Liam on Linux

Since none of my spare or test machines have hardware 3D, I was unable to try it until recently. Then I was testing an MSI Wind Top all-in-one touchscreen Atom PC as part of the Simplicity Computers project. (We've decided against it now.)

(The Wind Top works OK with *buntu, but for one entertaining bug: the axes on the touchscreen are reversed. Move your finger left, the pointer goes right; move finger up, pointer goes down. Install the drivers and config to fix this (which depends on HAL, and so doesn't work right on modern *buntu) and the screen image moves offcentre and goes all blurry, so though the touchscreen now works, you can barely read anything, it's all ugly, and the picture is offset about 5mm vertical & 1cm horizontal from where it should be and thus where the pointer is. As it's an all-in-one, there are no screen geometry controls, hardware or software. At which point, we gave up and sent it back.)

Anyway, I got Natty alpha 3 or so working on it.

Compiz crashes more times than Aeroflot in volcano season, taking the "desktop" - not that that word is accurate any more - with it.

The autohiding menu bar is insane, combining the worst of MacOS (menus randomly changing depending which window is active and having no spacial association with whichever window they control - if they control any visible window) and the worst of the Amiga (on which menus are hidden unless you whack the mouse up to the top of the screen and then right-click.) It's about as discoverable as Minoan Linear A.

The NotADockHonest™ is weird and feels raw and unfinished, not like something that shipped as part of Ubuntu 10.04 and 10.10 Netbook Remix. I don't like it as much as the Mac OS X Dock - and I don't like that much - but I am prepared to give the Unity Dock time. Maybe I'll adapt to it.

I mean, I don't like GNOME panels much, either, after all. They're much more customisable than Windows ones, except not in the ways I want (e.g. vertical orientation (b0rked), e.g. large panels but small icons; (no, you can't have that. And you can't have any pudding, either. Bad user, no biccie.))

(Incidentally again, if you like vertical docks and panels, Docky and GLX-Dock and AWM are all broken, too. If you want a nice, attractive dock that actually works quite well in a vertical orientation, try ADeskBar. It's good. Best I've found for Linux yet. Homepage seems to be down, though.)

Mind you, after a little playing, I like the WindowMaker docks much less than OS X ones. (I mean, no labels or tooltips? You are taking the mickey, right?)

But so far, the new Ubuntu 11.04 layout, from a play with a flaky, unstable implementation, just felt like it wasn't something powerful and capable enough to run a PC with. Not yet.

I have no choice but to stick with GNOME 2 on my laptop. It's seven years old, but rock-solid and nicely fast & responsive with Maverick. Much much better than Windows XP on the same hardware. But its ATI Radeon Mobility - actually a 16MB Rage II or III, roughly - doesn't work with Compiz and to give good performance (and to be able to drive a 1280×1024 external monitor) it has to be dropped to 65K colours.

Which Ubuntu provides no UI at all to do, of course.

So you have to edit /etc/X11/xorg.conf.

Only *buntu >10.x doesn't have an xorg.conf file any more. So you have to write one of your own. (I found a blank one that can be adapted, which is very handy.)

Once you've done that and got the graphics working, then you might, perhaps, want suspend/wake and hibernate/resume to work. That means adding "nomodeswitch" to the kernel boot parameters.

That means you lose the graphical boot sequence (which has the colours corrupted on this machine, anyway.)

So you might want to add "vga=791" to the kernel boot params too, to get a graphical boot back, in the same resolution as your desktop.

After doing all this, it works like a dream and is really nice, but forget any hardware 3D, so forget the Netbook interface - or the new Unity one. And also, I think, that means forget GNOME 3, as well.

The obscure and poorly-supported make of this weirdly non-standard machine?

IBM.

Not Lenovo, actual IBM. It's from 2004. A Thinkpad X31.

Saying all that, I still prefer *buntu to the alternatives.

But I think that as of or after Natty, I might be going over to Linux Mint full-time...

Mint, of course, is based on GNOME 2 and has no truck with any of this netbook or unity or GNOME 3 business.

But what is going to happen when GNOME 2 is no longer supported or updated, I wonder?

I mean (*shudder*) I might have to go over to KDE. But the ugly, it burnsssssss... I don't want 23,452,356 options to tweak, I want it to work, and it really helps if it looks vaguely professional and smart while it's at it, not like a red/green colourblind 13 year old's LSD nightmare.

Many websites are free to use because they run adverts. That's fine. They need to pay the bills somehow and this means the content is free.

But sometimes, that advertising can get very annoying. Many ads are intrusive, deliberately, to try to attract your attention.

The thing is, you don't need to put up with this. It's quite simple to block 99.9% of web adverts, without being a techie or doing strange arcane stuff to your computer. The techniques work on Windows, Linux or Mac OS X, are easy to reverse and everything works just fine afterwards. You can even temporarily turn them off if you actually want to see an ad for some reason.

Another bonus is that it makes browsing faster, as your browser won't download all those ads. If you're on a 3G connection, it might even save you some of your bandwidth and possibly even money.

Oh, and by the way, all the tools below are free. Whatever you choose, DO NOT PAY for any allegedly privacy-enhancing tools. They're pretty much all rip-offs and not worth the money, and some are outright criminal and will steal your data and secretly send it back to HQ. Just don't.

So. Blocking ads, the free and easy way. How to do it depends on what browser you use.

If you use Firefox, it's an addon, which are all very simple to add and remove and the same ones work on Windows, Mac and Linux.

If you use Chrome, there are addons, but you can also use a universal blocker that will work with all your browsers.

For Safari and other browsers, it's generally easiest to use the universal one.

If you use Internet Explorer: seriously, don't. Don't use Internet Explorer. It is the Web equivalent of sharing a used needle with a stranger. It really, seriously is Not Safe. I am not making this up because I am not a Microsoft fan (although I'm not) – but some Microsoft tools are OK. Word is about the best word-processor there is, for example, and the combination of Outlook and Exchange Server is unbeatably powerful, too.

But Internet Explorer is not one of these. It's not a good browser – all its rivals beat it – but mostly, it is not safe. IE8 is better than 7, 7 is better than the terrible 6, and even 6 was safer than its predecessors, but seriously, none of them can be entirely trusted.

If you just want something simple, fast and easy with no frills, get Chrome. It's free and will keep you safer online as well as delivering a better experience.

If you don't like Google knowing what you're doing, use Safari or Firefox. You don't need to be a techie. Download the version for your computer, run the file you've downloaded to install it, then delete the download. Job done. Takes five minutes even if you're on a slow computer.

Saying that, if you install a universal blocker, it will block ads in IE as well. Just, please, don't use IE. There's a saying among techies: "friends don't let friends use Internet Explorer." And one of the easiest ways of telling a genuinely useful or knowledgeable techie from a clueless bluffer is that the fakers still use IE.

So, choosing a browser. If you don't know which to look at, well, here are some of the pros and cons.

Firefox: great browser. Very safe, reliable, tons of addons to customise it, but it's getting a bit big and slow these days.

Chrome: small, very fast, very simple and clean. However, Google will be able to track what you search for and some other things. Small but occasionally handy choice of extensions.

Safari: as quick as Chrome, but not quite as clean and simple. Excels at readable text. Windows and Mac only.

Others: there are quite a few minority players: Seamonkey, Flock, Camino or Shiira on the Mac, Epiphany on Linux and so on. To be honest, most don't really have any killer advantages any more and you might as well stick with one of the big names.

So, let's look at the main contenders in a bit more detail.

Firefox - http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/

The daddy and the easiest one to block ads in. All you need to do is go to the Tools menu and pick Addons. If you already have some installed, it will show you the list, which is the second tab and entitled "Extensions". Ignore this; click the first icon along the top of the Addons dialog box, which is called "Get Add-ons". In the "Search all add-ons" box, type in:

adblock plus

… and hit the Enter or Return key. Assuming you don't already have ABP installed, it should be the first entry found. Click on that line to select it and click the "Add to Firefox" button at the right.

It will download it, ask you if you're sure, install it and then prompt you to restart Firefox. Do so.

If you want to add it manually, the above makes no sense or you're using a different Mozilla browser, such as Seamonkey, you can install AdBlock Plus directly from its webpage:
http://adblockplus.org/en/

When it reloads, it will take you to a screen which asks you which filter to use. If you're a native English speaker, just accept the default and press the "Subscribe" button. If you mainly use another language on the Web – German, French, whatever – then go down the list and look for a filter list targeted at your country.

That's all you really need to do. Once you've picked a filter and the screen has gone away, try visiting a site that's usually loaded with adverts, such as www.msn.co.uk or uk.yahoo.com, and admire the newly-minimal design with occasional tasteful areas of blank white space. ;¬)

If you want to be a little more thorough, I also recommend moving the AdBlock button from the toolbar (which can get a bit crowded) to the status bar (which usually isn't).

To do this, right-click on your shiny new red "Adblock" button – it's the hexagon with ABP on it in white. On the little menu that appears, go down to "Options" and tick "Show in status bar." Then do the same again, but this time, UN-tick "show in toolbar." That's it. Now you have a discreet little red logo at the bottom right corner instead of a big lairy one on the toolbar.

Chrome - http://www.google.com/chrome

There is a version of Adblock Plus for Chrome too, if you use that as your main browser. Runs on any platform Chrome does, too. You can get it by visiting

http://chromeadblock.com/

… and just clicking the "Install" button.

(Alternatively, visit the catchily-short address:
https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/gighmmpiobklfepjocnamgkkbiglidom
...if you prefer.)

Again, you'll get a red Adblock logo in your toolbar, right next to the spanner; in Chrome, though, it shows a white hand, palm out, rather than the letters.

However, if you do use Chrome, there's a case to be made for using a system-wide blocker. You don't quite get the fine-grained control, but on the other hand, since Chrome shares its Internet setting with all the other browsers on a Windows PC or a Mac, then installing one universal blocker will nobble all the ads in all browsers.

Apple Safari - http://www.apple.com/safari/

I said earlier that Safari isn't quite as clean as Chrome. This may sound a bit vague, but there are reasons - it still has a separate "search" box, for instance. Also, it doesn't recognise some of the standard keystrokes that work on both Chrome and Firefox, such as Alt-D for the address bar or Ctrl-K to search. One big strength for Windows users ios that Safari uses Apple's own font-display methods rather than the built-in Microsoft ones. This means that Safari has the best text display of any Windows program – if you find yourself squinting or struggling when reading blocks of text, this is definitely the one to go for. Virtually no extensions at all on the PC, though. A few on its native Mac OS. Not an option if you run Linux, unfortunately.

There is a version of AdBlock for Safari, but only for certain versions on certain (recent) releases of Mac OS X. If you have an older version of either, or are using Safari on Windows, you're out of luck.

Other browsers

Opera - http://www.opera.com/

Opera is a great browser and runs on all the big platforms – Windows, Mac and Linux. It's sleek and fast and some people really love it. Personally, I find its user interface just a bit too different from everything else – I can't work out how to do the stuff I want. It has a built-in ad-blocker, but in my humble opinion, you need to be a bit of a geek and Opera expert to use it. But then, if you run Opera, you probably are a bit of a geek and an expert. It will work fine with a system-wide blocker, though – see below.

If you aren't happy with the browser on your cellphone, though, Opera is definitely the one to go for.

System-wide ad-blockers

Which brings us to the universal blocker. The biggest and best is called Privoxy (http://www.privoxy.org/) and it not only blocks ads but also makes it a bit harder for websites to trace what you're doing into the bargain, so if you're a bit paranoid, it's definitely worth a look.

The way it works is this. You install it, turn it on – this might mean you have to reboot your computer, but just the once – and then you very slightly change your Internet settings so that your browsers all talk to the Internet through Privoxy, instead of directly. Sounds a bit scary, but it's quite easy.

If you're after the Windows version, you can get the latest Privoxy from here: http://sourceforge.net/projects/ijbswa/files/

It's the link where it says "Looking for the latest version?"

If you run Ubuntu or a derivative, use the Software Centre – it's a standard component.

Unfortunately, the Mac OS X version is no longer maintained, so for now, there's no easy way to run it. If you have an Intel Mac, use Chrome and add the Adblock extension. If you have Safari 5, you might be able to install Adblock from here: http://safariadblock.com/

If you're running a PowerPC Mac with OS X 10.4 ("Tiger") or 10.5 ("Leopard"), then you won't be able to install Chrome and probably not Adblock for Safari, but you might be able to install Privoxy 3.0.10, the last version for Mac OS X – you can get it here: http://www.macorchard.com/www/Privoxy.php

Quick question for the coders and those in related fields.

What notation do you first think of for "not equals" or "is not equal to"?

[1] <> (less than, greater than - BASIC style)
[2] != (exclamation mark, equals sign - C style)
[3] ≠ (crossed-out equals sign - algebraic style)
[4] .NE. (ancient FORTAN notation for elder programmers)
[5] ¬ (does anyone use the logical-NOT sign on the PC keyboard? (Except me in smilies?))
[6] A "NOT" gate (from a circuit diagram)
[7] Wikipedia suggests that /= is also a coding notation, but I've never seen it.
[8] Anything else?

Repurposed comment I just left on El Reg.

I noticed today that RegHardware ran a review of the Desire HD, the device that finally swayed me into abandoning Symbian and going for Android. Here is my response...

I've had one since October and overall I like it.

The battery life is appalling - it lasts about six hours in normal use, which I do not regard as heavy. It's the first charge-twice-a-day phone I've owned; I now constantly carry a spare battery and a USB charging cable.

It really would benefit from simple cursor and select keys and make/end call buttons - both for ease, precision and for use with gloves, for instance. You lose the onscreen cursor keys with Swype or any other enhanced keyboard; even with these tools, text entry and editing is infuriating, slow and painful. Entering more than a short paragraph makes me shout at the device in rage.

Those whinging about its size are munchkins, hobbits or something. The Desire HD is too small, if anything! A phone should reach from ear to mouth; this thing is a good inch-plus shorter than its predecessor, a Nokia E90, and HTC's battery is just laughably tiny.

It would benefit a lot from being two to three centimetres longer with some of the extra space used for just a few physical buttons. It also really needs to be twice as thick, with a big slab of detachable battery on the back - it needs something like 3500mAh to be usable as a smartphone all day. By which I mean calls, email, social networks, GPS, some music playback, occasional Web use, etc. Even with spare batteries I daren't listen to music or run the instant-messaging client on mine - it would die in a few hours.

Of course, then the little tiny people with their little tiny child hands and tiny miniature pockets would whine - but sod them, they have an abundance of microscopic kiddie-sized hairdressers' phones to play with. Let 'em whinge.

Better still, a slide-out keyboard on a phone with a screen this big - or bigger. An Acer Liquid Metal with a half-decent keyboard and a 3500-4000mAh battery would be ideal.

But no, oompaloompas rule the mobile-phone world these days, so even we proper man-sized actual adults are cursed with phones designed for infant People Of Restricted Growth.

For comparison, my* old HTC Universal, with a third party extended battery of ±3800mAh, could last for about two and a half days on a charge. Go to work Friday morning, go away for the weekend and it was still running when you got back to the office on Monday morning and could charge it. That is a credible battery life. The Desire HD's is a joke. Yes, it was an inch and a half thick and weighed about 400g, but it was totally worth it.

---

* Well, dougs's, really. Tragically stolen. I owe him.

In case any loyal readers ;¬) missed them, I had a series of pieces on Linux server distros published last week on the Register. They ran them out-of-order; this is the sequence I intended them to go in...

• Intro: Linux servers for Windows folk: go on, give it a bash


• #1: A Linux server OS that's had 11 years to improve


• #2: A Linux server OS that's fiddly but tweakable


• #3: A young and pretty Linux server OS that takes a bit of work

2 weeks of Android phone ownership & I already really hate onscreen keyboards! & I have a big-screen phone with lots of room for a relatively big 1, too.

So my interest in alternative input methods is becoming keen.

Sadly most I've found are payware, which I'd rather avoid. A friend recommended ThickButtons but it seems not to work on 2.2: it crashes on the 1st keypress for me.

So I am trying SlideKeys. It's a weird but very clever free input method that effectively leverages 1 of the strengths of modern touchscreens: detecting drags.

But I couldn't find any instructions, so I had to puzzle it out. Here is how you use it.

SlideKeys shows you a standard phone numeric keypad, with the same arrangement of 3 or 4 letters per number as any phone. BUT the letters are in an odd pattern: arranged NSE or NSEW if there are 4.

The reason for the arrangement is key (sorry) to how SlideKeys functions.

Tap a key, you get a number, as many frustrated comments in the Android Market attest. To enter letters, tap a number, keep your fingertip on the screen & slide it off the key in the direction that the desired letter is on the key.

So, for instance, WXYZ are all on 9, arranged WNES respectively. Tap 9 for a 9. For X, press 9, keep your fingertip on the screen and slide it off upwards. It doesn't really matter how far - nice long slides seem to work best.

You type by dragging off each key. Proficient number-key typers have an edge as the letters are in the expected positions but it will take time to learn to be fast.

It's clever and it does work. It badly needs integration with Android's predictive mechanism & some method of guessing when you actually want numbers - it enters digits FAR too readily.

But for free, I'm not complaining!

UPDATE: that was pretty much all typed with SlideKeys, if it was not apparent from the odd abbreviation. I thought it was about time someone described how it worked, since when I got it, I couldn't find any such info anywhere. I get a lot of mistyped digits; I am not sure if practice will improve this, since considerable accuracy is required. It's pretty unforgiving of errors.

I think it might also better suit very small screens - its square window is huge on my Desire HD & leaves only ½ the screen visible.

I've not covered installation or activation as I don't know if these vary from phone to phone.

But, still, a clever, novel & viable alternative text input method, entirely free, is not to be sniffed at.

A hint: tap the Alt button to cycle through punctuation and caps and back to normal text. Slide up from the Alt button to turn on Caps Lock; slide down across it to turn it off.

It automatically capitalises the letter after full-stop+space but doesn't capitalise "I" or any other words on its own & there are no predictions or suggestions, sadly.

Posted via LjBeetle

I think it might have done quite well.

OTOH, and I loved OS/2 - I have spent more cash on OS/2 than all other PC software put together in my entire computing life; possibly more than on anything except Spectrum games, and maybe more even than that! - but even as a fan, it was a pig to install, a pig to network, a pig to install drivers, etc. etc.

When I tried the Windows 4 beta, I was dazzled. THIS is how it should be. It Just Worked, and setup & tweaking was a dream. Explorer, so elegant! Device Manager - I nearly wept for joy. No 2000-line CONFIG.SYS file! No separate windows for the directory tree and the directory contents!

WPS, elegant & sophisticated? My arse it was. Half-assed Mac ripoff.

And for all OS/2's alleged reliability, Fractint could kill it easily, the whole machine. Win95 was no better, and as the 32-bit apps & shonky drivers piled up, considerably worse. Then came the horrors of Win98. And SE. And ME.

But at first, even the beta of Windows 4 was about as good. And DOS drivers worked at a push. And DOS games and things. The long-filenames-on-FAT hack was a hack, but it *worked*. Make a long filename on HPFS, look for it from a DOS window or WinOS2 - gone! Invisible! You can't have it, mate, tough.

Then they hacked that to give us FAT32, and lo, it worked and was just like the old days. Incremental steps, no big bangs.

But when the state of the art was the horrors of Windows 3.x on DOS - even DR-DOS, optimised until it bled with QEMM - or the driver-less and app-less incompatible nightmare of NT 3.1 or 3.5 (if you could afford a £2500 PC to run it well) - OS/2 really actually was "a better DOS than DOS, a better Windows than Windows".

But I still wonder... If OS/2 1 had been a 386 OS, and had swept away Quarterdeck QEMM and DesqVIEW, killed the infant BSD4.4-Lite on 386, ensured that Windows 3.0 had been aborted... If it had used V86 mode to flawlessly multitask DOS apps, boot DOS and its drivers off a floppy for those troublesome programs for near-perfect compatibility...

Well... Program Manager and File Manager, which in the 1990s everyone thought were Windows 3.0 innovations but actually came from OS/2 1... They weren't so bad. I kinda liked them, actually. Had them tuned for a very efficient, convenient GUI. Loads of custom hotkeys for launching and switching apps, which always damned well worked, unlike on Explorer when if Windows was narked it would just ignore you, or launch 876 extra copies of your app then fall to its knees and die.

It coulda been a contender. In 1987, we knew no better. We might have gone for it.

But knowing what I do now about OS/2 2 compared to Windows 95... I am not sure that we were not a whole lot better off with what we got than what might have been.

I remember impotently screaming abuse at a Warp Connect box, just trying to get it on my LAN and on the Internet via dial-up at the same time. Either Win95 or NT 3 were vastly better than that.

OS/2 was, in a horrible way, more DOSsy than DOS. Everything was hand-configured in a vast ASCII config files, which you had to hand-massage into perfection with excruciating care. Then, if you were particularly masochistic, optimise for performance. I never did get Warp 3 to drive the graphics cards and the sound cards of my two 486 laptops at the same time. One or the other, but not both. And one of them was a bloody IBM!

I would in an odd way have liked to see OS/2 thrive, but you know... Despite my irrational nostalgia for it, on the whole, when Windows 95 gave us plug-and-pray, I mean, plug-and-play, and power management and suspend/resume and so on, and then NT4 gave us a vaguely modern GUI... Then Windows 2000 brought it all together into a single whole, which if not exactly seamless by any means, did slap enough makeup on Frankenstein's Monster to make it look presentable...

Sorry to say it, but I think we were better off.

I know, heresy, praise for Microsoft from one of the "Linux Taleban". Shocking.

Of course, after that it all went a bit wrong. I know everyone loves XP in hindsight, but with all the bloat, I wasn't and am not so sure. Themes? Really? Do I need that? I know, I can oh-so-intuitively switch to Windows Classic in Display Preferences, then run SERVICES.MSC and stop the THEMES service and disable it... But I can't uninstall Movie Maker or IE or any of the other cruft, no way José. I can't move the hibernation file to another drive or partition.

Then came Vista and we learned to love XP.

Then came 7, and everyone loves Windows again, except for those of us who found it handy to run a command-line app full-screen occasionally.

I think I'll stick to Linux, thanks.

It appears I am not a Real Man in yet another way. (Despite the new beard.) My attempts to resurrect my old Thinkpad i1200 series (one of the iffy ones made by Acer under licence) resulted in total failure to get either PC-BSD or Debian 5 running properly. (Or Lubuntu, Puppy or any Ubuntu after 6.06.)

PC-BSD 8.1 uses KDE 4.5 which looks a bit nicer than previous KDE 4 iterations, but it's too much for a P3-750 with 320MB of RAM. I got 7.1 working well, if slowly, but 8.1 did not initialise my Xircom Realport Ethernet card and it didn't show in the GUI. No Internet connection means no use at all in this day and age.

Debian 5 went on fine, but the screen res was wrong and unchangeable, and it didn't find my soundcard. My attempts to upgrade to testing or unstable completely b0rked the install, too.

But to my pleased surprise, Crunchbang 9.04 went on without a glitch. Had to hand-tweak xorg.conf to get the screen res up from 800*600 to 1024*768, but that also afforded me the chance to drop it from 24-bit colour to 16-bit colour for one speedup, then later to disable DRI for another, bigger speedup.

I'm just worried about the age of #! 9.04. There was no later release and the new version, based directly off Debian instead of Ubuntu, is still in alpha-test and has been since late June. Come on, guys, get with the program!

I also note that Linux Mint looks inclined to jump ship from Ubuntu to Debian, having just released the first edition of LMDE: Linux Mint Debian Edition. It's GNOME-based, so a bit much for the old Thinkpad, but I shall be giving that a whirl very soon.

Apparently, Ubuntu's single-minded quest to become as polished (and somewhat Mac-like) as possible is increasingly alienating people. It seems some of the tweaks are harder and harder for remixers to work around. (A trivial example of my own: there's no separate panel volume control any more; it's part of the new unified Indicator Applet, which also interacts with Empathy and Gwibber. But I don't like or use Empathy, preferring Pidgin, and barely use Gwibber. To paraphrase an old Frankie Goes To Hollywood T-shirt - MARKIE SAYS: TOUGH.)

AKA Good tech, bad tech, how to win big

I spent some time a few days ago playing with an iPad an an iPhone 4, courtesy of jamesb and Mrs B. They really are lovely devices, a gorgeous combination of great industrial design and some truly excellent software and HCI work. Very impressive indeed. The iPad will be even more impressive and versatile when it gets "iOS 4", as Cisco is nobly allowing Apple to call it.

But I still don't want to own either of them. The phone is a bit too closed and I don't want to have to void my warranty and jailbreak and unlock either device just to run whatever I want on them. I also do rather want at least the option of Flash, Java and so on. Most of the applets on my Communicator are Java MIDlets.

For a while, I've been thinking that I would like an iPad clone, but running Android, with a couple of USB ports for slave devices and a host port for connecting to a PC, and perhaps a multiformat card reader or two built in, both for sucking pics off a digital camera and for adding additional storage, or for standalone backups. Oh, and replaceable batteries. Maybe even two of them, so you could hot-swap them when it was running, or run with just one for minimal weight.

Same sort of formfactor, same sort of functions and UI, but a bit more open. Not some little 5" or 7" thing but a full 10" or so, maybe even a bit more in a widescreen format.

But then I realised something.

One of the main uses for such a device is reading eBooks and so on, and one of the places I'd most like to use it, especially in summer, would be sitting in the park or in a beer garden or the like, places I wouldn't carry a laptop just to read or surf.

And in bright sunlight, TFT screens are useless. They wash out into invisibility.

Which made me think of the ideal combination: an Android (or WebOS) tablet with an ARM chip - perhaps an nVidia Tegra - and a Pixel Qi screen.

Pixel Qi is the standalone screen company selling the technology used for the OLPC project's XO-1 laptop - the famed $100 laptop. Its unique thing is that with a backlight, it's a normal colour LCD screen, but in bright external light, you can turn the backlight off and use it in reflective mode - like the ancient mono LCDs of the 1980s. Most of the colours wash out, but the resolution is very high, for crisp text, and with no backlight, your battery life goes up several times over.

It's the ideal combination. Thin light ARM-powered device - I could not be less interested in an Atom-powered slate with Windows 7, I want the thing to be thin, light and last all day on a charge and I don't want or need x86 and a desktop OS - but a screen that works outdoors and gives even longer battery life.

Now that, I might buy.

P. S. Aficionadi of this market might point at Notion Ink's Adam at this point, as demonstrated late last year, but nine months later it's still not on the market, so it hardly counts.

Those who don't read Twitter or Facebook may be unaware of the series on Linux I've done for The Register this week (amongst other stuff).

So here are some links...

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/06/21/reg_linux_guide_1/

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/06/23/reg_linux_guide_2/

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/06/24/reg_linux_guide_3/