Ubuntu on the Eeee battery life

Well the battery monitor app either needs housetraining or something as it bounces up and down more than I do 🙂

10 mins ago it told me I had 6 mins remaining and now it has crept back up again 🙂

Currently :

tigger@eee:~$ uptime
12:13:00 up 2:39, 2 users, load average: 0.66, 0.50, 0.47

This is sitting in the pub (tea and orange juice sadly) waiting for my car to be fixed. So well over two and a half hours of wibbling and wifi on a low backlight and it has not run out yet. Battery monitor still says 10% remaining but now thinks that will only last 5 mins!

Something is amiss here 🙂

edit : right in the end it lasted about 3 hours or so but then died with no warning just a sudden power off.   It had warned me I was low on power earlier but not right at the end.  It might be that it has not had time to profile the power use yet but although it is a bit flakey it seems to be slightly more useful than the Xandros one which I never did trust.

Lastminute copyrighting a colour?

I am not a lawyer but I would have thought that you could only trademark something in reference to a particular aspect of your business. The lastminute website though currently reads :

lastminute.com”, “lastminute” and the colour (block of magenta) colour are all trademarks owned by Last Minute Network Limited and/or its group companies.

Erm wtf. I know the Easy Group will hunt you down if you use easysomething and use a predominantly orange colour scheme but I don’t think even they actually claim they have trademarked orange itself.

If this sort of nonsense carries with other companies some of my more colourful trousers may have so many copyright notices on that they will start resembling a F1 car….

Silly Ibex wont start X

Meh my Eeee had just decided that it did not want to start X due to an internal error. A most odd occurrence and after a bit of digging I found the culprit, a read only file system.

It seems my disk had a couple of errors on it and thus had been mounted read only. A quick sudo up to root privs and brisk fsck later, reboot and done 🙂

One of those things I suppose…

Intrepid Ibex on the Eee701

Despite being quite happy with the default install of Xandros on my Eee701 that I have been using for nearly a year now I have taken the plunge and installed Ubuntu on it, partly to standardise (all my other desktop role machines are running Ubuntu) and also because there were a few features I missed from Ubuntu/Gnome when using Xandros, mainly network manager and decent battery status reporting 🙂

Ubuntu on the Eee has been around for ages but there seemed to be a whole raft of little spin off projects dedicated to it. After much consideration I decided to go with the stock image and the patches from http://eee.ricey.co.uk 🙂

Followed the install notes and it all worked flawlessly which was a relief as earlier versions of Ubuntu needed a bit of tweaking to get running, but I am pleased to report it is all running fine 🙂

Boot up time is not quite as fast as the stunning boot up time of xandros but it seems ok and I might have a go at tweaking it a bit to shave a few seconds off the boot time 🙂