Yeah, dream about it.

Yeah, dream about it: modem ? not working; as soon as I was in the office in Battambang - the main office of the NGO "Phare Ponleu Sepak" I am working for, I tried to get my mails: The thing connects, and disconnects automatically as soon as I try to use it (firing Opera or clicking "Fetch Mail" for instance); Good.

Enlightenment is definitely nice, but beware of what they call Epplets: if you start one, you'll be in a mess if you do not want it to be starting again at next boot. Destroying it just makes 2 samples to reappear the next time. And so on, and so on... Killing indeed. At some point, I ended up with 16 occurrences of "Toolbox", 10 of "Emixer" and so on.

Now, my SuSE93 box is slowly decaying. The automatic upgrade still works, so I guess overall stability is not threatened, but I cannot fill in repositories for extra software download anymore: the form window is dead, with the empty fields unreachable in a non-stretchable window.

Lately, with the Ubuntu laptop & its brand new 6.06LTS release, I (and many others) experienced troubles with the Security repositories as well, with Synaptics, the software in charge of keeping the system up to date & to install and remove programs unable to download list of files from them.

That's not serious, and I was lucky I did not fall into the wrong X11 update they released some weeks ago: it was faulty, and killed the desktop system of many users, leaving them with a black terminal instead. If, like me, you don't know nothing about "sudo apt-get" & the like, you are dead.

Bad times, great times. Shitty times this time.

Tech Update

Some more around recent exhilari-wathever times with the Laptop: 
Got Dual Screen solved,
 it look I now have a Modem working for when on the move, 
and I found a fantastic Window Manager to add up to this
 attractive piece of technology;

Check out www.enlightenment.org for more.

A Modem, Better and quicker looks, and the ability to use the tiny thing for presentations with an external videoprojector, it's coming ladies & gentlemen.

Modem thanks to www.linuxant.com

The dual screen thing is very impressive -and quite a hack: Originally, the Vaio PGN-T17GS is not ment to do more than replicating your screen on the external output, which is problematic given the wxga (widescreen) nature of its display.

Out of factory, locked on XP, you cannot display different things on the two outputs. Now, thanks to Xinerama, ubuntu forums and a german guy from HK called Wieman01, I successfully enabled Dual Head & fool around with a screen def of  1280x1792, they are stacked/configured one above the other & allow me to use the small laptop LCD as a Dashboard for the things happening on top. With the added glamour featured by Enlightenment, it's cheer Class. Slowly appearing windows, transparency, minimalism (lack of menubar/systemtray/icons) & just plain elegant design makes this trully appealing. Techno-aristocratic, yes indeed, but so good.

cheerio, life's good today.

If you look at the Deskshot below, you'll see my usual stolen-punk-baby-blue, with not much than the display of a transparent "iconBox" where minimized softs go, the 2x2 virtual desktops in 1280x768 mode, and a row of tiny "epplets" featuring a timestamp, a command-line fied, music and battery + a toolbox of buttons to access the most usefull softwares.

Yes, I added a little Logo: it;s the official Tux truncated by a line in a color taken from the baby's sunglasses on top of the VAIO sign. Nice huh?

Thanks to The Gimp for Graphic work on this.

Sleek. Hard to understand, pain in the ass to set up, crashed twice in three days, totally counter-intuitive, and

just plain gorgeous.

That's the Laptop DeskShot !

 
That' it ! The Sub-Vaio running ubuntu with the Enlightenment Window Manager. Great, sleek looks, good speed. love it.