Moley's Musings

These two articles are worth a read to keep informed as to how Microsoft has maintained it's position and undermined the position of others over the years, as their business model, rather than to just compete product to product.

http://www.ecis.eu/documents/Finalversion_Consumerchoicepaper.pdf

http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20090421111327711

In a nutshell, it is the playground bully taken to extremes that most ordinary people would just not begin to understand. Reminiscent of Jonas Cord in the novel 'The Carpet Baggers'.

Like most people, I cherish my freedom and the freedom to make my own choices. I strongly resent those being taken away from me, in whatever manner, having been brought up in the aftermath of the Second World War. I also mourn the loss of integrity that pervades our way of life now, as a norm.

For the first time since I bought my Lenovo S10e and Installed Win7 and Ubuntu I have been experiencing issues. However, today, in the new page for the Ubuntu 9.04 Release Candidate, I think the issue has been identified.

In my first two attempts to re-install the Beta of UNR 9.04, I elected to use the Ext4 file system and was twice locked out of my system and had to go through the laborious process of restoring my hard drive from an earlier image. I thought perhaps the problem was with hibernation or the QGrubEditor programme.

Note that imaging a Netbook is a very slow exercise.

In my third attempt to re-install the Beta of UNR, I decided to revert to the Ext3 file system and not use QGRUBEditor or to try hibernating, and all has remained satisfactory.

Quote from Ubuntu

"Switching to ext4 requires manually updating grub

If you choose to upgrade your / or /boot filesystem in place from ext2 or ext3 to ext4 (as documented on the ext4 wiki), then you must also use the grub-install command after upgrading to Ubuntu 9.04 to reinstall your boot loader. If you do not do this, then the version of GRUB installed in your boot sector will not be able to read the kernel from the ext4 filesystem and your system will fail to boot."

So I guess all my woes were caused by not doing 'grub-install' after the installation since Grub was already installed on my system. However, I'm reluctant to try to hibernate again because it is too time consuming to recover. The same goes for adopting Ext4 at this time.

Yet I'm not sure that I have really identified cause of my woes.

Another irritation with my Netbook is a recent tendency of the keyboard to fail initiate at boot or reboot time. I have installed the latest bios in the hope that this will resolve the issue - otherwise it'll be a warranty issue. Time will tell.