Sunday, July 18, 2010

MeeGo!

I don't want to use my laptop provided by the company any more: 1) it's 4 years old. 2) overheating problem. I decided to buy a device with my own money. I don't want to invest much because any computer becomes out of dated very soon. The requirement are: light, fast to start, energy efficient. iPad is not my choice because I need do some coding occasionally.

Finally I chose a netbook ViewSonic VNB 102p, it is based on Intel N450 Atom platform, the price is reasonable (less than RMB2000). I evaluated several OSes and installed MeeGo and Ubuntu Remix 10.04, these are designed for netbooks. Amazingly, all devices work out of box on these 2 OSes.

When I started to use this new netbook, I found I spent more time on MeeGo than Ubuntu. It might be because everything is fine on Ubuntu but I need some time to make some applications work on Meego. And Meego looks more simple, faster to start. I installed and customized thunderbird (for mail), openoffice 3.2.1 and skype (for voice chat), compiled Shrew (for VPN) and Shotwell 0.6.1 (for managing photos and online albums). Now I have used it for one month and this netbook can meet my demands for daily use.