The Dell Logo

Most of you probably saw my earlier rant at Dell for removing Linux laptops from their UK website last week. The post caused quite a bit of interest it seems which is always nice and I’m grateful people read and enjoyed it. There’s still quite an active discussion going on in the comments which you’re quite welcome to join in with if you like. My reason for posting this quick follow up article is to address a couple of points that came out of the discussion.

Firstly, a lot of people said I should be supporting smaller companies like System76 who really promote Linux rather then large corporations like Dell who just pay lip service to open source. This is a fair point and I do try to support smaller companies whenever I can, I’ve said many times over the last 18 months or so that I’d love a System76 machine but they don’t ship to the UK. They make really stylish computers and fully support Linux, so if you do live in the US I’d urge you to give them a look before purchasing from Dell. There’s also other US sellers like Emperor Linux who do a great job. It seems as though there are far more options available to Linux fans in America than this side of the pond and I hope people check them out rather than just going to the big boys first. In the UK we only have a couple of companies I know of who specialise in Linux hardware, Efficient PC and the Linux Emporium. I met Dale from Efficient PC at LugRadio Live 08 and he’s a lovely guy who works really hard, however there aren’t any laptops on the company’s website at the moment so I don’t know what the situation is. They do still sell great netbooks with Ubuntu installed and MythTV boxes with multimedia remotes that make great PVR solutions out of the box. Well worth a look I’d say. The Linux Emporium has a nice range of Linux laptops and netbooks, I’ve just been having a look through their site and the range seems to have expanded dramatically since I bought this Dell machine. The last time I properly looked at them must have been Christmas 2007 so I was well out of touch. I’ll be sure to rectify this situation and recommend the company to any other UK Linux lovers I know, if you’re in the UK check them out!

The other thing I wanted to mention was a change to the Dell UK website since my original post, the Ubuntu m1330n laptop has reappeared! Thanks to eagle eyed reader Grant for his comment informing me of this, I hadn’t noticed. I’m observant as ever so it’s a good job there’s somebody around to point these things out to me. It looks as though the Ubuntu Mini 12 has had to make way to accommodate the change though. This is what you can see on the Linux section (and I hesitate to call it a section) of the Dell UK site:

Dell UK Offerings Feb 12th 09

I thought I should let everyone know the machine was available again in the interests of fairness but according to many people who’ve written to me in the wake of the first article, the actual Linux models for sale at Dell UK change more often than a set of hyperactive traffic lights. It makes me wonder if they only list the machines they have in stock prebuilt and installed with Ubuntu already? This goes against the company’s business model as far as I understood it, they always promote themselves as bespoke PC builders. I’ll see what I can find out but for now I just wanted to let everyone know the Ubuntu m1330 is back, for how long though I can’t say. This is correct as of 12/02/09

Thanks to everyone who read and commented on the first article and also everyone who emailed me, your input is always greatly valued

No Laptops In Sight

Ok most of you who know me will know that I’m usually an easy going guy, I like to get along with people and have a laugh, I don’t often get mad but a few people have brought something to my attention lately which has caused me to furrow my brow and considerably raised my blood pressure. It concerns the availability of Linux laptops from Dell UK, or should I say the lack thereof. Last year I bought an m1330n from Dell with Ubuntu pre-installed because I wanted to help support both consumer Linux and a company prepared to try out something new in standing up against Microsoft. Despite a few very minor gripes over the lack of a media remote in the Ubuntu model I’ve been nothing but happy with this machine, I’m typing on it right now. For almost a year it’s rarely left my side and it’s never let me down. Someone posted recently on the Linux Outlaws forums that they were looking for a new Linux laptop in the UK so I directed them to the Dell website. It turned out through the discussion that there are no longer any Linux laptops for sale on Dell’s UK website. There’s only 3 options, 1 desktop and 2 Ubuntu netbooks, the Mini 9 and Mini 12. They’re all nice machines but they used to also sell the m1330 and Studio 15 laptops with Ubuntu. So my question for Dell is this, what’s happened to them?!

I was even told by another forum user they were given short shrift on the phone to Dell UK when trying to order one of the XPS laptops with Ubuntu. Apparently the sales representative told them they no longer sold any XPS laptops with Ubuntu in the UK. When the customer persevered and asked if they could just order the hardware with no OS they were flatly told no. An American friend checked the US website for us and confirmed the Ubuntu options there still include 3 decent spec laptops: XPS M1530n, XPS M1330n and Studio 15n. This is on top of the Mini 9 netbook and a desktop pc. The netbooks are very nice and do their job well but I’m talking about proper desktop replacements here.

Hardly At Front Of The Shop

Now, I know some people will think this is just another ungrateful Linux hippie not understanding commerce but I know exactly how the world works and that Dell exists to make money. I appreciated their efforts in supplying a top of the range laptop like the m1330 with Linux and I still do. I’ve been very positive about Dell to everyone I know in the last year or so because of this and while I’ve been upset to see the Linux machines buried in some dusty corner of the website I’ve kept it to myself, well no more. Forgive my French but this is bullshit!! Pure and simple. If it’s just a matter of not enough sales in the UK to justify offering the machines any more then fine, I’d be disappointed but I’d accept it. I understand they’re not a charity but honestly how much extra work is it to install Ubuntu on a machine instead of Winblows Vista? Ok so there’s training of staff and so on, I can see that. We’re not even asking them to go that far, just shipping the machine with no OS and letting Linux users install their own software wouldn’t be any extra work at all as far as I can see. It’s not like we were getting any discount for the Windows license, the machines were the same price as their Vista counterparts and I never complained about this, I just put my money where my mouth was and bought one. A lot of people will say “just buy the Vista model if it’s the same price and wipe it” but for me this is missing the fundamental point. Why should I pay Microsoft for software I neither want nor need and subsidize their business? “Oh you failed again, never mind, here’s some more money for nothing”. You can decline the EULA and try to force Dell to give you a refund if you like but that’s far from easy. I want to support Linux and not be treated like a 2nd class citizen for doing so, my money is as good as anyone else’s, especially in a time of apparent economic crisis.

Ok I’ll take a breath now, I apologise for venting this in public but it had to go somewhere. It’s possible that they’ve removed the old offerings while they work on new ones which will appear soon and I sincerely hope this is the case. If it is I will hold my hands up and applogise to Dell 1000 times over but for now I simply want to know… what’s up??

Greetings all. Today I’d like to tell you about my experience of upgrading the BIOS on my Dell m1330 under Linux. Regular readers of this site will already know that the m1330 notebook is my main machine at the moment. I bought it from Dell last year with Ubuntu pre-installed and did a full review with lots of pictures at the time. It’s almost a year old now and I’m still very happy with the machine, I’ve put countless different distros on there by now but it’s never complained. That was until recently when I noticed the fan had become disturbingly loud; it would run at full blast all the time, doing more in terms of noise pollution than actual cooling. I first noticed this when I installed a new version of Fedora for review a while back, I found when I moved to Ubuntu 8.04 the problem ceased so I put it down to a Fedora quirk but I was wrong. It seems this is actually to do with new temperature management features in the Linux kernel itself and Fedora was just ahead of the game in implementing that new kernel. The same problems occurred when I installed Ubuntu 8.10 and later Linux Mint 6. It came home to me just how noisy it was when a visiting friend heard my laptop whirring away and casually commented “that doesn’t sound happy”, I decided something had to be done.

My machine came with the A08 version of the Dell BIOS for this model and a quick look around the net confirmed that this was far behind the times. I discovered the newest version was actually A14 and I was 6 releases back. I’m always a bit wary of flashing the firmware on devices because of the inherent risk of bricking them and ending up with a very expensive door stop. As a geek saying that it doesn’t do my street cred any good but it’s the truth. I think that’s probably because I haven’t flashed (not like that) a BIOS in a very long time and the process involved sacrificing a lamb and saying the appropriate incantation back then, thankfully things have moved on and I was impressed with just how easy it is now. If you search the main Dell website for firmware upgrades you just end up with a list of .exe files which aren’t much use to me on Linux. I’ve heard some people saying you can use these with WINE but it didn’t sound like a very good idea to me. Again, I had a flashback to very expensive door stops, no pun intended. Fortunately I was told by my friend and colleague Fab there were .deb packages and instructions on the Dell Linux Wiki. There are guides for both Ubuntu and Debian-based systems and OpenSUSE systems. You can read the instructions there of course and they’re very good but here’s the process I went through on my Linux Mint 6 system:

• Open a terminal window and install the appropriate package from the Ubuntu repositories, it’s in the core repos so you don’t need to add any sources just type sudo apt-get install libsmbios-bin (you may be asked for the root password here)

• Next you need to get the id code of your system with this command sudo getSystemId (note the capitalization) You should see some output in the terminal similar to the screen shot below.

Getting your system ID (screen shot)

The important bit to note is the “System Id” line, you’ll need this to make sure you get the right firmware from the Dell site. In my case this was 0×0209 but yours may be different, don’t worry if it is.

• Now you need to download the HDR file containing the latest BIOS so head to http://linux.dell.com/repo/firmware/bios-hdrs/ and scroll down till you see a folder named “system_bios_ven_0x1028_dev_SYSTEM_ID_version_BIOS_VERSION“. Not the most intuitive naming scheme but the”SYSTEM_ID” section is the code you got before and you just want the highest version number. The directory is big and it takes a while to scroll down so my advice would be use the “find” function in your browser and enter the code in there. Then you can just make sure you’re at the latest version and enter the folder. Save the .hdr file somewhere convenient, I suggest your home directory but you could just save it somewhere else as long as you can remember it.

Finding your bios on the Dell site (screen shot)

• You’ll need to load the dell rbu driver to update the firmware so enter the following command sudo modprobe dell_rbu it won’t print any output but if you don’t see any error messages that means it worked and we can move on.
• Finally we need to actually use the .hdr file we downloaded earlier, so enter the following command in your terminal sudo dellBiosUpdate -u -f bios.hdr the last bit is just the location of the file, if you saved the file in your home directory as suggested that first command should work.otherwise you’ll need to enter the location you saved to.

The output of the update command (screen shot)

You should see some output in your terminal like the screen shot to the right. The very last thing you need to do is reboot your machine to complete the update, the easiest thing to do is simply type sudo reboot into the terminal you have open. Make sure you’ve saved any files you have open in other programs as this will obviously close everything and reboot the system. Upon reboot you should see the screen change a little as the new BIOS is installed. It may take a few minutes but for god’s sake don’t switch it off or anything, if you’re running on battery power then plug in and make sure you don’t run out of juice. This is the dangerous part of the process and if you leave it half done you could render your computer useless. In practice it’s very easy and not half as scary as I’m making out I found when I did it my screen went funny and instead of seeing any nice Dell install screen I just got a lot of weird colours and no readable text but I left it alone anyway. After a minute or 2 it rebooted again and I could now see “Version A14″ displayed on the boot screen. I ran the system for a while to confirm but it does seem to have fixed my fan noise problems. The system isn’t running any cooler, it’ll still burn your legs off if you’re wearing shorts (don’t ask) but at least it’ll do it quietly now.

Upgrading the BIOS was refreshingly easy I thought and while it does require some terminal commands I don’t think it’s too complicated. I’m really impressed that Dell have worked on this and got the tools into the main Ubuntu repos, installing the upgrade seems to be pretty easy in other distros as well and I’ve heard good reports from friends using Arch Linux, this is all very positive. I do wish they made it a bit more obvious for non-Windows users on their main site, I’ve also been told stories of Dell support staff who don’t know there is Linux  software to do this but overall they’re doing a good job I think. I hope this article will serve as a guide to the process for users new and if it helps one person out there then I’ll be satisfied. As always comments and thoughts are welcome so fire away

Thanks for reading,

Dan

Downgrading Instructions: Thanks to Bobby for his comment about downgrading the BIOS which I must admit I hadn’t thought of. Here’s what he had to say about it – i had the problem and was shocked that the information on bios downgrade is quite miss in any case all you have to do is follow the step up to the last one then instead of sudo dellBiosUpdate -u -f bios.hdr it would be dellBiosUpdate –override_bios_version -u -f ./bios.hdr (presuming you have downloaded the bios.hdr you would like to downgrade to you can get more details here http://bigbrovar.wordpress.com/2008/12/07/upgrade-downgrade-your-dell-bios-on-ubuntu/

Well as many of you will know I finally got my shiny new Dell XPS m1330 laptop recently and I have to say I really love it. Not everything about it is positive and I hope this will prove to be a balanced review. It’s very nice to be able to order a new laptop from a large manufacturer with Linux pre-installed, especially as a home user, it’s been an easier option for enterprise customers for a while now I think. So without further ado here’s the low down on my new laptop, hope you enjoy it…

Vital Stats:

• Processor – Intel Core 2 Duo T7250 2Ghz
• Memory – 2GB Dual Channel 667MHz DDR2 SDRAM
• Display – 13.3″ WXGA White-LED Display (with TrueLife)
• Graphics Card – nVidia GeForce 8400M GS with 256MB VRAM
• Storage – 160GB SATA drive (@5400rpm)
• Optical – 8x DVD+/-RW slot-load drive
• Wireless – Intel® Pro Wireless 3945 802.11a/b/g
• Ports – Ethernet, 2x USB2.0, Firewire, HDMI, VGA, SD card reader
• Power – 6 Cell Lithium Ion Battery
• Operating System – Ubuntu 7.10 Gutsy Gibbon

Introduction, the story so far:
This whole journey started sometime before Christmas 2007 when I decided I should replace my clunky desktop with a nice new portable laptop. Now I’ve never really owned a laptop before, I’ve always been a desktop user. That’s pretty shocking in this day and age I know but that’s just the way it’s been, I’ve had work laptops provided by employers but never actually spent my own money on one. So this was quite a big step for me. The one overriding thing in my mind was that I wanted a fully Linux compatible machine and I would not pay for an unwanted Windows licence. I was absolutey clear on that and I can be pretty single minded when it comes to these things. I looked around at the different sellers and options I had on offer as a Linux user.

I live in the UK and I found that there were probably better options for those living in the US or Canada through the likes of System76, they won’t ship to the UK sadly and it would also make the warranty pretty useless. I had a look at the Linux Emporium who offer Lenovo Thinkpads with Ubuntu and SUSE, they’re very nice but not quite as portable as I wanted. Also the price for the kind of spec I wanted was £1250 and I just couldn’t fit that into my budget. I then looked at Efficient PC who offer their Anubis laptop with it’s ASUS barebones base. It’s a nice enough machine but wasn’t quite as portable as I wanted and just didn’t do it for me. I would urge you to look at them though if you’re interested in a new laptop and you’re in the UK, it’s a great little company and just cos it didn’t suit my taste, you shouldn’t rule them out.

In fact, if I’d wanted just a portable Linux device to check my emails and do basic stuff there’s no doubt I would have gone for a black ASUS eeePC from Efficient PC. They’re lovely but I needed a proper desktop replacement for rendering audio and other such tasks.

I knew Dell were offering some machines with Ubuntu so I went and had a look at the 6400n which was the only Ubuntu laptop available in the UK at the time. It suited my meagre budget but it was a bit of a hefty beast and not the most portable. I rang Dell at Christmas and asked them if they could do me an XPS M1330 with Ubuntu or no OS at least. They were great and shipped me a machine within about 3 weeks, unfortunately though when it arrived I realized I’d been stupid not to order the more expensive WLED screen and Nvidia graphics. I returned it and by that time the new Ubuntu range of M1330′s had been announced, maybe I was more persuasive on the phone than I’d realised hehehe

So that’s what I’ve got, I just went on the site and customized the machine as I wanted, ordering in the normal way. It arrived a couple of weeks back pre-loaded with Ubuntu and now that I’ve had a proper chance to play here’s my thoughts.

Damn that was a long into sorry

Unboxing:
So what can you expect to find in the box if you order an M1330 with Ubuntu? Well, as I discovered there are some things missing compared to the standard Vista package which pissed me off a little. I’ll come to those in a moment. Here’s what I found in the box:

1 x Dell m1330 laptop with Ubuntu installed
1 x Standard Dell UK Power Adapter
1 x Thin Magnetic Clasp Dell Carrying Pouch
1 x m1330 Owners Pack containing cleaning cloth & user manual
1 x Dell Drivers & Utilities CD
1 x Packaged Ubuntu 7.10 Install CD
1 x Quick Start Guide

That’s the lot. Now the reason I say I was a little pissed is because I know for a fact the Vista model ships with a nice pair of Creative In-Ear headphones, a multimedia remote control which slots in to the side of the machine for storage and a biometric fingerprint reader. I’d had these with the first machine I sent back and I also know from friends that all of them work perfectly with Ubuntu, even the fingerprint reader. I paid pretty much the same price as the Windows machine so why exclude these things? It was a little annoying but I got over it once I fired up the machine.

SEE THE FULL UNBOXING SLIDESHOW HERE

Giving It A Boot:
Upon booting the machine I was greeted by a Dell Licence Agreement which threw me a little, what’s the licence for I thought? I don’t have the Media Direct software you get with the Windows version, so I can only think it must be for the system BIOS or maybe some drivers. Next I reached an Ubuntu splash screen and a wizard for setting up my user account, location and so on. This was essentially just like the later stages of the Ubuntu installer and it’s not something I’ve seen before, having only ever installed Ubuntu from scratch myself. It worked fine and would be perfect for most home users, personally I like to have full control over an install, setting network host name, partitioning and a few other things but most home users wouldn’t worry about that. I completed the few short tasks and was then launched into a familar looking login prompt and an even more familiar Ubuntu desktop.

It’s been a while since I’ve used Ubuntu as my main OS but I felt at home again pretty quickly, I love the Gnome desktop and the feel of the distro, even if it is brown. I was prompted that my video and wireless cards needed to use restricted drivers. This means closed source proprietary drivers, I enabled them and downloaded the updates pretty quickly. After a quick restart of the x server I had full Compiz Fusion 3D effects and it all looked very slick. I installed all the extra software I like to use easily from the Ubuntu repositories, added Skype and also got a few extra peices from getdeb.net. I have to say that’s one of the best things about Ubuntu, the community, the amount of support and documentation out there. If anything, that’s Ubuntu’s killer app, it’s not so much technical dominance, it’s odrinary joes like you and me helping each other out.

The system comes intalled with an Ubuntu image customized by Dell and I was keen to see what differences there were, if any with standard Ubuntu. There’s a link on the desktop to a Dell Ubuntu Install disk image you could burn to DVD. The actual file is located in the “/home” folder not in “/home/username”, I presume this is because you only create your user account on the initial boot, so the folder wouldn’t exist before that. Anyway, this image weighs in at a pretty hefty 5gb in size and I have no idea what it contains. When you think that the standard Ubuntu install is only one 700mb CD the mind boggles as to what all the rest of that data can be. I can’t see any changes to the standard Ubuntu desktop really on the surface. There is the addition of LinDVD which allows for legal DVD playback if you’re in the US, other than that I can’t see much at all. Maybe there are some drivers or background things included who knows. You’ll need a dual-layer DVD-R to burn that image anyway if you want a hard copy.

The 160gb hard disk has been split into the following partitions:

/dev/sda1 – FAT32 – 1.09mb – No idea what this is
/dev/sda2 – FAT32 – 5gb – I’m guessing this is the Dell recovery partition, an Ubuntu install image
/dev/sda3 – EXT3 – 138gb – Ubuntu root partition “/” where your installation lives
/dev/sda4 – Extended Partition – 5.8gb
/dev/sda5 – Linux Swap – 5.8gb

When you boot the system you can choose to reinstall Ubuntu as one of the options from the GRUB boot loader menu. My theory is that this uses the Dell Ubuntu install image, which I assume is on sda2 judging by the size. It’s nice to see that Dell have taken the time to think about this kind of thing and set the system up so they can offer some proper support. I suspect a lot of calls to the Ubuntu support line with a serious problem would end in reinstalling the system from this partition. The good old Windows support model hey, “have you tried reinstalling Windows?”

I’ll be repartioning the system when I reinstall with my usual separate “/home” and root “/” partitions. I find this a much better approach but I will probably keep a copy of the Dell install image just in case I ever want it. Everything seems to work perfectly with Ubuntu on this machine, suspend and hibernate both work. Although I’ve found that sometimes the wireless connection doesn’t wake up after hibernate and it took me a while to work out how to fix that without rebooting the machine. You have to use the following command to restart all network interfaces and it’s fine in a second or two.
“sudo /etc/init.d/networking restart”

I’ve made a shell script to do this for me and placed it on the destop so it’s nice and easy. There might even be a way to lauch it automatically after wake up but I haven’t really bothered looking into that as yet.

Overall Verdict:
I like this system a lot I have to say, I’ve now got it set up so I can use it at my desk connected to the sound system, large LCD, power and Logitech wireless desktop. At the same time though it only takes a quick tweak of the Nvidia display settings to switch back to the mobile screen and I can be off. I did have to have a look around for some tips on doing this as I have my external screen at 1440×900 and the onboard one at 1280×800. I’ve created a link on the desktop to the command “nvidia-settings” which launches the tool for me, I can then enable or disable the external screen without an X server restart. I could use separate X sessions but I find this solution works well for me. One thing to be wary of is the fact that if you don’t have your external monitor connected before launching the tool, it won’t show up in the display window, just click “detect displays” to refresh, that caught me out a bit at first.

The price of my machine was £800 delivered, give or take a few quid and I think that’s pretty reasonable, you can get a similar or possibly even more powerful spec for less money I know but not in this kind of case. The machine runs very quietly and efficiently, it’s powerful with it’s two 2ghz Intel cores and can handle almost any task I throw at it, giving a good 3hrs battery life in standard operation. You can get a larger 9 cell battery that would last over 4hrs 30mins if you prefer, I’ve even seen them for sale on eBay.co.uk for £50, not bad. The machine is lightweight to carry around, great design and I love some of the little features like the media buttons which light up on the strip below the screen as you pass your finger over them. The in-built web cam also works great with Skype 2.0 on Ubuntu. Touches like this add to the overall feeling of a quality product and I’m very happy with it.

There are some negatives that I should highlight I think in interests of balance. Mainly the differences between the Ubuntu and Windows models and the lack of a real difference in the price. The Vista model comes with a media remote, Creative headphones and fingerprint reader which this version does not. I don’t understand the reason for this, we’re paying the same price and all those things work perfectly in Ubuntu, I know they do I’ve seen them. It’s a shame but cannot take away from the fact that overall I love this laptop. I also wish to support Linux and show Dell there is a market for it, so I don’t mind paying the same even without the extra frills. I realise that the company must be spending time and money on researching Linux and adding this option to their range, I think that’s great.

If you’re in the market for an ultra portable, stylish and powerful Linux laptop then this is well worth your time I think. It’s a very desirable machine, I saw a review recently of the Vista version which said “this is the best 13.3″ notebook available without an Apple logo on it”… now with Ubuntu added I’d argue it’s actually far better than that hehe

You can checkout Dell’s Ubuntu offerings here if you’re interested

Moving on…
I have a fair bit of work to do moving things about and rebuilding my various machines in both software and hardware terms over the next week or so. I’m still intending to do that Arch Linux review though, it should be next week I hope. I’ll keep you updated. Thanks for reading, see you next time for another adventure…

Yes that’s right, a cunning plan has formed in my usually ineffectual brain over the weekend. As you’ll know if you read this blog much, I’ve just got a shiny new Dell XPS m1330 with Ubuntu installed, this is gonna by my main machine from now on. This means I can have it on the desk connected to my sound system, large LCD and Logitech wireless desktop but at the same time go mobile easily whenever the mood takes me, as it sometimes does. That’s all good and the machine seems to work great. It’s still running the Dell pre-installed Ubuntu at the moment while I review it, which I will do this week I promise. Once the review is done I’ll decide which distro I want to go for full time and rebuild it properly restoring all my data from external backups. That’ll feel really weird after 6 months of constant distro hopping I’m sure.

So now I’m left with the old desktop which is pretty powerful and in decent condition, I plan to move into my music studio to replace the almost dead machine in there now. I still want to do lots of distro reviews and I had planned to then build yet another machine for that and maybe get a KVM switch to hook up with the studio machine. It’s true that I could just use Qemu or something similar to review distributions on my laptop but for some reason I feel the only real way to review something properly is on actual hardware. I feel it’s more authentic and closer to the experience people will have when using these distros at home. Going to the trouble of building a dedicated machine just for this purpose though seems a lot of work to me and I think I’ve stuck upon a great solution.

A while back someone suggested to me I should use hard disk drive trays to swap drives easily, that way I could keep installations of different distros or even operating systems (god forbid) on the same hardware. This was in a comment to an earlier review and I apologise I can’t remember the name of the individual in question now but please stand up and take a bow

I’ve ordered 2 of these drive trays from Novatech

The plan is to fit them into my new studio machine enabling me to just pop in a new drive and install a distro when I feel like it. I can still keep my studio installation safe for whenever I need it and with hard disks so cheap these days I might even build up something of a library who knows. I would love to get all my studio gear running on Linux and it will also give me the freedom to try things out. It’ll take some time to swap all this hardware around and get settled again but in the meantime I’ll go against my gut feelings and test out some distros in Qemu. I’ll also be publishing the laptop review so hopefully I can keep the momentum going over this busy period.

I’d like to say a big thanks to everyone who’s read these articles and been so supportive to me in the last 6 months. It’s really grown into something that I never could have expected and that’s down to you guys and your encouragement. So thank you!

See you soon for the m1330 review…..