Cloudbook Day 2
Well, I had to head to the day job today, so I didn’t get much of a chance to toy around with the Cloudbook. Brought it with me though. Coworker was somewhat impressed mostly at the size and what it had in the small package…but it’s not a gaming machine so useless to Levvy.
I tried to hook it up to a fullsized keyboard, mouse, and DVI monitor at work today. Mouse and keyboard functionality are fantastic. External monitor leaves a lot to be desired. First of all, the screen switch button on the keyboard (Fn-F3) doesn’t seem to have any response. I’d hit it, and the Cloudbook wouldn’t switch. Only after I rebooted did the external monitor suddenly come to life. It works, but the other problem is that it’s also showing 800×480, which looks horrible on a 19″ external monitor. I didn’t see any easy way through the GUI to change this…seems to be hardcoded at this resolution (there’s no other choices available). I know I could tweak xorg.conf and make it work, but I gave up for a while to do real work at the day job. One last thing, I never got it to see both screens separately (again, probably some tweaking would fix). I have a feeling the VESA driver it’s using will make this pretty difficult, if not impossible to accomplish.
Last night I updated the kernel and header files with what the Cloudbook was popping up showing me as a necessary update. What’s strange is I was getting this notice even before I first had the Cloudbook on the Internet. It’s like the kernel update was shipped with the Cloudbook. Odd things have started to occur with my wireless connection it seems now after this update. I’m getting some really bad transfer rates, and twice it seems wireless just went off to “la-la land”. Not sure what the updated kernel could possibly be doing to the wireless, but I want the old one back now.
I ran into a few more apps and windows that don’t fit too well on the screen. Really I think this theme that’s in use is partially to blame. The buttons are all HUGE. Big jelly-bean buttons are nice looking but really don’t utilize the screen real estate well. Alt-click-drag once again saves the day.
Looks like the Cloudbook is using a 2GB swap partition, which makes Linux think it has a total of 2.5 GB of RAM to play with. Honestly, that’s probably overkill. I probably would’ve made it more like 512MB myself.
Other than that, this thing is performing beautifully. I was editing some Google docs tonight, and really enjoyed sitting on the couch with an almost weightless laptop to use to just update a few cells in a spreadsheet, or check the latest news feeds in Google Reader. Brought it over to the kitchen table (this thing is super easy to carry around) and plugged in a wireless mouse which came up instantly. After adjusting the sensitivity on the mouse, it was very enjoyable to use at the table.
Laptopmag mentioned the keyboard gets really hot. I disagree, sortof. It does get warm, but not what I would call hot. My Latitude D620 gets hot. To the point that it feels like it’s going to burn me. I wouldn’t say the Cloudbook gets that hot at all.
The screen on the Cloudbook is easily MUCH brighter than my Dell Latitude. I’m a believer in LED backlighting now.
And finally…I’m going to keep toying around with gOS for a while, but I have a copy of Gparted, Windows XP Home, drivers from Everex, and some USB thumb drives here. If I can figure out how to get the Cloudbook’s internal drive repartitioned, and install XP from a thumbdrive…I’ll try out the Cloudbook with a different OS and see how it is. Later…
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