Monthly Archives: March 2010

A new netbook: The HP5102

The ETH Neptun offers discounted laptops every six months, and having to travel quite a bit this year, I ordered the Hewlett Packard 5102. This morning, I recveived it and could not resist unpacking it and starting it up.

The hardware is nice: It looks slick, is pretty lightweight and feel very robust. The keyboard is a very nice one, nearly standard sized and not flimsy at all (me avoids looking at my Acer eee701 here!). The touchpad operates quit nicely too. I am happy to have a hardware switch that seems to turn the Wifi off. There are 2 extra buttons with lights on, one starting Firefox and one starting Evolution. If those lights can be easily turned on/off, I can see some uses for them (like email notification, or online presence of my wife :-)).

  • Booting whatever came by default, the Suse Logo appeared, for 5-10 minutes during which nothing happened. If I were clueless this would be giving me a bad Linux impression.
  • The OpenSuse installer appeared, in which I needed to configure things like my keyboard layout. Hey, HP knows which laptop they sent me, so why do I have to select my keyboard layout! But that is a minor issue. Generally the intallation went smoothly, but there were some weird questions and checkboxes, that really put me off. "Change my hostname with DHCP": does that mean, receiving a host name byy DHCP, or setting my hostname at the DHCP server? I don’t know. Or "save hostname to /etc/hosts": would that save my entered hostname as 127.0.0.1 in /etc/hosts? I don’t know. As a clueless user I would easily have given up here already.
  • I also did not like that I had to click myself through 2 EULA dialog windows that I did not bother to read. I thought in open source we are beyond imposing EULA dialog windows?
  • The installer screen is somehow scaled to fit on that netbooks resolution, the whole screen looks very unsharp. If I did not know that Linux can give me nice resolutions and graphics, I would probably be stopping my "linux" experience here and put in a Windows Vista usb stick… At least, some minus points for user experience here.
  • Sometimes an expert option button appears offering me stuff like the encryption method for my stored passwords. Encryption method for my passwords? What the heck? Why would I ever want to chose an encryption method (even at expert level)? Just select the most secure one and be done with it. And yes, I am spoiled by Ubuntu.
  • Boot times are 35 seconds from hitting the grub menu entry to the user authentication dialog and from entering my password, 15 seconds to the build up gnome screen.
  • I do like the dialog that pops up when I hit the "Computer" button , although I know that I will immediately uninstall 3 out of 6 applications that are presented in the application wuick selector thingie. (Evolution, banshee, and f-spot if you are curious)
Enterprise Suse 11 Start app dialogSchlitten hoch

©Spaeth, licensed: CC-BY-2.0

  • The boot process looks a bit 1995’ish, with lots of scary white-on-black text scrolling over my screen so fast, I cannot read it anyway.

I have not actually used it yet, so I can’t say anything about that, but I expect some pretty standard Gnome install. I will keep OpenSuse on it for a while, but it looks like I might switch to Debian or a Debian-derivative at some time.

Grillieren im Wald

Dieses Wochenende hat uns noch mal ein Schneegestöber überrascht, obwohl wir uns schon so auf den Frühling eingestellt hatten. Oliver hat sich gefreut, aber er freut sich über jedes Wetter bei dem wir rausgehen… Haben wir also den Schneeanzug wieder ausgemottet.

Picknick im Wald

"Momo-salat und Wust! Danke Almut!"

Grillen im Wald

"mmh, Wuust!"

Letztes Wochenende war es schon so frühlingshaft warm, dass wir in den Wald gegangen sind und gegrillt haben. Almut hatte eine Superidee und alles schon hervorragend vorbereitet. Oliver war gar nicht überrascht, dass wir eine Decke im Wald ausbreiteten und dort assen. Er nimmt so etwas ziemlich gelassen hin. Allerdings fand er es bemerkenswert, dass wir einen "Ofen" im Wald angemacht haben. Es ist schön, in so kurzer Zeit draussen "im Grünen" sein zu können.

Am Besten war neben den Riesenmengen "Wust" allerdings, dass direkt nebenan ein Bach war in dem er mit seinen Gummistiefeln herumplanschen konnte. Gummistiefel sind praktisch, denn wenn einmal Wasser drin ist, wird der Kinderwagen auf der Heimfahrt nicht nass :-).

Feuer im Wald

"Feuerteufel am Werk"