Happy Lappy Dance

Sorry, it's nothing to do with real lap dances so most of you will be performing an about turn right about...... now.

I dusted the cobwebs off my wallet and sprung 600 goodies on a laptop. It's a nice little (well, actually, rather large) Acer Aspire 5612. It's got a 15.4" screen, 100G HD, wireless and wired networking, 1G of RAM, Core Duo 2300E processor, built in webcam and other little bits 'n' bobs.

I had a little fun getting rid of the data partition and resizing the main partition put on by acer so I could stuff linux on the thing. The main issue was after partitioning Acers eRecovery software went nuts when it couldn't find the data partition and decided to max out the CPU.

To do the partitioning I used the gparted LiveCD which is without doubt f'ing awesome. Very straight forward, very reliable and it got the job done nicely.

I had linux on it within a couple of hours, Ubuntu to be specific, which is also f'ing awesome. I've been using linux for about 12 years now and know my way around but it's nice to not bother sometimes. My biggest pain was getting the wireless working with WPA using NetworkManager. NetworkManager just refused to allow me to use WPA so I dumped it and did it myself. Now, wireless works great with the ipw3945 driver and wpa_supplicant, I just wish my wireless access point was as reliable. Wireless sucks when the AP freezes and has to be power cycled.

The only thing I haven't got working under linux is the webcam which isn't that much of a loss, but it just looks like there isn't a driver for it yet so I'll just wait.

It's a nice machine, it's quite fast and very comfortable to use and certainly worth the money. The only things I have to do is get an extra cable for the power supply so I can plug it into US sockets and get a nice bag for it then I'll be all set to take it on my business trip. Oh, and I have to get apache2, tomcat and jboss going, but that's too much like work so I'll leave that along for a while ;)