Recently, PC World made available a cheap version of the MSI Wind netbook, known as the Advent 4211. It’s based on the excellent Intel Atom processor; however, there are some ways in which it’s deficient: it has only an 80 GB hard drive, and only 1 GB of RAM. Plus, for some strange reason, it comes with Windows XP.

I tested it in Windows mode for a while and was somewhat surprised by what I found: the processor was powerful enough to run Rome: Total War without any hiccups. However, as my lady doesn’t play games, I decided to ditch Windows and give her a smoothly running Linux machine. I bought a 120 GB Seagate Momentus 5400.3 hard drive, and I had an old Dell 1490 broadcom based wireless card to replace the Realtek card that the machine contains. I also bought an additional 1 GB of memory: memory from Crucial only costs £14.

The Advent 4211 doesn’t have a CD ROM drive, but LG GSA-E50N drive is perfectly adequate for the job.

However, it’s important to follow a series of steps to ensure that you’re getting the maximum performance out of the laptop. These steps begin before you replace anything.

First, ensure you’re using the latest firmware. If you’ve purchased the Advent 4211, this can be found by clicking here. If you’re using an MSI Wind, this bios update can be found here.

Once installed, shut down and remove the battery for ten minutes. For whatever reason, missing this step can cause the keyboard to freeze up. Restart and then go into the BIOS; there is an option to optimise the system by pressing F9: do so, and then save and exit.

After rebooting to ensure everything is all right - switch off. Remove the battery. You’re ready for surgery.

Removing the cover is relatively straightforward: there are nine screws which hold the bottom in place. Once these are undone, the back pops off easily. There is a free memory slot which is instantly recognisable: detailed instructions on how to put the additional memory in is available here.

Removing the wireless card turned out to be the most difficult portion of the task. The wireless antenna leads, which are indicated by a small white and a small black cable leading into the card, popped out easily enough - however, the screw which held the card in place gave me no end of trouble. It had been screwed in so tightly, and the screw itself was so soft, that the treads were ruined with only a couple of attempted turns. I had to use a pair of needle nose pliers to get it free; this accidentally loosened the metal portion below the card which the screw turned into. Fortunately, a small dab of superglue at the tip of the metal portion, fixed it back into place.

Beneath the wireless card there is an additional screw which frees the hard drive. The drive after this, pops out relatively easily. The Advent 4211 comes with a Western Digital drive, a brand I detest: I took it out, removed the metal guide and affixed it to the Seagate, which slotted easily back in. I put the drive back, put in the screw and then put in the Dell 1490.

The Dell 1490 wireless card is not an easy fit. The antenna cables are particularly awkward. Furthermore, a thin sticker on the bottom of the card is all that prevents an ill-placed protrusion from touching a portion of the motherboard, which can lead to it shorting out. I screwed it in to the point that it was in place, but did not tighten it to excess.

After putting the back on, and screwing it in place, I put back in the battery, and plugged the CD drive in. My OS in this case is Ubuntu Hardy Heron 8.04.1 - note this is the latest version, as the immediate predecessor did not work.

Installation was straightforward; the only complication lay in a difficulty I had made for myself in using the Broadcom based Dell 1490. I plugged in the wired connection into my router, entered the terminal and typed:

sudo apt-get update

After that, I went into System > Administration > Hardware Drivers and found that the Broadcom wireless card driver was awaiting activation. I activated it, following the steps in the installation process after this selection. Wireless gave no further issues after this.

Apart from this, graphics acceleration, sound, and all other features worked as expected: the MSI Wind / Advent 4211 appears to be a very good fit with Ubuntu Linux. Wireless is quick and punchy, and even the small screen (10″) is something one gets used to after a short while.

In fact, I like it so much, I may get one myself.

Comparing the two at the moment may seem unfair, given that both are works in progress.  However, the two have been going back and forth in being the best, fastest browser for Linux; and the betas are an indication of how the next round is going to shape up.  After having used both side by side for the past week, I believe I have an idea as to who is going to come up trumps.

Firefox 3 is a good, well-rounded browser.  It is reasonably quick, and with some slight modifications in “about:config” - its speed can be improved further.  There is no doubt as to why this is the standard; however, there is no doubt that the new Opera is much better.

With 9.50b, the previous sins of Opera have been forgotten: it does run Flash plugins, and whatever was throttling its performance in 9.27, has been eliminated.  I don’t have a stop watch, but speaking as a user, its throughput is much faster than it is on Firefox 3.  Admittedly, I am using a lower end machine: however Opera seems to be able to do less with more.

I am also a strong believer in the idea that the class of a browser can be seen in its font rendering.  In Firefox 3, this has apparently taken a step backward: the rendering is less sophisticated than it was on Firefox 2, and its variants such as Swiftweasel.  It somehow looks like a throwback, almost like how browsers look on Windows.   The difference can be seen in these samples:

Firefox 3
Opera 9.50

I found after several hours of using both, I much prefered using Opera: as the samples show, it’s quicker, easier on the eyes, and there is a better “finish” to it.  Firefox 3 still has the feel of a beta; there are niggles in it, for example, how the history on the URL bar drops down, that indicates it still has some way to go, that some concepts have not yet fully arrived.

Opera 9.50 simply does not feel like a beta; there are no niggles or annoyances to distract, rather, it simply works and works well.  No doubt Firefox will catch up to it again; the to and fro of this struggle is unlikely to stop.  However, for the moment, Opera is the winner.

That said, I thought it was really coming to the end of the line.  I had upgraded it from Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon to Hardy Heron via the usual upgrade procedure while Hardy was in Beta.  I lost the Desktop Effects, and the computer seemed to be getting bogged down: the extensive error messages I got during shut off was particularly painful.

I decided to give it one last go with a clean install; if it didn’t work, then I was going to have to accept that the laptop, after 5 punishing years of service, was coming to its end.

But I’m pleased to say it did work, and in fact, it’s better than ever.

I should point out that this is not a standard HP Compaq nx7000: I replaced its original IDE hard drive with a Seagate 7200 80 GB drive.  I also put in an SMC Networks PCMCIA 802.11g card (this is based on the Atheros chipset).  I also put in 1 GB of RAM several years ago.  These have helped in terms of connectivity and speed; otherwise, it is a standard first generation Centrino laptop.  It has a 64 MB ATI Radeon laptop graphics card, and a lovely 1680 x 1050 widescreen aspect.

I wanted to ensure that the transition was as painless as possible; this meant that I wanted to ensure that I’d copied all my Bookmarks and emails. Fortunately, in Firefox 2, there is a facility under Bookmarks > Organise Bookmarks to export Bookmarks as a single file. Firefox 3 has a facility to import these bookmarks.

Thunderbird was less straightforward. I found an excellent add on called Import Export Tools. It’s available here. I was able to export all the messages, whisk them off with the other files and able to wipe the hard drive with confidence.

Installation was painless.  All of the hardware was detected and there were no problems with the sound, graphics, or networking; I still remain convinced that this laptop was more designed for Linux than for Windows.  Where it gets a bit trickier is trying to “smooth the setup”.

First and foremost, with my setup, I have two competing wireless cards.  As I’m not interested in having an 802.11b connection, I went into Applications > Accessories > Terminal and typed:

sudo gedit /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist

Add the following line:

blacklist ipw2100

Save and close.  This will knock out the silly old Intel wireless card upon restart.

I found that the Desktop effects still did not work.  Not to worry though, there is plenty of eye candy to be had at www.gnome-look.org.

In my case, I decided to install the Aurora GTK engine, because I rather liked the Elegant Aurora theme.

The good news is that this old laptop can run it. The bad news is that it does require some further packages in order to make it work.

I first had to go into Terminal again and type:

sudo apt-get install libc6-dev g++ gcc

But this isn’t sufficient, it is looking for specific GTK packages to make it work. One also needs to do this:

sudo aptitude install build-essential libgtk2.0-dev

Then extract the Aurora 1.4 folder from the zipped archive onto the desktop. Go into Terminal again, and navigate to that folder. From this point, the instructions are relatively straightforward. Type:

sudo ./configure –prefix=/usr

Then hit enter. After it goes through the motions, then type:

sudo make install

This will install the Aurora engine. Reboot.

You can then go into System > Preferences > Appearance and install the Elegant Aurora theme. Its curved, elegant appearance, while not as “dynamic” as Desktop Effects, is pleasing to the eye.

However, there are other items I wanted to install. First, fonts. It’s necessary to get the Microsoft core fonts in order to view web pages correctly. I went into System > Administration > Synaptic Package Manager and Searched for the following package, “msttcorefonts”. This package contains all the base Microsoft fonts one could require. I also wanted Macintosh fonts, as I rather like Lucida Grande. I found them at “Iceman’s Emulation Page”.

Once downloaded, unzip and put all the .TTF files on the desktop. Go back to terminal and then type:

cd /usr/share/fonts

Then type:

sudo mkdir apple

Navigate back (via “cd”) to the Desktop. Then type:

sudo mv *.ttf /usr/share/fonts/apple

This will move all the fonts to the “apple” folder.

You can then refresh the font cache by typing:

sudo fc-cache -fv

This will clock through your newly installed fonts and make them available for use.

Next, there is the matter of setting up Firefox. Firefox 3 is an improvement on Firefox 2 in terms of speed, though it is still a beta, with the limitations that implies. Some of the tweaks one could do with Firefox 2, still apply to Firefox 3. It’s a question of identifying where changing values is still appropriate.

To start, type “about:config” in the address bar.

You will get a warning; proceed anyway.

The HP Compaq nx7000 now needs to be treated as if it is a slow computer on a fast connection (given the SMC network card). Add / change the following values unless these values have already been changed / exceeded by the Firefox 3 configuration:

user_pref(”network.http.pipelining”, true);
user_pref(”network.http.proxy.pipelining”, true);
user_pref(”network.http.pipelining.maxrequests”, 8);
user_pref(”content.notify.backoffcount”, 5);
user_pref(”plugin.expose_full_path”, true);
user_pref(”ui.submenuDelay”, 0);

And:

user_pref(”content.max.tokenizing.time”, 3000000);
user_pref(”content.notify.interval”, 1000000);
user_pref(”content.notify.ontimer”, true);
user_pref(”content.switch.threshold”, 1000000);
user_pref(”content.maxtextrun”, 4095);
user_pref(”nglayout.initialpaint.delay”, 1000);
user_pref(”network.http.max-connections”, 48);
user_pref(”network.http.max-connections-per-server”, 16);
user_pref(”network.http.max-persistent-connections-per-proxy”, 16);
user_pref(”network.http.max-persistent-connections-per-server”, 8);
user_pref(”dom.disable_window_status_change”, true);

This will yield a substantially faster Firefox.

I don’t like the default Firefox theme, so I’ve gotten a hold of Phoenity Modern. I also made sure I hit You Tube to get it to automatically install the Adobe Flash Plugin (I went for the genuine Adobe plugin rather than its open source equivalents).

Next, Opera. Opera 9.27 doesn’t work with Flash on this machine; so it’s time to be daring and go with the beta, known as 9.50b / Kestrel. This can be gotten here. This works with the Flash plugin reasonably well.

Finally, Thunderbird; one does need to install the Import Export Tools again, however, it is relatively easy to import the messages, once you’ve re-set up your accounts. Just ensure you’ve clicked on the right folder - i.e., Inbox, when you’re trying to import Inbox messages.

There were other items to set up: as the FireFTP extension doesn’t work with Firefox 3, I went through setting up gFTP. Pidgin internet messenger setup was simple and painless. As my printer is a Canon, I used the Turboprint drivers, as they seem to lead to less smudging in the output than the standard Ubuntu drivers.

Also, with some wallpaper and icons from Deviant Art, I managed to make the old laptop look like this:

Screenshot One
Screenshot Two

But most of all, it is not left behind by recent developments - with the latest Ubuntu, latest Open Office, latest Firefox and latest Opera - it’s at the forefront of them. Not bad for something which in Windows world, would be pushing up the daisies.

I have to say - just wow.

Why am I saying this? For those who missed out on the news, Hillary Clinton narrowly won the Democrat Presidential Primary in New Hampshire, thus reviving a campaign that should be gathering mold and icicles in the morgue of American political history.

Hillary Clinton represents much of what I hate. Before feminists leap down my throat, it’s not the fact that she’s a woman. It’s because she couldn’t come up with a genuine emotion if her life depended on it: absolutely everything about her is contrived, marketed, packaged. When she speaks, it’s as if she is lecturing a bunch of not-too-bright children on how to behave. That said, what really grates on me is her sense of entitlement. Try this exercise - whenever she snaps at someone, mentally preface her statements with “how dare you”. You’ll find that it not only fits, it shows the real character of the woman: she believes that she is destined to win the nomination, destined to be President and no one has the right to question her plans, her policies, her experience or her temprament. She has been acting like this for years.

There is something familiar about her approach, and her presentation as the inevitable, logical choice, the industry standard, the voice of experience. From my perspective, she sounds a lot like Microsoft.

If one really thinks about it, Hillary Clinton is the Windows Vista of candidates: we are being told this is the upgrade America needs. After the Windows ME years of President Bush, the country needs all the packages and upgrades that are being foisted upon it by this woman. For example, her ideas on health care mandates - basically forcing everyone to buy health insurance - sound Microsoft-ish: we’re going to make you take it out, you are not free to make choices for yourself. No doubt, she is more or less slickly packaged; however, it doesn’t take much stress for cracks to appear.

This is in stark contrast to Obama. He apparently has learned something, indeed, a central principle of the Open Source movement: greater participation is key to progress, and a monolith is not nearly as good at advancing things as a diverse group that pulls together voluntarily.

For example, from day one, he has called upon Republicans and independents to work with him, in spite of being opposed to many of their beliefs. Presumably, he regards their participation as providing a proof of concept of his own plans. Additionally, his speeches are notable for calling for participation from the wider public: by no means has he suggested that he alone is the agent of change, rather, it will require change driven by the nation as a whole. Unlike Hillary, he hasn’t included mandates in his plans; he has stated that he assumes that people will be intelligent enough to choose health insurance for themselves.

At the very least, this call for citizens to be active in the life of their country is a sign of inclusiveness that Hillary’s top-down approach lacks. Furthermore, it shows humility, a quality that no one sane would accuse her of having.

Before I’m accused of going completely off on a weird tangent, I should point out by a strange coincidence, according to Netcraft, Hillary’s website is running off of Windows Server 2003, and Obama’s is running off of Linux.

So again, I have to say to Democrats in America: you pick this woman at your peril. As someone on this side of the Atlantic, I have to say the yakkity yak that we hear out of this pantsuited nightmare is already tedious. No matter how intelligent you may think she is, her brainpower does not outweigh that of a whole country; in understanding the frontiers of his intellect and personal power, Obama shows that he’s smarter than she. The only way she could be attractive is if you find thinking hurts you and you’d rather she did it in your stead.

The primaries are about to move on to Nevada and South Carolina. Hopefully the winter freeze hasn’t dulled their senses in the same way that it did the faux LL Bean lumberjacks and the silly mums who are fighting middle aged spread and think they’re on an episode of Desperate Housewives. Hopefully, they’ll go Open Source and make the right choice.

I believe him.

My lady likes these shows as well; she’s the kind of person who looks in various house and home magazines, looking for ideas on how to stick an additional toilet into a ridiculously small place, among other things.

So, we were watching Property Ladder last night; the programme featured a rather irritatingly nice family that were developing and selling houses for a profit. Think of Disney Does Real Estate and you have a fair idea of what it was like. Sarah Beeny, the presenter, said “they’ve cleared a £58,000 profit…before tax.”

My lady seized upon that. “That’s the first time she’s said the phrase ‘before tax’ - if it’s a second home, it’s subject to capital gains.”

As I regard property development for profit as being a more complicated way to commit suicide than taking arsenic, I hadn’t really thought about it before. Loads of people have bought houses and then redeveloped them under the assumption that at most, they’d have to pay 10% to the government on their gains. For those in other countries, you may not have heard that Gordon Brown recently raised this tax to 18%.

Hitherto, I thought that Gordon Brown just might win the next general election, whenever that may be. Yes, his government is full of corrupt wankers who have all the morality of a lobotomised weasel on meth. For goodness sake, any decent human being realises that taking money from a businessman who wants to donate anonymously has at least the air of dodginess about it, and given that they’re supposed to be in public service (cough, cough), they shouldn’t do it. We could live with that if it was accompanied by an air of competence and self-criticism. We’ve seen neither.

First take self-criticism. Speaking for myself, whenever the presenter on Sky News or BBC News says they have someone from the government on to defend some indefensible mistake, I get a sense of a dread. Few inspire more loathing in me than Hazel Blears: she has a smile that is as plastered on as that of the Joker from Batman. She tries to appear like she’s one of the “ordinary working folk” from her constituency of Salford, but you know that she’s got Sancerre in her fridge and if she ate a doner kebab, her head would explode. Furthermore she’s wound up so tight that you’d like to see her handed over to a crew of Liberian sailors who had been at sea without female companionship for 6 months, possibly the only way that would shake loose what’s been bunged up in her.

In precise tones, she always carries on, says that the government is competent and knows what it is doing even when the banking system is near collapse, the economy is plumbing depths that the passengers of the Titanic would recognise, and youth crime is such that a television presenter like Jeremy Clarkson can’t shake one of the little scrotes that’s bothering him by the scruff the neck, without thinking, “Oh crap, am I going to get done for this?”

Perhaps the most disgusting element of all is that Labour seems to think it is entitled to stay in power forever. Funny, I thought we lived in a democracy. Sort of, anyway. Part of the idea is that power should change hands from time to time. As much as I was cynical about New Labour in 1997, it was clear that the Tories were showing signs of wear and tear after 17 years; it wasn’t good for democracy that they were in power forever. At least the Tories went more gently into that good night. Labour thinks it can replace a charismatic leader with one who has to duct tape his smile into place and magically make it so they stay in office till the end of time.

Fortunately, they have made the fatal mistake of jacking up capital gains tax. So much of our economy is based on madness with housing; they just shot at all the little developers like the nice but irritating family. They shot at the small business owner. They shot at the people working in finance and all those who depend on them. And they’re not showing any signs of remorse, they’re just trotting out Hazel Blears.

Labour is done. Yes, yes, the pundits say they can come back from this. Pundits generally speaking live in London and hang out at dinner parties with people who discuss this very seriously no doubt. The view out here in the provinces is a bit different: they are dead, dog meat, and should lie down and accept the inevitable. Gordo plotted and schemed to become Prime Minister to the point that I wouldn’t be surprised if sacrificing the lukewarm blood of babies to Satan was involved. In the end it was futile; the sell by date has expired, all that remains is the long walk to the graveyard.

This is not to say things will get much better with anyone else. Generally speaking, decisive governments tend to anger people. For example, President Sarkozy in France just told the unions to bog off, and there’s a lot of unhappiness with him. Bush was decisive in getting rid of Saddam Hussein, now the entire world is angry at him to the point that they forget how the porky guy (who used to have chemical weapons) gassed the Kurds. Given this, most politicians try to just muddle on and not do anything courageous. So the recession will not be called off, and we will get just as fed up with the new lot as we did with the old one. But given that we are imperfect people, we should expect governments to be just as frail, ignorant and ridiculous as the rest of us. All of it springs to mind what Churchill once reportedly said - democracy was the worst form of government….except compared to all the others.

If only.

The build is complicated somewhat by the fact that they’ve moved to America for their retirement, so the usual haunts I’d use for parts don’t apply. No matter, there is www.newegg.com to the rescue. From this, I’ve managed to put together the following list of parts:

I’m starting with a Intel Core 2 Duo E6750 Conroe 2.66GHz LGA 775 processor. It’s not the fastes that Intel make, but it is 64 bit and it has a nice balance of cost for performance. It also comes with the necessary cooling equipment.

Sticking with Intel for the moment, I’ve selected their Intel BOXDP965LTCK LGA 775 Intel P965 Express ATX Motherboard. If I need to change the processor to something with more oomph later, the board gives me some room for this.

I’ve proposed getting two sets of Crucial Ballistix 2GB (2 x 1GB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 800 (PC2 6400) Dual Channel memory. The memory comes highly rated, and again, appears to be a nice balance of price and performance.

Linux support for Nvidia is still better than ATI in my view. At the same time, my parents are not likely to be playing graphics intensive games. So for graphics I’ve selected a ASUS EN8400GS/HTP/256M GeForce 8400GS 256MB 64-bit GDDR2 PCI Express x16 HDCP Ready card.

The sound on the motherboard doesn’t look particularly convincing. Hence, I’m proposing that I bolster that with a Creative Sound Blaster Audigy SE SB0570LPVP 5.1 Channels PCI Interface Low-Profile card.

SATA drives offer better performance than their IDE predecessors. I don’t want to skimp here, but at the same time, my parents aren’t going to load loads of music and photos on it. For the hard drive, I’ve picked a Western Digital Caviar SE16 WD2500AAKS 250GB 7200 RPM SATA 3.0Gb/s drive. For a DVD-R drive, I’ve picked a SAMSUNG 20X DVD±R DVD Burner Black SATA Model SH-S203B.

As for the casing and power, I’ve gone with a GIGABYTE Triton 180 Black 0.7mm SECC Steel ATX Mid Tower and Thermaltake Purepower W0100RU ATX 12V 2.0 500W Power Supply.

With these parts, plus a 22in Samsung monitor, a slimline Kensington USB keyboard, and a Microsoft mouse, the sum total comes to less than $1070. In contrast, to replace their iMac, the entry level model would cost $1199 - this has a smaller screen (20in), much less memory (only 1 GB), and a slower processor (2.0 Ghz). Of course, the Mac does have a lovely casing.

That said, the user experience need not be radically different; The Mac4Lin Project is an example of how the usability of a Mac can be brought to a Linux machine. Furthermore, there are benefits the Ubuntu machine will have: for example, it will be able to run Swiftweasel, and connected to an American cable modem, it should be blazingly fast.

If my parents allow me to execute on this project, I will write an update as to how the project proceeds.

Merry Christmas to all, nonetheless!

And another: