I was very disappointed with the Acer netbooks. They felt cheap and weren’t very OS X friendly. I decided to shell out the extra cash and try a Lenovo (former IBM) netbook. The difference is huge. You can see and feel the quality all over. It feels more durable and the keyboard on it is great. It’s definitely worth paying a premium price for a better product. Anyways, here is OS X 10.5.8 running on the Ideapad S12.
It’s a nice portable Internet device but not for my fingers. The keyboard just feels too cramped and the enter key has a funny shape. I had to return it. I will probably get the 11.6″ model with a full size keyboard because I really liked it for surfing and chatting. The 11.6″ model also has a higher resolution screen which is a big plus. The battery life is awesome. Good value for the money.
I picked this up on eBay for a good price. It’s used but in mint condition. I plan to use it as a development/experimentation platform. Should be lots of fun!
I found this around the house. I think it’s one of my brother’s friends. I am suspecting a dead hard drive. With the hard drive in it powers on then screen goes blank. When I take the hard drive out it tells me to check the HDD connection. So I ordered a replacement hard drive and a power supply on eBay. Hopefully I can make it work and install Rockbox on it. At the least it will be useful as an external drive.
The website is up and running on the PII celery laptop. I am slowly transferring the content from the old site to the new one. It may take a few days. Here’s a screenshot of a VNC session:
Wow, this was a trip. It took me a good day to get it up and running. The first major issue was that the laptop had a power on password. I did some research and found out that you can bypass that on some Toshiba laptops with a special parallel port dongle. So the below took care of the password.
Another issue was that it was missing a hard drive. Luckily I had an old 40GB laptop hard drive lying around. It took some time to install it, but it was recognized properly.
Yet another issue was that the built in screen didn’t appear to work. Connecting an external screen solved that problem. I installed VNC on it so that I can control it from my desktop. The laptop will serve my website and it will be in the basement near the router. It has an NE2000 compatible PCMCIA network adaper which was recognized by Xubuntu.
The newest version of Xubuntu installed properly, however it refused to boot. It froze half way through the boot process. So I tried an older version, namely 8.04. That one seemed to work just fine.
Oh yeah, it was also missing the power adapter so I had to get one on Ebay for around $20. It’s up and running now and I just need to configure NFS so I can upload my website to it. Below are some more pictures and a video of it in action.
I haven’t changed my glasses in about 4 years. I was having trouble reading street signs when driving. So I booked an appointment at Wal-Mart to see an optometrist. I got the glasses a few days ago. You can see the pic below.
