The search for the ideal mobile text editing device is over. While the price was well over my original budget, we’ve since gone ahead and splurged on two new Eee PCs: one for me, one for my wife. In the end, I think it will be worth it because these systems are capable of far more than just editing text. Now comes the challenging part. Xandros is the default OS and we want Debian on it instead. I have started supplementing the system with packages from Etch and Etch-backports using apt pinning, but already I have noticed some cracks beginning to develop: with pure Xandros, an SD card was automounted when it was inserted. Now it fails. Also, the Network utility no longer launches. I can work around these glitches for now, but it is plain that in the long term this Xandros/Etch hybrid is going to be more grief than it is worth. To that end, enter Debian-eeepc. Building on the work started by timbobsteve and drawing from the collective experience of the Eeeuser.com community we will make a debian-live cd + debian-installer to install Debian (as pure as possible—obviously the kernel is going to be our most contentious issue) on the device. So stay tuned for more articles on that work-in-progress. And how does my new toy shape up for mobile text editing so far? I’m delighted! For starters, this article was drafted on the bus home from work. The keyboard, while small, is still quite usable for touch-typing, the display is crisp and bright, and the size is just perfect for the cramped quarters of a public transit bus seat. But beyond just editing text, I have loaded up the system with all of the tools that go around it: subversion, git, ruby, gcc, meld, etc. I’ll be able to manage a fair amount of development on the bus, with the exception being really large builds that will continue to be done on remote build systems.

I have long recognized that to be usable by young kids, xjig really needs a better user interface. So I wrote a launcher, xjig-menu to address the problem. It adds a file open dialog (via zentiy) and support for more file formats (via imagemagick). Update

I have put this script in subversion and added a man page. Check it out:

  $ svn co svn://svn.debian.org/pkg-games/people/synrg/xjig

or browse the repository.

I hopped onto IRC and put most of the debate questions to Gustavo Franco (stratus). You can read it next to the others - SynrG and pusling tried to help recreate the cage fight, but I think we're just too tame. There's also this linux.com article where Steve McIntyre and Anthony Towns don't answer questions and it seems the reporters didn't notice Sven Luther's withdrawal.

I recently started to be aware of a problem in our family. Ever since we configured Mythgame to run Xmame games, we started to ignore native Linux games. This is a shame, because often the quality of such games is much higher, and besides, they are open source, which I strongly believe in. I looked around for help configuring Mythgame to run Linux games, and was unable to find a way to make a game player that would play any Linux game. So I devised the following solution: Step 1: Set up directories for pseudo-roms, command switches and snapshots

mkdir /usr/share/games/roms
mkdir /usr/share/games/switches
mkdir /usr/share/games/snaps

Step 2: Define a player in Mythgame

Player name: Linux
Type: OTHER
Command: %s  cat \ dirname %s\ /../switches/\ basename %s\ 
Rom Path: /usr/share/games/roms
ScreenShots: /usr/share/games/snaps

Step 3: Populate the directories with data

cd /usr/share/games/roms
ln -s /usr/games/oolite
ln -s /usr/games/starvoyager
cd /usr/share/games/snaps
cp ~synrg/snaps/oolite.png .
cp ~synrg/snaps/starvoyager.png .
cd /usr/share/games/switches
touch oolite
echo "-f" >starvoyager

Step 4: In Mythgame, “Scan for Games” Step 5: Play!