I have a Everex Cloudbook. When I got it, I was absolutely thrilled with it. I couldn't wait to surf wifi hotspots or load video onto a thumb drive, maybe add some games to it....
Now, time has gone by, the first blush has faded, and I realize the machine has some shortcomings. Compounding this is that I forgot the root password I picked (shows you how much I've installed on the thing). Now, I know there's a way to get the root password just by booting up another distro that runs off an SD card or a USB thumb stick (Puppy is my choice for doing such things) and simply marching through the file tree to where the password is stored. But, it occurs to me this might be a good time to simply junk the gOS desktop it came with and get something more...suited to what I hope to do. My (main) complaints with gOS and the Cloudbook in general are pretty straightforward (I'm ignoring how it claims to lose connectivity with the mouse and then locks up the machine to where I have to yank the battery to shut it down and restart it), but they also make me wonder if switching to another distro on this thing is even feasible. Problem 1 is the wifi. It detects wifi perfectly well. But I can be right next to the transmitter (I tried this) and the wifi won't work. It detects it and all, but for some reason, the OS will simply not communicate with it or, in some cases, suddenly switch back to looking for a LAN and say there is no Internet connection. I'm figuring it can't be the wifi antenna, or it wouldn't be seeing the signal at all. I figure that leaves the part of the OS that relays the information between the antenna and the OS itself. Problem 2 is the display, or more specifically, the display chipset. I am a humble hobbyist programmer, using a game engine to make my garage games (I just want to emphasize that I do not consider myself the next Alan Cox, I am very aware how minuscule my abilities are). It compiles the programs to run as single file executables. When I tried running one on the Cloudbook, the screen flipped out, turning weird colors, displaying random parts of the screen in random places, and generally visuals that you usually have to consume something illegal to see (from the sound effects and everything, it appears the rest of the program was running fine, it's just the display). I tried changing display resolutions for the program itself and even set it to run windowed, with no change. I've seen mention that some people have similar problems porting their stuff to the Cloudbook, and they trace it to the integrated VIA GPU. Does this mean that another distro, like say Fedora or Ubuntu, would have trouble running because this is clearly an unusual chip design that the engineers have not encountered yet (I know gOS is based on Ubuntu, but it appears to have some key differences, given that you are urged to use the gOS Update feature instead of Ubuntu's App-Get)? Or will it run fine, and simply getting a good distro as opposed to the entry level gOS will fix the problem with things running weird? Basically, if I change distros on this thing, I want a mature distro, not one like gOS or Xandross. Any ideas how feasible that is? --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Linux Users Group. To post a message, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit our group at http://groups.google.com/group/linuxusersgroup -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
