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.

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.