Red Flag Linux on an American Nettop

Maybe this is a mistake, or maybe this was intended for the Chinese market, but I find it funny that an American nettop by Asus is being sold with Red Flag Linux (the Chinese government's official Linux distro.)

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16883220028

HP's "Ultra-Portable"

I came across this.

Hey HP, a 5.3 lb (2.4 kg) 14.1" laptop is hardly what I call an "Ultra-Portable."

To be fair, it does look like a pretty good laptop. It has good user reviews on their site and it always comes with 802.11n wi-fi, hdmi/vga output, and a USB/eSATA port. Still, get your labels right HP.

Ubuntu Lucid (10.04) Alpha 3 Reactions

I've been trying out (Gnome) Ubuntu Lucid (10.04) Alpha 3. Here are some notable changes:

-It boots up extremely fast in VirtualBox 3.1.4.

-The highly technical Xsane image scanner has been replaced with "Simple Scan," developed by Canonical. I say this is definitely a good idea.

-There are now only 6 games included by default. I read one user story where a grandma was amazed to see all the awesome Gnome games included by default.

-You can update the installer (during the installer wizard.) If this can increase the changes that ubuntu will install, it sounds awesome.

-No more installer option to participate in the package popularity survey. You can enable it under the synaptic options.

-Virtualbox guest editions, both Lucid's 3.1.2 OSE ones and the official 3.1.4 proprietary ones, cause the mouse cursor to not be shown.

-Browsing my (always difficult to browse) network is either not working or extremely slow.

-The new Palimpsest Disk Utility 2.29 version seems nice, but it doesn't work with an 800x600 screen.

-I'll have to try out the included pitivi video editor. I like the idea of including a simple video editor by default. I wish I didn't have to install the whole windows live package to install windows movie maker on Windows 7.

-Although tsclient is still the default RDP front-end/client, I am glad that Remmina is in the repos. It is a great gnome RDP (and other remote desktop implementations) client. However, it should not default to 256 colors (8-bit color.)

-System Testing didn't work. I contributed to a bug report.

If you want to try this ALPHA on something non-critical (like a VirtualBox test machine,) you can download it here:

http://www.ubuntu.com/testing/lucid/alpha3

Remember that we are past the feature freeze, so it will only get more stable from here until its release on April 29th.