Back in the day, I saw more than once that the 12″ Powerbook G4 was referred to as “the blogger’s delight.” Pound for pound, it was the best device of its kind: more potent than an iBook, powerful enough to churn through any apps of its day, compact and portable (if not appreciably lighter than the iBook, it was at least thinner and certainly less of a challenge than the 15″ or 17″ variety.
The whole rationale behind the netbook was that it could be used to blog much more effectively than an iPhone. Adding the Linux and open source layer only pushes the envelope further – so this is brought to you by Drivel, an open-source package for blogging with MT, Livejournal, Blogger, WordPress, Drupal…the whole kit and kaboodle. It’s lean and light, and in this form at least it’s a full-screen writing solution and easy to cope with.
If this is all mashed together, by the way, you’ll know who to blame. My biggest gripe with MarsEdit on the Mac is that you actually have to run a damned AppleScript to get the paragraphs to separate with HTML tags. I’m not doing any tags on purpose with this post, just to see what happens.
I have to say that a couple days in, the Strumpet is bearing up well. I don’t feel like I have to boot into Windows to accomplish anything, although I expect I’ll keep that piece around just in case. The default boot was Xubuntu, but I’m getting more confortable with Ubuntu Netbook Remix to the point where I may wind up ditching the XU partition before long. Not that partition size is all that key to me – I still intend to keep as much in the cloud as possible, as much for safety as anything else.
(I’m starting to think that maybe I’m going to regret not having auto spellcheck on this thing. I can also say that it types more comfortably if it’s not in your lap. The lack of breadth on the 12″ PB was its biggest drawback for me – the 13″ MacBook was critical in that it was wide enough to keep on your lap and still use in a stable fashion.)
Well, this’ll have to do. Let me know how it works out…
Thank you for being my test case, now tell me what to do with Lappy586!
Offhand, I’d say the thing to do right now is use Wubi to install Ubuntu Netbook Remix. I say Wubi because it will spare you the nightmare of partitioning and then trying to get it back if things don’t work out. You might also want to make sure you have a wired network connection handy until you’re sure the Wi-Fi drivers are working.