What I have been up to
I have been deathly quiet on the Domino front recently, but don’t worry, I have been keeping myself occupied.
Some big news in the UK is that right now a major high street retailer is selling mini laptops, but not just any old mini laptop, this is the new webbook from Elonex (who you may remember I have met before). If you were to go right now to the home page of The Carphone Warehouse you will see a webbook. “nice, but unremarkable” I hear you say. Well that is just the start of the story. Right now on the web they are selling the Windows XP version, however in stores they are selling the much more exciting Ubuntu Linux version, yes you heard correctly Ubuntu Linux pre-installed. The pricing is pretty attractive too. They are giving them away free with a free mobile broadband dongle, but you pay a monthly contract price for bandwidth (the exact pricing will vary so I won’t quote figures here, go to your local store and ask them)
Now all this is really great news and well worth blogging about just as an exciting development in the mainstream adoption of Free and Open Source Software, but I haven’t yet told you what I have been up to. Well I took off my yellow hat for a bit and put on my red mortarboard of The Open Learning Centre and Alan Lord, myself, and some very clever chaps at Canonical and Warp have been working together to build all the software that goes on the webbook, including really great support for mobile broadband dongles.
There is quite a lot to say about the webbook, it is a lovely little computer, so much so that I have started a new blog dedicated to the webbook at webbookblog.com where I will be revealing tricks and hints to get the most out of the webbook.
If you ever considered getting a mobile broadband connection then this is a fantastic deal, get the dongle you want, use it on whatever laptop you have and get a free webbook (which also works with the dongle of course)