The netbook that I ordered from Dell finally arrived in the past weekend.

“Ubuntu on Dell Mini 9” website (http://www.ubuntumini.com/) has a lot of information about it. Very cool!

I started making a list of things that I will need to make them work on mini 9.

4/14/09

Progress so far:

• enabled wireless for internet access
  
• installed PDF printer (so I can generate docs in pdf)
  
• enabled Chinese language support and configured Chinese character input (智能拼音输入法)
• file access to home file server NAS
• Terminal service client (via RDP) so I can remotely access/control Windows machines if needed (such as initiate a p2p download or shut down a machine)

4/15/09
Get Pidgin working for Yahoo!, MSN, and QQ

4/22/09

Still having problems with setting up Cisco VPN client, even after installing vpnc package. Not a big deal to, I can live without it for now. It may have something to do with the netbooking using Atom processor which is not i386 based so it is harder to look for the right package and configure it correctly. Plan to deal with it when I upgrade to Ubuntu 9.0.4 release later on.

每次股市大涨，总是豪情万丈。

然而股市大跌时，就像把头藏在沙子的鸵鸟，不敢去看帐号上的损失。

A few weeks ago, I wrote a blog “Home NAS and More” about setting up a home NAS (Network Attached Storage). As I said in that article, I am very pleased by its basic function of file server, as well as the extended Linux-based functions such as SSH, p2p download (eDonkey and BitTorrent), and FTP.

One thing that I have reservations on this DNS-323 is the UPnP AV server function. Although I tried TwonkyMedia server which is considered as the best AV server on DNS-323, my user experience has been below average. By and large, it is a tiny box with a week CPU and little memory (by today’s standard), how can you expect too much out of it?

Today I ran across an article about installed Windows Home Server (WHS) on bare bone device called VIA ARTiGO A2000, and it seems very interesting. The article is here:

How to build your own Windows Home Server rig

Here is a hardware comparison between those 2 devices:

How about comparison on software?

Useful links:

WHS wiki http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Home_Server

VIA ARTiGO A2000 on nowdirect.com http://www.nowdirect.com/exec/partInfo/part_detail.tsb?prcpart=VIAARTIGO%20A2000

WHS Add-Ins http://forum.wegotserved.com/index.php?autocom=downloads