systems

Netbooks Development Blog

Just some notes about what we are working on.
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Debian 'Lenny' Installation on Medion Akoya E1210 aka MSI Wind

Tkilla installed Debian on the Medion Akoya, which is similar to the upcoming MSI Wind Netbook.
There is a bug in the r8169 network card module of the Kernel 2.6.24, which is used in the latest Testing -'Lenny'- Installers. Sid should be working, if it uses a newer kernel,
but someone posted a debian bug report on the same morning when we sorted this out and got a solution before evening, so we tried that way and it worked.:

2008-07-09

Debian and Tabstarter on the OLPC X0

wow, the X0 OLPC looks really nice: a ruggedized mini-notebook.

the sugar desktop looks also very interesting, but at first glance it is too far a away from usual, western computers to be intuitive for a european.
the home desktop screen is very inspiring, but we wonder: why is it all gray?
does that safe energy?

it does not offer many programs and those which are installed take long to start.
they are mostly educational software and no games, except a memory.

we have a lot of ideas for this machine.. our tabstarter is already running on a Debian System.

there is a debian project that works on OLPC support and they released an installer.
its relativly easy to get X up and running, but it is slooow.
our tabstarter interface in Python GTK is working and we are testing out some programs now..

stay tuned..

Flash Video Stream Player starting, if Plugin installed..

2008-05-12

Pinguincafe @LinuxTag, Berlin

We prepared 10 Asus eeePCs for the Childcorner on Linuxtag fair in Berlin.
The resonance on the fair was very good and people of all ages were interested in the hard- and software.

the nerds on linuxtag specially liked the 3D Desktop Effects likethe rotating Desktop Cube and the wobbling windows, but also geeentooimpressed people, who know how much work it is to compile the wholesystem with all extra-software included.

The speed of application starts and running games on gEEEntoo was impressive.

Children liked Planet Pinguin Racer most: We had a wireless Joystick and 2 Wiimotes to control the Games.

Smaller Childs were sent to tuxpaint, that was hacked by Bognetti to include grafics and Sounds of a social project: plantanmptree.org in combination with motives of our City Game 'Meta Friedrichshain' - 10247.net

Therewere also many educational games like gcompriss, knowthekeyboard andour 10247.net city game, including a memory and a trash-sorting game,specially created for children.

If we were Asus Premium Partners- and if the Linuxtag was not the _Linux_Tag, but a commercial fair ;-)we could have sold many of them, including our installer package:

Afew machines ran on the original Asus, enhanced by our TabStarter v0.1to include the extra installed games, that had no icon in the originaleasy mode.

2 machines bootet gentoo from SD card and the other 5 were running our preferred, optimized debian lenny system ::

Westarted by installing more games and educational software into theoriginal Asus Xandros, Debian 'etch' , stable system, but therepositories of that system are limited and old, so there was not muchto install.
We found many distibutions on the net, but all were just starting (march 2008) and dod not support all of the hardware.

Sowe followed all Howtos on eeeuser and later debian-eee-wiki, but therewas no easy icon starter interface and no easy configuration interfaces.

Because we liked the EasyMode of Asus a lot, we started with something similar:
Coded in Python GTK, we hacked a first version within a day and Bognetti included her grafics and created some icons then.

2008-04-30