Edit: e oggi mi e’ arrivata questa da HelloTux!

Altro capitolo nella saga della proprieta’ dei propri dati.
Ne ho scritto qui e qui e ora, forse, forse, ci siamo.

Quattro ragazzi dell’Universita’ di New York, dopo aver ascoltato un discorso di Eben Moglen su liberta’, sicurezza e riservatezza online, si mettono insieme e decidono di creare Diaspora.

we’re going to build a great lightweight decentralized social networking framework and release it as AGPL software

Per fare questo, hanno usato kickstarter, una piattaforma per finanziare progetti.
Hanno trovato sufficienti sottoscrittori (soldi) e tra 15 giorni inizieranno la fase implementativa che dovrebbe concludersi a settembre 2010 con la prima versione del software.

Diaspora aims to be a distributed network, where totally separate computers connect to each other directly, will let us connect without surrendering our privacy. We call these computers ‘seeds’. A seed is owned by you, hosted by you, or on a rented server. Once it has been set up, the seed will aggregate all of your information: your facebook profile, tweets, anything. We are designing an easily extendable plugin framework for Diaspora, so that whenever newfangled content gets invented, it will be automagically integrated into every seed.

Un seed, quindi, si installa sul proprio spazio e si collega agli altri seed e ai servizi che si usano (Flickr, Facebook, ecc.) in modo da avere sempre il proprio flusso di informazioni nel proprio spazio.
Ma la cosa piu’ bella e che personalmente aspetto da tempo e’ questa.

Eventually, today’s hubs could be almost entirely replaced by a decentralized network of truly personal websites.

Bye bye Flickr, Facebook e gli altri accentratori della nostra presenza in rete.
Riprendiamo il controllo della nostra identita’.

This post is the description of my adventures during and after the buying of the laptop. Maybe my findings could be useful to someone else.

For quite some month I was looking online to identify a new laptop to buy. One day I went to a shop and end up with the choice between a Lenovo X301 and a Sony Vaio Z.
I was more impressed by the Sony, so I bought the super new Vaio VPCZ11Z9E.

I wanted to buy it without the Redmond closed source operating system but unfortunately there was nothing to do with the shop guy. They sell it with that OS. Period.

One more requirement for me was to have OS, manuals, keyboard and everything else in English. Although at the moment I’m based in Germany, I’m not German.

Unfortunately it turned out that even the software to initialize my laptop (OS installation, drivers, etc.) is in German (of course) but thanks to their kindness they provided me an “English” version of the OS. I double quoted English because they told me that they have an utility that simply translate the German text to English (?). Unfortunately what comes before the OS loading is still in German.
Edit: I took the laptop once again at the shop and they put everything in English, even the recovery partition. Hurra’! :)

I thought to put Ubuntu Lucid Lynx into an usb key and play with it for a while. Then, after solving at least the most important issue, I would install it on the HD.

To create the Ubuntu bootable usb key, I used Universal USB Installer with the useful Persistence feature.

Findings:

• touchpad not working -> solved!
• brightness keys not working
• ambient light sensor not working

Touchpad not working
Solving the touchpad issue was easy.
A simple search on internet revealed that it’s enough to simply insert in the kernel parameter:

i8042.nopnp

To be continued

The first ARM device to propose all major distros: Ubuntu, Android, Mer, Gentoo, Chrome OS…

Viene proprio l’acquolina in bocca! :)

Le specifiche sono queste:

• 9.7″ x 7″ x 1.3″ for around 3 lbs (with keyboard)
• ARM Texas Instruments OMAP3 chip
• 1024×600 8.9″ screen
• 512MB RAM – 8GB SD card for storage
• Wifi 802.11 b/g/n and Bluetooth
• 3-dimensional accelerometer
• Speakers, micro and headphone I/O
• 7 USB 2.0 (4 internal, 3 external)
• 10 hours of battery life

E sul sito della casa madre, la Always Innovating e’ possibile vedere svariati video di questo touchbook, come viene da loro definito, nei diversi modi di utilizzo (office, gioco, ebook, gps, ecc.).

Il tizio che presenta il touchbook e’ il capo della compagnia ed e’, come si puo’ ascoltare, decisamente francese! :)

Io ci sto facendo seriamente un pensierino.

For anyone who uses, and loves, Creative Commons music site Jamendo, as I do, no 2nd round backers = financial trouble: http://trunc.it/4kx68

via brendaclews on Identi.ca

The installation can be made in many ways. Since I got another laptop with Windows operative system, an easy way is to download the distribution directly inside the memory card that will be used to boot the netbook.

The easiest way to do so is to use unetbootin, an utility available for both Win and Linux.
Through this utility it’s possible to choose the operating system version and the destination (Hard Disk, USB Drive, etc.) where to download it.

Once download it into my USB memory stick, I unplugged the USB memory stick where I downloaded the operating system and plugged it in one free USB slot of my Asus eeepc.

I switched it on and pressed Esc key in order to show the menù with which it’s possible to choose the startup storage.
Choosing the USB Stick the operating system fired is the live distribution of the Xubuntu 9.04.

Once booted, the desktop will be like this.

Localize the icon saying install and double click on it to start the installation on the SSD memory.
From here, everything is straightforward. Here you choose the language.

The timezone.

The keyboard.

Here the installer detected another partition with the old OS. In my case, I answered NO not to unmount the unit and to overwrite the old OS with the new.

Of course if you want to create other partitions, swap, etc. you’re free to do it. I choose use the entire disk.

Credentials, name of the netbook.

Last review of the options before fire the installation.

Writing… writing… :)

Restart and…

Et voilà! Xubuntu installed!!!

Now you can go on with the fun installing and configuring the zillions of apps you like!

Happy Xubuntuing!!! :D

Maledetto filtro! :)))