowledge would be well advised to make the switch to Eeebuntu. It really does far out perform the limiting OS that comes with the machines. Has anyone else had any experience of running other operating systems on a netbook? Leave your comments below.

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