[CoLoCo] system76 Starling report
Collins Richey
My Xmas present to myself is a Starling netbook from System76. I've
never been a great fan of laptops, but this one is light and portable
enough to suit my tastes. A few notes if you get one. I've always been
a fan of supporting local entrepeneurs, and System76 is top notch.
1. The Starling comes with netbook remix installed. This is not my
favorite, but it does work well including on wireless. Network Manager
has improved since I used it a few years back!
2. So, I decided to accept the offer to upgrade to 9.10 (on wireless).
Three hours later after no errors, I rebooted the system, and, of
course, wireless was dead.l
3. This is not a System76 problem. The good folks at Ubuntu released
9.10 without bothering? being able? to test with a Realtek rtl8187b
chip. Carl and company posted a warning about this, but of course I
didn't read it before upgrading. I'm not sure whether Ubuntu is doing
anything, but System76 is working on a fix. Meanwhile, a helpful user
reported a workaround using ndiswrapper that works for some users ( me
included).
4. So now everything is just ducky, well ... almost. I've never been
fond of Gnome, and I'm not impressed with the current offering. Gnome
ducks, or a rhyming word. Not that it doesn't work, I'm just not fond
of it.
5. Not being a long-time laptop user, I've got a lot of questions.
I'll start a new thread on CLUE, and those who are interested can
follow along.
You Ubuntu folks need to support System76.
--
Collins Richey
If you fill your heart with regrets of yesterday and the worries
of tomorrow, you have no today to be thankful for.
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Andrew Barney
Collins Richey
> There is supposedly a Kubuntu Netbook Edition coming out soon... maybe you
> should look into that.
>
Thanks for the suggestion.
Everything was going quite well when I decided to install
kubuntu-desktop, choosing kdm as the login manager. When I rebooted,
this screwed uo video. I tried to boot using the recovery option, but
this failed to. Finally I reverted to the prior kernel recovery
option, edited the menu.lst and removed all the quiet, etc. options
and was able to come up in kde. The first time, the touchpad was not
working, but this disappeared after a second reboot.
I don't like the way Ubuntu has screwed with the kde setup, so next
I'm going to put sidux on the netbook.
If worst comes to worst, I can always restore the remix.
Collins Richey
is not an in depth Linux guru is here:
http://janehadley.net/Starling_Review/starling_review.html
Michael Hirsch
> should look into that.
As a KDE guy I tried exactly this on my Asus Aspire netbook. It was
pretty bad. Granted, no one claims that it is ready for production,
but I don't think the model is going to work. I don't like GNOME
much, but the netbook remix is quite suitable for the intended use.
It uses big icons and presents the important applications for easy
access. The KDE version had lots of little icons and the ease of
navigation just wasn't there.
Michael
Richard Guenther
As a KDE guy I tried exactly this on my Asus Aspire netbook. It was
pretty bad. Granted, no one claims that it is ready for production,
but I don't think the model is going to work. I don't like GNOME
much, but the netbook remix is quite suitable for the intended use.
Richard
Collins Richey
problems with Intel video, and this one is no exception. After
converting to the kubuntu-desktop environment, I had to disable the
graphics mode initial booting stuff (total lockup with unreadable
screen). Even now the occasional boot results in a garbled screen, but
most of the time it comes up and works. As soon as I get around to it,
I'll put sidux on the unit and see about the results.
The biggest problem now is the overly sensitive touchpad. I need to
find my portable mouse and turn off the touchpad. It's really tiresome
when the cursor wanders away while you're typing.