[clue-tech] system76 starling report

[Matt Gushee]

Hi, Collins--

On Sun, 06 Dec 2009 14:46 -0700, "Collins Richey" <crichey at gmail.com>
wrote:

> My Xmas present to myself is a Starling netbook from System76. I've
> never been a great fan of laptops, but this one is light and portable
> enough to suit my tastes.

Yeah, if you can stand the small keyboard, and your eyes are good enough
to
read the small screen. I love my netbook, and with Arch Linux installed
it performs
most awesomely well.

I'd never heard of System76 before. Have to keep them in mind for next
time
I buy a computer.

> 3. This is not a System76 problem. The good folks at Ubuntu released
> 9.10 without bothering? being able? to test with a Realtek rtl8187b
> chip.

Any idea what the cause is? Have you tried loading the rtl8187 module
manually,
e.g.:

  # modprobe rtl8187

If that works, maybe you just need to add an appropriate udev rule to
have the
module load automatically. Though I am guessing it's not as simple as
that--if the
module fails to load, and you don't want to use NDISWrapper, maybe it's
time to
consider compiling a custom kernel. If you do choose to do that, I might
be able
to help--I've been running Linux on laptops for 13 years, and up until 2
or 3 years
ago I *always* had to compile a kernel to get all the hardware working.

> 4. So now everything is just ducky, well ... almost. I've never been
> fond of Gnome, and I'm not impressed with the current offering. Gnome
> ducks, or a rhyming word. Not that it doesn't work, I'm just not fond
> of it.

Yeah, Gnome seems to strike an unhappy medium between the full-featured,
friendly, just-works user experience of KDE and the power-user
minimalism of
XFCE. So couldn't you install one of those other desktops? I'm mainly
using
XFCE these days, and while it doesn't provide a complete selection of
apps,
I rarely have a problem running Gnome or KDE apps within the XFCE
environment.

-- 
Matt Gushee
matt at gushee.net