I'm installing Ubuntu on a Compaq Armada M300 laptop acquired as a cast-off from a client.

I tried the regular Jaunty 9.04 install disk, which failed while trying to boot into the live system, and also during the boot of the direct installer.

I then tried the alternate install disk. This failed while trying to enable the framebuffer. The screen slowly faded to white and back down to black, and stuck there.

For further amusement, I tried the netboot install....

I have KDE on my desktop machine at home, but I run Ubuntu (Gnome) on my eeepc. The latter choice is partly because Ubuntu/Gnome looks pretty good on the eee's small screen and is well supported by Adam McDaniel's eeepc optimised kernel and hacks, and partly because it's useful for when someone calls up with a question about an Ubuntu system I've installed for them.

Gnome took the decision to simplify its interface some time back, creating an impression that it's much less configurable...

[Warning -- this solution is now well out of date!]

For ages Flash has failed to work properly for me when embedded in Konqueror on my Arch Linux system. It would start to load, look as if it was buffering, but not play, and meanwhile that tab or instance of Konqueror would be eating CPU.

Today I found a fix, as detailed by Mike Arthur.

Install kmplayer. I'm currently running kdemod3, and I had to install kdemod3-kmplayer from AUR, which I accomplished by running...

Curious to try XFCE again, I fired it up. I already had it installed on my Arch system, and it was up to date thanks to regular runs of pacman -Syu.

Well, I quite liked it. Thunar, the file manager, was agreeably quick and susceptible to being driven by the keyboard. The transparency of the terminal was cool. There were a huge number of window manager tweaks available. I only gave up my experiment because for some strange reason I couldn't get any sound out of the machine any more....

Back when the Met Office used to provide the weather forecast in a nice simple page that looked good in the Links text-based web browser, I had an alias set up in my .bashrc so that pressing 'w' and 'enter' on my keyboard would cause links to run and open the page for the South East England forecast. Lightning fast, I knew whether to pack my Gore-Tex in my pannier.

Nowadays the Met Office's forecast page comes up a useless mess in links.

Never mind. Today I worked out...