I’ve been chugging away on the same laptop for many years. now.  That old <a href=”http://joshmiller.net/2010/02/19/the-hp-mini-311-review-part-1-the-why/”>HP Mini</a> I’ve been using for years?  I’m still using that, with all it’s netbook and ATOM procesor glory.  The screen is a little flakey at the wrong angles but it gets the job done.  I’ve been sharing it with my wife for a while now, but recently (over the holidays) we bought her her own laptop.  Now that she’s blogging, it’s inconvenient for both of us to share a laptop since inevitably, both of us want to use it at any given time.

It’s also becoming increasingly more unstable, moreso when she is using it.  Part of the issue is that it has been running Windows XP since forever.  I have dual booted many flvors of Linux on it over the years and even ran the Windows 8 Beta on it for a bit.  Unfortunately Xp is completely and utterly end of life from Microsoft and more and more it shows.  The browser compatability is less and less and it’s just not as capable as it was in the past.  Unfortunately, I’m not about to shell out for a new updated version of Windows.  Since I don’t have to deal with the larning curve of teaching her how to use linux, I am not free to go back to Linux on my laptop, specifically, Ubuntu, and specifically, ONLY.  No dual booting or any of that nonsense.

I already had Lubuntu installed on a spare drive that I swapped into the machine, but I had issues getting networking to work in Lubuntu. I probably could have fixed them but I opted to just blow it out for a fresh 14.04 Ubuntu install. Unfortunately and irritatingly, the WiFi issue persisted. The core issue is that the Broadcom driver needed is “proprietary” ie not Open Source (though it is free), so it’s not installed or included by default. This problem is compunded because the age of this device means all of the tutorials are outdated and suggest I install the “jaunty backports repositories” and restricted drivers or something using Synaptic.

The specifics are not important, what’s important is Jaunty Jackelope was like 4 distros or so ago and Synaptic is no longer the package manager used. I got it working but it’s always been an issue. At least it seems this round the system defaults to “disable touchpad when typing” so my coursor isn’t flying all over the place.

So anyway, new year, new… ish… OS. Not much else will probably change on my whole projects and workflow end. I can do most everything i need to do besides play games with Ubuntu and the NAS means I can get to my files reguardless of OS. The only real issue is rejiggering my blog workflow, but lately I haven’t been posting shit anywhere anyway so it really doesn’t matter much. At the moment I’m writing this with Pico (because vi is a piece of crap), but I am not real sure there is any way to push this into productions without just cut and pasting. Also, word wrapping is non existent, which makes it tricky, what with hard line returns and junk that will probably cut and paste like garbage.

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