THAT’S RIGHT KIDS!!!1!!ONE!!!

It’s a massive overhaul of the current dashboard…actually no…it’s a totally new dashboard I’ve had a poke and a prod around various sites, and it does look quite funky (and yes - the Wii style avatar things are true, but they don’t look that bad actually).

I’m really quite looking forward to it, hopefully it won’t be ridiculously slow when it’s finally released (I can think of a certain (read: current) release that can be painfully slow at times…)

I also found a link to what looks like a genuine (if somewhat small) gallery of images for the new dashboard.

ShackNews Gallery: http://www.shacknews.com/screenshots.x?gallery=10254&id=122358
Wired Blog Post: http://blog.wired.com/games/2008/07/pics-xbox-360s.html

Official Xbox.com Announcement: http://www.xbox.com/en-GB/E3-2008/nxe.htm

Now this is a surprise for me writing this!

I used to hate emesene, I didn’t like the way it functioned, I hated the constant updating (it’s still a little bit annoying, but at least the updates aren’t even half as slow as a certain other OS’s updates (read: Windows <All Versions> ;))) and I just generally preferred aMsn, maybe I preferred that slightly because I compiled it from source, whereas emesene was a simple “sudo apt-get install emesene” - who knows (or cares).

But I’m now using it, and I’m just in the middle of editing my .conkyrc file (any excuse to use Vim…) And I’ve got another couple of posts in the works which should appear in the next day or so.

Good to be back!

I’ve just had a look over at TalkToshiba (I’m wondering if they have any small/portable notebooks for a trial…hint hint…) and I notice that my blog is listed there on their “sidebar” - admittedly it is at the bottom, but still, it’s nice to have some publicity, especially from there

Anyway, if any of you guys from TT are reading this, let me know if you have some small/portable laptops for a trial (15″ or less ;))

Yes that’s right - I had a fiddle with the power settings on my Ubuntu installation earlier

I’m pleased to say that suspend works great with my laptop Which I’m sure will come in useful while moving between lectures at Uni when I go back.

Not much else to say really, I’m just glad it works! Holiday next week, so no posts for around 2 weeks

I’m sorry I’ve not posted much recently, it’s mainly because I have quite a bit going on currently, so I’ve not really had time. I’ll be moving house at the end of this month/beginning of July, but I’ll try and post something up after then

Until then!

So people can become Ubuntu Members (as I’m sure the title of this post suggests, and many of you reading this will probably already know).

If you want more detail, I’m too lazy to explain, so you can visit the webpage detailing the process here. Basically it gives you recognition within the community, and entitles you to an @ubuntu.com email address amongst other things.

I’ve already signed the Ubuntu Codes of Conduct (CoC), so I figured I may as well try for membership. I figured I’ll try the next time it comes up (the next EU meeting is tomorrow, and I wouldn’t be able to make it). They require you to have a wiki-page as well, so I’ve even had to delve into the wicked world of wiki-editing

I just came across a pretty nice website about Ubuntu, I actually mainly wanted to mention it because I love the theme on it, it looks very nice (while keeping Ubuntu style colours - which to some may just mean “brown”).

Anyway you can find it at http://www.ubuntustory.com

Gaming

Sorry for the delay between the last part and this part - I was ill, and GTA IV was released

So anyway, I have no screenshots, as the laptop has been formatted in order for it’s return later today. However I can say that apart from the very latest games, such as Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare (CoD4) etc. This laptop managed to run everything on full settings.

The games I tried out on the laptop (albeit briefly tried) were:

• The Sims 2 (incl. Nightlife)
• Command & Conquer 3 Kane Edition
• CoD4
• Black & White 2
• Half Life 2/Counterstrike Source
• Unreal Tournament 2004

For a little run down of the games and how they looked and performed, click below

Sims 2

This ran very well, as I expected it would, however I did find that there was an issue with the particular graphics card in the laptop, which caused the game to stop displaying anything. However when this ocurred Vista recovered the driver and play could resume normally. Overall a decent experience however.

C&C 3

Now I’ve been a fan of C&C games for a LONG time, I even have the 1st one in it’s original packaging somewhere! I enjoyed playing this game on full settings, it made it feel like a totally different game (normally when I play it on my own laptop I have to play on low settings :’(). That said, I thoroughly enjoyed playing the game on this laptop, there was no lag whatsoever, I’ll miss playing it at such a high screen resolution on full graphics.

CoD4

Now this game is only around 8 months old I believe (I can’t remember exactly), so I didn’t expect it to perform quite as well as the others, knowing how large the game is (I have it on Xbox 360). I was quite correct in my thinking as well as it turns out. Though the laptop will play the game on full settings at 1920×1200, it runs slow and isn’t really that playable. Needless to say I only tried the training level (again - I’ve completed it on the Xbox 360). So this is my basis for not recommending brand new games on the machine.

Black & White 2

I’ve never been able to play this game on full settings on any of the PC’s I own, so to do so at the full HD screen resolution was brilliant. The game was still good, and the fact the graphics were a massive improvement over any time I’ve played the game before was just a huge bonus. It improved the desire to play to say the least. Sadly I never got time to finish the game while I had the laptop (mainly because I somehow managed to corrupt the Windows install so had to use the recovery disc :p)

Half Life 2/CS: Source

I never really played Half Life 2 all that much, but I can say that it looked good (I’m not the biggest HL fan to be honest). However I did give CS: Source quite a bit of play time. I enjoyed it, the graphics were a lot better than the last time I played it I had a laugh while playing it online, and miraculously it didn’t kill my router

Unreal Tournament 2004

I’m a big fan of this game as well I literally had all the settings maxed out - and little something I never managed to find in UT2004 before (I’ll possibly tell you what it was another time if you ask nicely). And I enjoyed playing it, ran perfectly smoothly, I even got some online play in (I didn’t know there was still servers for it!) I’m still waiting on UT3 for the Xbox 360

HD DVD Playback

As I mentioned in part 1 of this review, the Qosmio has a HD DVD-R Drive Now as I have a few HD-DVD’s, I figured I would try this out. Especially given that it also sports a Full 1080p HD Screen!

So I popped in the HD DVD (The Matrix if you must know) and the HD DVD player launched. I have to admit, this slowed the system down a little, and changed the theme to Windows Vista basic, however I expected this, as playing HD content requires a lot of processing power.

I should also mention that if I paused the movie, and minimised the player window, I was able to do other things (i.e. yesterday I was torrenting the new Ubuntu 8.04 release all day).

So, overall, combined with the killer audio system, the HD DVD playback was brilliant, the images were sharp, black’s were very dark etc. I think the sharpness of the image was helped a little by the small 17″ screen - It’s small when you consider I watch HD movies on a 37″ screen usually - however I can’t really say much more than this, other than the playback was flawless So I’ve attached some screenshots, though I don’t know how good the image quality will be, I know it won’t do justice to the HD images

Ubuntu Linux

Yes that’s right, I managed to get Ubuntu installed on this machine. I installed Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy Heron) as it was at the Release Candidate (RC) stage when I tried it.

It all runs perfectly smoothly. I had to change the boot options on the installation CD, due to the Nvidia graphics card, which needed a proprietary driver. This was the most painful part of the installation, as on a screen with a native resolution of 1920×1200, I had to run at 800×600 :’(

After that it was all smooth sailing, I compiled a few apps, and used it as I would my own. Everything worked just fine, I was impressed that the volume control (the disc “thing” on the left of the keyboard) even worked! Sadly the touch buttons didn’t work, but I expected this, as I know they’re controlled by software and not hardware.

I didn’t manage to get the fingerpint reader to work either, which I wasn’t too fussed about, but it would’ve been nice. Overall I was impressed with the Linux experience I had with the Qosmio. The battery life didn’t differ from Windows, though it doesn’t on my own laptop either.

So overall, the Qosmio does actually work pretty well with Ubuntu in my experience, I wasn’t expecting much because Toshiba laptop can be notoriously difficult to get working properly (just read through some of the threads in the UbuntuForums ;)).

There are also some pictures of the qosmio running Ubuntu if you would like to take a look :