My Cloudbook Experience
I have had my Cloudbook for about 2 weeks now, and it has worked out pretty well. gOS was quickly replaced with Ubuntu and Windows XP, because frankly the gOS sucks big time. I haven’t finished tweaking it, and hardware mods have been put on hold for the time being as all the equipment is still being shipped to Sweden.
The verdict? So far Windows XP out-performs Ubuntu, mainly because I haven’t got Ubuntu to use the VIA graphics drivers and is still using the non-optimized VESA graphics drivers. In effect that means that video playback works in Windows XP, but not in Ubuntu. If you got a working xorg.conf for Cloudbook using the VIA drivers please send it to me (and if you can make it run at 1000×600 I would be very happy).
The Windows XP installation has been tweaked according to Black Viper’s OS Guides, except that I still have Windows Wireless Zero Config running (because I connect to a lot of different public hotspots).
The Ubuntu 8.04 installation didn’t go without problems. It seems that at least the Desktop (live) installation CD has problem detecting and loading the drivers for the IDE controller and generating a working xorg.conf file. After manually loading the IDE drivers and generating a xorg.conf that works the installation is pretty painless. The Ubuntu installation on the Cloudbook needs to be documented more in-depth.
I used a lot of the EEE optimizing tips for the Ubuntu installation, and the guides works out surprisingly well. EEE users wants to minimize writes to the SSD because it will wear out, while as a Cloudbook user I want to minimize disk access because frankly, the 30Gb hard drive in the Cloudbook won’t be setting any speed records. I also used the output and tips from PowerTOP a lot to optimize system resource usage.
Currently I have partitioned my drive as follows:
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7 Gb Windows XP
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7 Gb Ubuntu
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7 Gb gOS (to compare it to the standard Ubuntu installation)
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1 Gb Swap (used by both Linux installations)
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6 Gb Data partition, to transfer files between the different systems
I will soon remove the gOS partition and make the Data partition larger (using the gparted software). I have a long way to go with my Cloudbook project, but so far it is looking good.
