Unfortunately, Windows Update doesn’t like this, specifically when it comes to installing service packs. I actually want service pack 2 for my laptop as it brings in better support for my BlueRay drive. What I need is to find a way to make my Linux and Windows installations more cosy with one another.

The way to do this is to give the Windows  partition the boot flag, booting its manager and selecting either Windows or Linux from there. Otherwise when the Vista update scans the boot manager it finds grub and gets, quite rightly I suppose, a little confused.

To setup your multiboot computer to get around this, read my tutorial.

After a bit of a lagging installation I find myself, having just clicked the “don’t restart” yet button, wanting to show off a feature I found completely by accident. A now included Plasma Widget for Facebook pictured below and the nano blog widget.

Desktop networking

As you can see both of these widgets speed up not only you access but interaction with the two biggest Social networking sites, as well as of course identi.ca for you micro-blogging-open-source gurus out there.

The standard desktop looks quite nice, albeit a little slow but fair’s fair – I’m still running from the live-cd at present so that will pick up when I boot.

The biggest problem I foresee with Kubuntu is my beloved firefox. It still seems to run perfectly well, but I still feel compelled to use Konqueror; being its native browser and all. I’ve heard mixed reviews about Aurora; the webkit-engined, Qt4 powered browser alternative but I don’t believe it has yet reached version 1. I hope it doesn’t peter out like Midori for gtk, that browser looked so great and fast but was plagued with bugs.

Nevertheless it does seem to have grown up quite well. I’ve liked the levels of integration with your files and computer before, often being handy, but I look at Konqueror now and it is wondrously streamlined. A nice short browser header as I like to think of them. The area where you find your address bar and various buttons etc. There’s nothing worse than a browser with so many toolbars have your page real-estate is eaten up!

But that’s all for now, it’s getting late. I need to restart.

More to come as I find it.

Rebooting now…

An Intel Atom Z530 processor running at 1.6 GHz motors through your tasks and the included 1 GB of RAM holds those tasks in place. Graphics are catered for by the Intel GMA500 graphics chipset with hardware acceleration and a DVI interface. A 160 GB SATA drive is more than capable of storing your files; Remember, a typical installation of Ubuntu takes up only 3-4gb (5-6 at the very most, 10 maybe for those of us compiling programs as well as getting a little apt-happy) of that space. A quick check of my Vista (I say quick… it took around a minute to calculate the file contents…) install shows me that currently it takes up 24gb. That’s a lot of hard drive real-estate I’d rather have for my files, not the systems’.

To round off the specs it also sports Gigabit Ethernet, 802.11g wifi (a small antenna is fitted to the back of the case), 6 USB 2.0 ports; two of which are on the front and are befriended by an SD card slot and an infra-red port. Personally, I think bluetooth wouldn’t have gone amiss as it offers a far greater scope of functions than IR.. but a remote control is seldom something to scoff at.

This is also a very green pc, running only on a laptop style power-brick rated 12 volts at 1.5 amps. Can anyone say car pc! A bracket is also included allowing you to attach the machine to the back of your monitor in a slightly poor-mans imac style, I like the idea though I think I’d rather show off the unit’s tiny size than hide it.

Mini-ITX and similar technologies have been around for years and used by Linux heavily. Many products which we take for granted such as network routers often are actually embedded Linux systems. But embedded desktop systems first saw a surge of popularity with Damn Small Linux. They booted from solid-state pen drives so were blazingly fast, and ran silently on fanless Via EDEN processors. You can still buy them now and support DSL in doing so.

However, what this computer brings to the market is not a ‘live’ Linux system, with limited storage space and a need to set up alternative data-storage, but a full Desktop with all the features you could need. With the price of $359 for the Linux variant, this could be a very popular purchase indeed. Hopefully it will be and customers can start testing what can actually be done with it, like the ITX projects of old.

If you’d like to find out more you can read Rob Reilly’s Review at linux.com.