run to the breakers

So I got two puppies this summer, and ever since they’ve been engaged in a slow campaign of destroying everything I own. A little over a month ago they broke BOTH of my laptops by knocking them off end tables.  The HP has a busted hinge (which I guess isn’t all their fault, since apparently the hinges on that model are balls to begin with) and the mac… well, the mac was a nightmare.  It actually wouldn’t turn on, and I had to take the whole thing apart to get it working again.  It does, but it’s really touchy and the case is bent.

So with nanowrimo imminent and a pressing need to have an actual working laptop, I hit the streets and started doing some research.

Okay, so I hit google products and the internet in general, not the actual streets, but whatever.

What immediately jumped out at me were the many new ultra-portable “netbooks” that are starting to come out in force these days. Considering the fact that my puppies are likely to knock over any new laptop I get, the idea of a tiny, featherweight device with a SSD was suddenly VERY appealing to me.

The other thing that appealed to me was that a lot of them have a linux option, and while I haven’t really had any huge problems with Vista, I was really interested in the idea of trying out some flavor of Linux.

I wanted a particular model of the Acer Aspire One, but the exact one I wanted wasn’t available anywhere.  So I settled for my second choice - the Asus eeepc 900.  It doesn’t have as much storage as I wanted, the processor I wanted (pentium-m as opposed to the new atom), the battery I wanted (3 cell as opposed to 6 cell). But the differences are so small that I figured I’d go for this one and upgrade later, after they’ve had a chance to get even bigger SSDs, faster processors, bigger batteries, etc.

As it is, the Asus is a very solid little machine and I’m enjoying it a lot. It was a HUGE pain to kill the Xandros operating system it shipped with and actually get Ubuntu working right (with sound, wifi, mic, webcam, osd, etc all working properly.)  But in the process I’ve learned a lot about how linux works. I hadn’t used a terminal for ANYTHING in almost ten years, so it was a huge learning curve for me, but I managed to figure it out and I’ve now got the thing working perfectly.

my busted old hp had a tiny baby

Of course, today I got home from the store and discovered one of my puppies had chewed through the power cord of the new netbook to the point where it was shorting out.

Baby steps, I guess.  Baby steps.