Lucid & Karmic on Asus eeePC 1101HA

This page started out as a quick attempt to explain my experiences and problems in getting Ubuntu on my eeePC

It transformed into me sort of understanding the css float contruct, and an exercise in resizable java script controlled page layout, and page reuse which I'll use for something totally different in the "thing" I'm working on

Did you know you need 5 languages to write a Web2.0 application: html, css, php, sql, javascript

I must admit to being a bit of a unix head, after a 15 year break. I started programming at 13 on a TRS-80 in Basic and Z80 assembler.

In 1981 I went to NIHE, Limerick, and met a VAX/VMS 11/780 with Pascal, Fortran, COBOL, PL/1, and an assembler that makes Emacs look feature poor and uncustomisable. In 1982 I did actually get into a bit of trouble together with a conspirator for installing a backdoor in VMS, and after many months of happy benign hacking, I made a rather stupid, and careless mistake that left the machine incapable of starting without the operator fixing the user config file, and both of us banned from the computer for 3 months.

My first and only permanent employment with Hasler in Switzerland, in 1987 introduced me to unix/C/emacs which I quickly found went together better than VMS/Pascal/EDT. I bought my first PC in 1992 a 33MHz 80486 with 4M ram, and a 512M HD. It had MS-DOS and Windows 3.0, and I installed some pointless unix that could only handle 64k of memory.

Somehow from 1992 until 2005 I only worked in Microsoft environments. I was quite happy with MS-DOS, and only used Windows when I had to which often I had to, as more and more vendors were only offering Win applications. I was pleasantly surprised by WinXP, and know nothing of Vista.

And I've just bought a netbook with 1.33GHz Atom, 2G, 250G. Came with Win7, now I can choose between 5 operating system(version)s on boot and its sluggish. Slower than my upgraded first PC: Pentium (with floating point bug) 70MHz, 16M ram browsing with Netscape under Win 3.11

Which is not a bad thing, the sluggishness. Applications take a while to start, but then run fine. All I run is a source code editor, browser and (yes Chrome is 5 times faster than Firefox), a xampp web server in the background. With the slowness of the machine, any bottlenecks in my javascript or PHP/SQL are immedietly apparent. Which makes it the perfect web development environment.