LinLog

So today I took the new laptop (dubbed Epyon, in keeping with my Gundam Wing naming scheme) with me to Barnes & Noble to test out how it works out in the wild. The results so far are mixed, but I can't complain too much.

By way of exposition, I now have almost all the basics set up on the laptop. KDE 3.5 is installed, along with my basic "productivity" applications and multimedia. I've got basics like Opera, JEdit, and KDissert, the akode-mpeg stuff for MP3s, and the Xine engine for Kaffeine. I've cloned the configuration files I really care about along with my ~/bin directory. I'm currently copying the data files I want to work with to the laptop hard drive before I leave. There's probably a better way to do that (maybe something with rsync), but I haven't worked that out yet.

The good news is that taking Epyon on the road turned out to be pretty easy. Suspending to disk - which I'd never even seen before - worked perfectly. The only real problem is that when changing to the DHCP network settings profile I created in KControl (because I use static IPs in my LAN), it didn't automatically request a new IP address. Easily fixed, but annoying.

There's bad news too, though. Although the good news about the bad news (if that makes any sense), is that you can't blame any of it on Linux. The first downer is that the battery only has about 2 hours worth of life in it. And since I left it unplugged last night, apparently I didn't quite start at full charge. But that's Dell's fault. The other bad news is that Barnes & Noble uses AT&T for their WiFi service, meaning it's not free. They give you several options to pay, but I wasn't crazy about any of them. The first was a monthly fee of $19.95 for (presumably) unlimited access to their WiFi network. Not too bad, but I don't plan to use it that much. The second option was pre-paid cards, with the cheapest being $25 for three connections (presumably with no time limit), which seems a bit steep to me. Last, which is probably what I'd go for, was a one-time fee of $3.95 plus tax for a two-hour block. Given that I don't plan to be using the laptop on their network for long periods of time, this didn't seem too horrifying. Still not great, though.

The last thing that I need to comment on is the inherent suckiness of laptop keyboards. These things are obviously not built for heavy typing. I've seen worse (like Panasonic ToughBooks where the keys are rubber and you literally have to use the two-finger method), but it's still not optimal. Plus I find myself routinely screwing up my typing by brushing my thumb on the touch pad. This is really annoying. Of course, I supposed the touch pad is better than a track point, but I would have preferred a trackball. Then again, for $500, I guess I can't be too picky.