A little over a year ago I bought an eeepc. I used to claim that I had no use for a portable computer and would not make use of one even if it were given to me. Oh how foolish I was in 2007. The main thing I like about this computer is that I can write or read on the computer in a central area, such as a living room. At swarthmore I managed this for two years by having the central space being in my (shared) bedroom, and senior year I set my computer up in the hall, with ethernet cables running back into my room. This does not work as well in medford, as there are now multiple social spaces. None of which it would really make sense for me to set up a desktop in.

So I gave in, and use a laptop despite my continued hatred of debugging wireless problems. But I'm not writing this just to admit I had misjudged laptops. I'm writing this because I just installed eeebuntu on the computer and made a bunch of customizations. It's like a new computer. So, changes from the factory xandros install:

• Installed eeebuntu, an ubuntu variant
• Dragged the panel around so that I have only one taskbar like thing, 17px high. Icons are small and things I don't need are not present.
• Made firefox have only one bar at the top, used tiny menu to do away with the menubar. And there's the tab bar. Two bars. The stratini theme is small while looking nice.
• Installed something that makes all windows open fully maximized with no title bars. (apt-get install maximus)
• Turned off the menu in gnome-terminal.
• Turned off blinking cursor in gnome terminal following this advice
• Caps lock is another control

I also like how it will now autoconnect to the medford wireless and suspend to ram for near instant boots. It's amazing how long I stuck with lazily configured xandros.

Now I just need to figure out how to shrink the firefox status bar.