So I’m sure it hasn’t escaped people’s attentions that Google Mail had a little bit of downtime this week. A combination of my body clock being on the fritz and our internet connection being about as reliable as the average freelancer, meant that I missed most of it - thankfully.

This downtime certainly got Google a lot of press - because a *hell* of a lot of people use their services. I use Google Apps for all my domains on my server and would never turn back to hosting my own e-mail. I have used Google Apps for quite some time now and I can’t actually think of a single time where I’ve had any e-mail down time. So to have a few hours worth of down-time, in the grand scheme of things, is nothing - especially when you consider that Gmail is still a “Beta” (snigger…) and that it’s a completely free service. No e-mails were lost and you could still access them over POP3/IMAP, which takes 30 seconds to setup. So come on guys - give Google a break.

This still highlights an issue I bought up recently of our dependence on the internet and the cloud - as looking at my twitter feed, people were struggling left right and centre due to the lack of e-mail. Be prepared!

My internet service has been really troublesome the past few weeks (as mentioned) - we think due to noise on the line. However, BT gave us the run around and suggested that if they sent out an engineer and no fault was found it would cost us quite a bit of money. So we tried different filters, modems, cables and finally moved to BE Broadband, to eliminate the exchange as the issue. We’re on BE now and it seems fairly reliable (apparantly ADSL2+ is better at coping with noisy lines) but we’re getting about half the speed that we should, probably due to the line noise. So having eliminated all these issues, I think we’re confident enough to get a BT engineer involved. Here’s hoping!

Some of you may remember me recently talking about not wanting to upgrade from the Ubuntu 8.04 based Mint Linux on my primary machine. During this down-time I found the one thing that has made me want to upgrade - 3G Dongles. I’ve had to resort to using Ubuntu Intrepid inside a VirtualBox VM to work with the dongle I have for the times when the internet was just too unreliable. I’d really quite like to simply be able to plug it in and go, which Intrepid supports. Rummaging around my bits and bobs I found a 32GB SSD drive that Crucial sent me for an article a while back. So I’ve decided I’ll install Intrepid on to this and then casually move stuff across from my old install. After installing Intrepid on my girlfriends notebook last week (an experiment I’m watching eagerly), I was reminded that it doesn’t take long at all to get it setup with all the bells and whistles

I’ve been wanting to try out alternative Linux distros on my EeePC 701 for a while, but I’ve not done it - primarily because the default Xandros based operating system is so damned good, for what I need it for. 20 second boot up time and I can start writing on the train - perfect.

However, when I saw this guide on installing Android on the 701, I felt I really had to give it a shot, so I jumped in with both feet. Generally speaking, I compile things only when strictly necessary, so my machine isn’t exactly setup for it. Although the article has a fairly good list of dependencies - I did need a few extra, so I found myself wading through output looking for generated errors. Eventually, I got it compiled, and stuck it on a USB flash disk.

The article did mention it would wipe the hard drive, but I thought it would also give you a prompt to confirm you wanted to do this and was hoping I could trick it into installing to an SD card instead. I really should have read this article, with a big flashing red warning about this fact. Oh well - I can always hunt out the install CD and put Xandros back on - it’s not as if I modified it (much).

So Android installed and booted, generally a lot less painful than I was expecting. Awesome! So now what. The mouse doesn’t work (designed for touch screen) and the Wi-Fi doesn’t work. Not the end of the world - but no word processor either. Sigh!

A lovely technology demo, but in reality - a pointless exercise right now. Nobody is offering Netbooks with Android on, yet, so developers have yet to add the required functionality in. But I don’t imagine it’ll be long before we see it and I’ll revisit it then.

So, having (accidently) removed Xandros, I figured I may as well take this opportunity to take a look at some of the other EeePC distributions around. I tried several, and all had their good and bad points (something I’ll have to cover in more detail later), but most of them took too long to boot up. I imagine part of this is due to the slow 600MHz CPU on the 701 and the Atom based units probably wouldn’t struggle anywhere near as much.

However, the distribution I settled on (for the moment) is an EeePC specific version of CrunchBang Linux, called CrunchEEE. This has been optimised with a lean Kernel for the EeePC, and had the fastest boot time of them all, being around 50 seconds from pressing the on button to a working desktop. This sacrifice of time does yield many benefits.

For starters, it has a system tray icon allowing you to control the over and under clocking of the processor - allowing you to put it into a “powersave” mode. Perfect for word processing and put the estimated battery life up to over 5 hours. Being based on Ubuntu Intrepid, it has the benefit of allowing me to install any software that I’m using to using on my desktop machine rather than using the crippled Asus/Xandros repos.

Unlike using an off the shelf Linux distro - it also supports the Wireless/Network out of the box and more importantly my ZTE MF622 3G dongle which I have terrible trouble getting to work on most Linux machines.

After using gOS for a short period on the EeePC, and liking it, I found myself pining for a Mac-like Dock. I installed Cairo and configured it with the only applications I tend to use, all through the GUI. OpenOffice Writer, Pidgin, Skype and FireFox.

Overall, It’s certainly worth checking out as an alternative, if Xandros isn’t quite cutting the mustard for you. Thanks to Colin of the Kent Linux User Group (KLUG) for suggesting that one