May 2010 – TheBlindCow

I haven’t found the laptop of my dreams yet (yes, I’m a romantic, probably I should write some series about How I Met My Laptop when I’m done) but life has not stopped, au contraire, it just kept moving on.

For starters, I spent last week with the KDE Edu and KDE Multimedia teams in Randa where we gathered to get our projects some steps forward. Personally it was a great experience, I was actually looking forward to discuss some issues with the KDE Edu people mostly and I think we did great, we’ll see how it turns out in the future but I’m quite optimistic about it :). Also I could meet Percy, our new KAlgebra contributor in person, so we could discuss about some technical issues we found and about how are we going to rule the world in the future. 😀
On the other hand, with my Kamoso developer hat on, it was a nice experience also to get to talk to some VLC developer to sort our problems out which is going to mean a new version soon. \o/ Great, and kudos to Alex who is doing some really tough work (VLC has bugs too! we had a hard time to realize that). And last but not least it was great to be able to show KDevelop to some KDE developers who had not realized its awesomeness yet, I even think I convinced some of them so, yay us!

Other than that, I keep working on my GSoC, I’ll have some flash visit home tomorrow and much more to come :D.

Hi!
So after last Akademy-es (which was great BTW \o/) I realised that I have to find a new laptop since the current is basically broken in many ways.

I’m writing this blog post for 2 reasons, as a reivindication and as a call for help.

The Reivindication: I’m sure I’m not the first one who finds himself in that ugly position where you’re a Free Software hacker and have to pay you want or not for a Win7 license. That sincerely sucks in many levels, it’s hard to get to be a proud and solid community when you feel like all the industry is denying you exist. In fact I think that hackers should be a good market (they fix their computer themselves, everyone asks them to know what’s the best computer,…) but the truth feels far from that, apparently the segmenation is netbooks, businessmen and hardcore gamers. Well then, the reivindication is this: why isn’t there any company that would let our community be part of their market?
Why isn’t there any of such free hardware initiatives in Europe? (which sells laptops, of course)

The Call for Help: I’ve looked through all the important brands, even if I consider to pay for the windows license (even if I hate to do so) I still can’t find anything I’d be comfortable with. I want something at least GNU/Linux-friendly and not too heavy to carry around everyday but still scales up to my usual KDE hacking. Most laptops claim to be “good for business” which is some concept I just fail to understand, does anybody know what’s appropriate for my use case? (of course budget is limited as a student’s :P)

Thanks!

EDIT: Needs, well I need to be able to compile KDE there for sure. I was wondering if some of these ULV processors would be fine. I don’t do any gaming so for graphics intel is just fine, I just need something where KWin works properly.

Month: May 2010

Buzzing

Being a hacker

my projects

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