Archive for the ‘Introductions’ Category

Hello webbook, pleased to meet you

Thursday, July 24th, 2008

When meeting someone new it is polite to introduce yourself, lets meet your new friend, the webbook. Press the power button (the middle silver button near the hinge) and a few seconds later it will start up for the first time.
The webbook wants to talk to you in your language. It knows lots of languages, but I speak English so I am going to choose that.

Now it wants to know where you live. I live near London so I am going to use the map to click on London.

You may find the mouse a bit lively at this point, if you struggle to click on the city with the map leaping about you can click and drag the edges of the window to make it bigger or just select the city from the dropdown list, (which is arranged into continents) or you could try plugging in an external mouse to one of the USB ports.
Click the Forward button and it now wants to know a bit about the keyboard you are using. It will take a good guess at this based on the city you selected.


Now it is time to introduce yourself, and set up a password. Don’t forget this, and notice that it wants your real name and also a login name. It suggests your first name in lower case as the login name.


After a little while (it has some preparation work to do for you) it will present you with the login screen and you can put in your username and password to log on for the first time


And here it is, your webbook is ready. Have fun exploring the menus, we have put lots of nice things in there for you to find!

Posted in Introductions | 10 Comments »

The Unboxing

Wednesday, July 23rd, 2008

Welcome to the blog of the team that brought you the webbook.

My name is Alan Bell and I will be showing you lots of tips on how to get the most from your webbook. Feel free to post questions on any webbook related subject (and feel free to provide responses to other people’s questions) and I will try to help as much as I can. Please bear in mind that this isn’t an official support channel, but I might just be able to get you an answer to your question direct from the mouth of the horse.

In the box

So having introduced myself, lets introduce the webbook.

The webbook is a mini laptop, or UMPC (Ultra Mobile Personal Computer) or SCC (Small Cheap Computer) or 4P computing solution (Power Performance Portability Price) depending on who you ask. For simplicity lets just call it webbook here.

It has a nice bright screen running at a decent resolution, 1024×600. The main processor is a VIA C7 running at 1.6Ghz, and it has 512MB of RAM. The hard drive is a very spacious 80GB drive, so whilst you won’t get the blisteringly quick boot time that a solid state drive gives you there will be plenty of room for all your stuff. Sometimes size does matter.

The graphics card is quite good, but right now the drivers for it are still maturing so some of the wizziest graphical effects can’t be used yet, it is however, perfectly functional. If you are a true geek you probably want to see the output of lspci and cat /proc/cpuinfo. If you are remotely normal you can skip the last sentence altogether.

In my mind the very best feature of this little laptop is the operating system. It doesn’t run Windows (well there were a few sold online with Windows XP, but I don’t know much about those ones) it runs Ubuntu Linux. If you are a long time Windows user some bits of the system will seem a little unfamiliar, but others things will be right where you expect them to be and in no time at all you will be wondering how you ever survived without it! Linux is very different from Windows in many ways. There are technical differences, user interface differences and even legal and philosophical differences. The overriding objective is to give you, the user, more Freedom to do whatever you want with the software, and I will talk more about that later. For now, plug in your battery and lets get started with the webbook.

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Posted in Introductions | 22 Comments »