So you have had a think about the things you don’t like about buying things such as laptops. Now lets talk about the positive things. What have you seen that really impressed you? What made you thing “wow, that’s good service”. Again the scope is pretty open, talk about your shopping experience for any laptop purchase online or offline and any online purchase at all. What impresses you pre-sales, during the sales process, waiting for delivery, after-sales, the product, packaging, documentation etc. Talk about purchases from any vendor at all (you don’t have to name names, but you can if you like).
Archive for November, 2008
What totally rocks about buying laptops?
Thursday, November 27th, 2008What sucks about buying laptops?
Wednesday, November 26th, 2008If I am going to be involved in an online store I want to make certain that it doesn’t suck in any way. In fact I want to have happier customers than all the other vendors. So here is your opportunity to rant about poor shopping experiences either online or offline. The scope is wide open, moan about anything, store layout, product information, pricing, customer service, support, returns, product quality, delivery times etc.
This isn’t just about your experience with the webbook from Carphone Warehouse (in fact I would rather steer clear of that subject) it covers any laptop purchase, and any online purchase (laptop or otherwise).
I will do a followup post capturing all the really great ideas you have seen, or would like to see, but for now I want a stream of vitriol about things bad vendors do that good vendors should avoid.
I think the Ubuntu webbooks are coming back . . .
Tuesday, November 25th, 2008Not through Carphone Warehouse, but though a new online store. I don’t have a launch date to share yet, but we will be charging 15% VAT and might well be shipping some to Santa’s elves for a Christmas delivery.
Go Social
Tuesday, November 25th, 2008Paul Holt set up a facebook group for webbook owners. Facebook is a very popular social networking site, and one of the key sites we had to check worked on the webbook while it was in development. If you are on Facebook then do join the group, if you are not yet a Facebook fan then research and contemplate the privacy issues first to make sure online social networking is your kind of thing.
I would also like to bring you news of a new social networking site launched just yesterday, it is quite exclusive – you have to be called Alan to join! This site is based on Elgg which is kind of like Facebook but anyone can run their own server. A company wanting to use social networking as an internal business tool might want this. Even if you are not called Alan you can join up and have a look round, we just might delete your profile after a few weeks 
webbooks in the news
Thursday, November 13th, 2008You may have seen a flurry of webbook related articles appear over the last couple of days. As with pretty much all news stories some of it is true, some of it not so true, and it certainly doesn’t tell the full story. I will try and find out what I am allowed to say to enhance the truthiness of the situation.
The USB Recovery in detail
Thursday, November 6th, 2008So the USB “nuke my webbook” restore process is quite handy but it is always nice to know how things work so here goes. . .
The USB stick is FAT formatted and has the syslinux bootloader on the master boot record, on the filesystem are the following files
ldlinux.sys something to do with the syslinux bootloader
isolinux.bin something to do with the syslinux bootloader
kernel this is the linux kernel that the bootloader starts
initrd.gz this is the initial ram disk, the filesystem that contains all the partimage programs and everything the kernel needs to run
syslinux.cfg the configuration file for the bootloader with some important parameters that get passed through to partimage
there is a folder containing the full backed up image of the webbook
bios this contains backed up bios settings, I am not sure this actually works or does anything useful. In theory it might be possible to reset the boot sequence back to boot from the hard drive.
hda this contains the very first bit of the drive, the master boot record and partition table
hda1.first_sectors this contains the start of partition 1
hda2.first_sectors partition 2 just exists to contain the extended partition
hda5.first_sectors partition 5 is the swap partition, we only need to recover the first sectors with the partition information, the contents don’t matter.
hda1.000 this is the biggie a Gzipped partition image of the contents of partition 1.
Making a restore
To turn the Intrepid USB stick into a backup of whatever is on your webbook you need to edit the syslinux.cfg
DEFAULT rescue
LABEL rescue
KERNEL kernel
APPEND vga=normal devfs=nomount pxe ramdisk_size=33000 load_ramdisk=1 init=/linuxrc prompt_ramdisk=0 initrd=initrd.gz root=/dev/ram0 rw noapic lba After_Completion=Shutdown Replace_BIOS=N AUTO=Y Server=/dev/sda1 Directory=/ Image_To_Restore=intrepid1
Edit the APPEND line so it reads:
APPEND vga=normal devfs=nomount pxe ramdisk_size=33000 load_ramdisk=1 init=/linuxrc prompt_ramdisk=0 initrd=initrd.gz root=/dev/ram0 rw noapic lba
and you can delete the folder with the webbook image in it. If you boot from the USB stick you will now be able to go to a root shell or do a backup (or restore) from the partimage menus. There is an extra irritating little detail which took me days to figure out, when you back up an image this way it splits it into two files, the restores then don’t work (most of the time). I do the backup from the menus then delete the hda1.000 and hda1.001 files then go to the shell and run partimage from the command line which lets me back up the partition to a single unsplit file. (I will do some screenshots of that at some stage).
There are pros and cons to this method, it might be better to have a separate /home partition and have an option on startup to leave the home alone. The advantage is that it is a hands off rebuild that anyone can use, including the factory.
Intrepid on a stick
Wednesday, November 5th, 2008If I have got this right you should be able to download this .torrent file which may well automatically start the transmission bittorrent client on your webbook, or you might want to install some other kind of bittorrent client if you have a particularly poorly webbook. Once you have the file which is a fraction over a gig in size you need to write it to a USB stick. Not copy it as a file onto a USB stick, the .img is a complete image of the USB stick including boot sector, partition tables, partition and filesystem so it needs to be placed on the stick in a special way. With a webbook or other linux computer (or perhaps a Mac) you can use the dd command. If you downloaded the image file to your desktop you would open a console, plug in a USB stick (1GB or more in size with nothing on it that you want!) and type something like
alan@webbook:~$ mount|grep disk /dev/sdd1 on /media/disk type vfat (rw,nosuid,nodev,uhelper=hal,shortname=mixed,uid=1000,utf8,umask=07
this is to find out the drive name of your USB drive (the |grep disk bit just filters out the stuff we are not interested in) in this instance we discover it has mounted (opened) /dev/sdd1 which is a device called SCSI Disk D partition 1. We don’t want the drive to be mounted, so we now unmount it
alan@webbook:~$ sudo umount /dev/sdd1 alan@webbook:~$ cd Desktop alan@webbook:~/Desktop$ sudo dd if=intrepid1.img of=/dev/sdd
and that will start copying the data. The interesting thing is where we are copying it to, /dev/sdd not /dev/sdd1. We don’t copy it into the first partition on the USB drive, we copy it to the drive itself. The .img file contains a 1GB partition. After this is done you should be able to remove the stick and reinsert it and browse the new partition. To use it you need to set the bios settings to Boot from the USB stick an SD card would work just as well as it happens. THIS WILL TOTALLY DESTROY EVERYTHING ON YOUR DISK and drop on a new full disk image. After you change the BIOS settings and boot from it there is no “yes to continue” it is totally hands off from that point, as soon as it starts you might as well let it carry on to the end because everything you had before is gone.
If you have Windows then this dd for windows program might do a similar thing. If anyone has a friendlier way to get an image onto a USB stick I would be interested to hear about it – remember it is not just the files it is the bootloader and an active partition that we need.
If this sounds a bit scary then wait for some of the other penguins to jump off the ice and check for seals first
Looking good
Wednesday, November 5th, 2008Earlier, Alan & I were talking on another thread about allowing users to register to the site, upgrading the blog core files, and making it look nice. It’s starting to get a bit hard to follow, so I thought I’d use my new-found powers and write my first post about it.
To summarise, I asked Alan if we could register so that we could follow our own comments easier and suchlike. Within a few hours, he’d agreed and checked all of the boxes to make this happen. For the moment, the link is /wp-register.php, but a site meta box is something I’m hoping to add somewhere to make it easier to login/logout/register.
Then I started talking about what version of WordPress Alan was using on here, was it the stable version, or the very pretty AJAXed beta version that;s due to come out soon. Alan responded by upgrading the blog core, which has lead to improvements such as threaded comments (so you know what comment responds to what) and a better looking dashboard for those choose to register.
A few more hours went by and I noticed a couple of small visual flaws caused by the new features, like a bullet-point appearing next to the comments, and I offered my help to Alan. Now, I’ve been promoted to an ‘Administrator’ level, and I can edit the template files online. I’ve already fixed the bullet-point issue, and have plans to shorten the indents of the threaded comments as well as ensure that the alternate colour shading works as it should.
So, why start a new post?
Well, I figured I wasn’t the only person who could see things on the blog that weren’t quite right somehow. So, if you see something that needs to be fixed, leave a comment down here and I’ll try my best to fix it. When I’m done, I’ll reply to your comment (if it doesn’t look fixed, try pressing Ctrl+F5).
So how do you want your Intrepid webbook?
Sunday, November 2nd, 2008I am working on a build of Intrepid for the webbook, what would you like on it? I was going to do a default install from the CD then add Tuxpaint, Gnucash, Planner, Inkscape, the Wader mobile broadband client. I was also going to remove mono, which takes out Fspot which doesn’t work that well at 1024×600. Is there anything you would add? Anything you would remove?
I reject your reality and substitute my own
Sunday, November 2nd, 2008I have been playing with the ARToolkit which is a really amazing piece of software. It allows a real-time video stream from a camera to be mixed with virtual stuff. Here is me holding two bits of paper with special markers on them. The cube and sphere are being added to the image in software and I can wave the markers about and the objects stay ‘attached’ to them. It is quite spooky.
This is running on Ubuntu, but not a webbook just yet. With OpenVRML it should be possible to attach all sorts of objects to the markers.