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.
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.
Tags: hardware, start here
Hi! Great to see an official unofficial blog for the Webbook.
Backpack PCs (or netbooks, or UMPCs, or whatever..) are definitely this year’s must-have tech gadget, and I’ve been planning to get myself a ‘buntu-box’ (ie, a portable box for Ubuntu) for some time. The only problem is that every time I pause for breath, it seems a new contender comes out!
I’m still not sure what I will eventually purchase, but the fact that this blog exists is certainly a point in the Webbook’s favour, as is knowing that Ubuntu is actually officially supported. That CPW make it affordable with a monthly mobile broadband contract is also good news (meaning I don’t have to reach for my credit card), although the CPW website doesn’t do us any favours ( = potentially losing sales) by only mentioning the Windows XP model: I was therefore confused, but also delighted, when I saw a Webbook in-store and saw that it was running Ubuntu.
Does the Webbook run the standard Ubuntu release, meaning that future OS upgrades should be easy, or have you had to customise Ubuntu especially?
I can’t guarantee a purchase just yet as I’m still making up my mind, but good luck with the Webbook and thanks also for adding to the ever-growing range of Linux-powered computers!
Hi David, I am hoping that very soon the CPW home page will be selling the Ubuntu model. It is a pretty standard Ubuntu release. Hardy Heron. We just added a few bits, like fixing the xorg.conf to work with the 1024×600 screen and adding the dialer client for the mobile broadband dongle. It really is a great little laptop for Ubuntu.
Where can i get XP drivers for the wireless card please
@ Steven, this question has come up a few times and I can see a few people googling for the XP drivers and turning up here. Personally I know nothing about them, and I have not tried them. If you really want to downgrade your webbook to a legal copy of XP then you can apparently get the drivers from here http://www.elonex.co.uk/support/products/webbookxp.shtm For me right now that gives me a zero byte ZIP file. I will tell someone that is broken next week. If you want to put Ubuntu back on the webbook, then I can help you with that.
Alan.
I work for CPW Alan, trying to get a copy of XP onto my boss’s webbook, ive tried the elonex site, all i need is the make and model of the wireless module and ill do the rest
Hi Alan,
Just wondering in relation to graphics drivers….do I take it then that Compiz effects are out of the question for now?
Hi Phil
Compiz is temporarily out of the question. I have it running on my webbook and it looks fantastic. We just need to get the patched VIA drivers correctly packaged so we can put them in the repos.
Hi,
I’ve had my WebBook just over a week, and I’m busy exploring it. I reckon I’m likely to want to rollback at some point, so where can I find documentation on how to do a complete Ubuntu restore? It looks like I need Hardy Heron, plus ‘wader-gtk’, and you mention that xorg.conf needs tailoring. Are all the required drivers in there already?
Also, I’ve seen mention of using GSynaptics to tailor the touchpad preferences, but the devices seem to be Wacom! After installing anyway it says I need to set SHMConfig in xorg.conf, but there’s no Synaptic pad mentioned in there! in the list of input devices, is the touchpad ‘pad’? and what’s the ‘eraser’???
That’s a lot of questions, but I hope you’ll answer them
Jim
I will answer all the questions I know the answer to!
The touchpad issue is odd. I had it working on a prototype webbook (basically what should have been a regular webbook in a different case) and then when I copied the xorg.conf to one of the current webbooks it didn’t work. I did see that comment about someone using gsynaptics though. If anyone gets the configuration right so you can turn off the tap-click etc then I would be interested to hear how you did it.
Basically to install Ubuntu (or any other modern Linux such as Kubuntu/Fedora etc.) take a backup of /etc/X11/xorg.conf then install your linux. It will probably end up at a black screen. You can then press ctrl+alt+F1 to switch to a console, mount a USB stick with your xorg.conf and restore it. Press ctrl+alt+F7 to get back to the graphical console and press ctrl+alt+backspace to restart the X server. Needless to say, if that meant nothing to you then don’t do it
Wader can be installed by adding
deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/wader/ubuntu hardy main
to the list of third party software in the software sources application.
Thanks for that. I’ll backup your suggested files and try an 8.04 install sometime. Good luck with the chickens too
I’ve hit a problem already
I wanted to install the full virtualbox program from Sun, so I could use the USB ports, but it wouldn’t install with the OSE version there. Uninstall seemed ok, but it still wouldn’t install the new .deb file, reporting a broken pipe. Re-installing the OSE version leaves it failing to start and reporting ‘VirtualBox kernel driver not installed’
What’s non-standard there?
A minor point: In virtualbox, the ‘Rt Ctrl’ key escape function is actually mapped to the Left-ctrl key.
yes, that is really weird about the control keys being the wrong way round. I have reported this to the hardware people. Luckily I can’t think of anything else apart from Virtualbox that distinguishes between left and right control. There is nothing non-standard about the Virtualbox install. We just installed it from the Ubuntu repositories. I will have a crack at installing the SUN binary version soonish and let you know how I get on.
The Sun binary installed eventually thanks
I found this reference: http://www.virtualbox.org/ticket/1664 and then found there were still some traces from the OSE version, Once all that was cleared off it installed without a problem.
Cheers,
Can i start using my webbook instantly or do i need to wait for it to charge for 8 hours? Will it not charge while i use it?
Thanks
I think the battery is delivered without much charge, but plug in the power and get using it. Probably best to leave it plugged in and make the first charge a full charge, but I wouldn’t have the patience to wait before I started playing!
Is it possible to upgrade the RAM in the webbook? I bought one today and it’s currently on charge and thought I’d do some surfing about it, bit back to front I know but I use Ubuntu on my normal pc so thought I’d go for (roughly) what I know.
I’ve read a few reviews saying the wifi is a bit hit and miss and that you have to be very close to router, is this the case?
Thanks for blog
G
You can upgrade the ram to 1GB, but it doesn’t really need it. Wifi is fine and I have heard people say it has good range. I always find with my rather rubbish router that things have to be fairly close to it to connect (5M or so), but once connected you can take them further away. I don’t know how normal this is.
Hi
Just wondering about cd drives can you get add ons????
yes, any USB CD or DVD drive should work fine. Cost about 40 quid.
Hey, I have a little question about the webbook. I’m Portuguese and I bought my webbook at a store like carephone warehouse. It is called “PhoneHouse”.
It comes with Windows XP, and I bought it about 1 month ago. My quaestion is: Does the Webbook has a CD drive?
I am going to recieve my Webbook at Christmas, so I didn’t opened it yet..
I just saw there a few CD’s, and I don’t know if it has a CD drive, because a friend of mine told me that it doesn’t.
Please help me.
no, it doesn’t have a CD drive, but can use a USB drive. They are quite cheap now and you can get USB powered drives so you don’t need an external power for them.
Hello, I’ve got a couple of questions:
Firstly, is there a list of hardware components for the Webbook (not just the processor, RAM and chipset/IGP, I mean like the audio chipset, networking chipset, wifi adapter and such) around at all?
So far all I’ve gathered is:
Via C7-M@1.6GHz, supports SSE, SSE2, SSE3, MMX.
Via CX700-M chipset with VIA Chrome9 IGP.
Some mysterious Intel networking chipset.
512MB DDR2.
Secondly, the VIA C7-M/CX700 obviously isn’t going to be adequate forever, hell it’s a little stretched as it is. Even running a youtube video at full screen resolution isn’t exactly ideal at this time. What I want to ask is, will there be an option to upgrade at some point? Or will there be a successor to the Webbook? I ask because VIA has recently released their Nano range of processors and will soon be launching their Nano dual core processors, and since the chips are supposedly pin-for-pin (or solderball-for-solderball as the case may be) compatible whilst being about twice the speed at the same clockspeed. It might make sense to have that as an option for those who like the system as a whole but would like a bit more power from it.
not sure about any upgrade option for the processor, however I did get to play with an Intel Atom based webbook last week. It works really well and the i945 graphics chipset has open source drivers that work properly so Compiz is a deployable option on that. For the Intel Atom in theory we should use Ubuntu compiled for the lpia architecture, but that seems to create more headaches than it is worth, we need to do some structured battery and performance testing, but I think the standard i386 installation is the way forward on that. I am distinctly unimpressed by the level of cooperation from VIA in terms of providing working deployable drivers. I don’t have any deep technical list of the hardware, but try cat /proc/cpuinfo, lsusb, lspci and sudo lshw from a terminal window to get quite a lot of info. If there is any other specific item you want let me know and I will pass on the question.