"A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects." (Robert A. Heinlein)

Friday 26 October 2012

Test Drive: Ubuntu 12.10 “Quantal Quetzal” on the EEEPC


Ubuntu's upgrade season at last arrived. I must say I haven't paid a lot of attention, this time, to the new release (I even missed the beta release date) and to the endless discussions that usually follow any new version. By the way I downloaded Ubuntu and prepared my old 1GB flash drive in order to give it at least a look.

First impressions

The boot time seems good even with the increased disk image size (and my slow flash disk drive). Here is how the new release looks, just after the boot.

Wednesday 24 October 2012

Upgrading to Ubuntu 12.10 “Quantal Quetzal” (on the Veriton S661)

The upgrade season arrived at last. As soon I got enough free time, last week-end, I started the upgrade process on my desktop computer.


Doing the upgrade


At first, since the installed version was a LTS one, I had to enable notification for any new versions in the “software sources” configuration.
after that the update manager activated the “Upgrade” button

Saturday 13 October 2012

Android Development on Netbeans (and the EEEPC)


In my previous post I moved my first steps in Android development world by installing Android SDK and Eclipse IDE on my desktop computer. After successfully writing my first Android hello-world I went, almost immediately, on how to do Android development on the EEEPC 900. If it's true the desktop computer is much more suited for writing code it's the EEEPC tho one I always bring with me and I use for my experiments.
I'm a big fan of Eclipse and I use it everyday at work but, when it comes using it on a netbook, it performs very poorly. Worst of all some Eclipse configuration windows are too big to fit into the small EEEPC screen and even lack of scroll-bars. This is why I use Netbeans on the EEEPC. After a brief looking-up on the 'net I came to NBAnroid plug-in page.

Installing Netbeans to 7.2

Even if it isn't required I decided to upgrade my Netbeans installation to the latest 7.2 version. I so removed previous version by launching Netbeans removal script
sudo /usr/local/netbeans-7.1.2/uninstall.sh
then I downloaded latest Netbeans version from its download page and launched the auto-installing script
chmod +x netbeans-7.2-ml-javase-linux.sh
sudo ./netbeans-7.2-ml-javase-linux.sh
this started the usual Netbeans installation wizard 
after some “I agree” and several “Next” I got the new version installed.

Installing Android SDK

Like in my previous post I downloaded Android SDK from Google's page and extracted it on my home folder
mkdir android
mv Downloads/android-sdk_r20.0.3-linux.tgz android/
cd android/
tar -xf android-sdk_r20.0.3-linux.tgz