Doom for the Zonbu – Top 10 games of all time?

So I’ve been thinking about the performance capabilities of the Zonbu.

A 1.2 GHz machine, not long ago, was a kick ass bit of kit. I gamed on much more humble machines “back in the day”.

Even today, as we’ve discovered in this blog, you can do some pretty heavy lifting and multitasking with the Zonbu, despite what some of the casual reviewers suggest.

Which got me thinking, some of the best PC games I ever played were on much slower systems. And many of them are now open source…

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The Zonbu & power outages

A few minutes ago I wanted to reboot so I could continue my Skype testing.

Instead, to simulate the all-to-frequent-here power outages, I decided to just hit the master power switch (the rocker on the back) while I was in full swing.

[EDIT: It is worth noting, that given its tiny power draw, the Zonbu could last 6-10x longer on a UPS than an equivalent desktop PC.  Likely outlasting most common outages.]

At the time, I had the IM client (Gaim) open, as well as Skype running and an IM going in there. I also had about six browser windows open, Rhapsody playing music and I was testing the Evolution E-Mail client, and had that open to my test mailbox…

Strange input delay in Skype IM

[EDIT: This is interesting, I’ve had Skype open for more than an hour and now there is no visible delay between hitting enter and text appearing. If I get a chance, I’ll reboot and try again. I definitely had the delay on multiple occasions before.]

[EDIT 2: I rebooted – the delay is definitely back.]

I continue to attempt to use my Zonbu as my home desktop, and while it is far from perfect is this regard, it has promise…

My new USB KVM switch arrived today, making use considerably easier…

Freespire 2.0 is now available

I just saw this over at www.DistroWatch.org:

“Freespire 2.0 has been released: “Freespire 2.0 is immediately available; the latest version of the free desktop Linux operating system. Building on the best of open source software using Ubuntu as its baseline, Freespire 2.0 adds legally licensed proprietary drivers, codecs, and applications in its core distribution, to provide a better user experience. Freespire is able to provide improved out-of-the-box hardware, file type, and multimedia support, such as MP3, Windows Media, Real Networks, Java, Flash, ATI, NVIDIA, WiFi, and many more. Freespire is also the first desktop Linux operating system that will include a CNR plugin for the soon-to-be-released new CNR Service, providing free one-click access to thousands of open source applications.” Read the full release announcement for more information. Download: 2.0.0_full-feisty….iso (688MB, MD5); also available via BitTorrent.”

I think I’ll try this on the old Duron 1.1 machine and see how it compares.

-Mr. Zonbu

PS – CNR stands for Click-and-run which is a slick package manager that Freespire uses to help non-technical users install new applications.

DLS muses on the Palm Foleo

Downloadsquad has a little piece today on the Palm Foleo.

This musing caught my eye:

“Well, as with any computing device, it turns out the Palm Foleo will only be as good as its software. And the more we hear about the software available or the Foleo, the more we warm up to this little device. First of all, the Foleo runs Linux, which means you might be able to slap some custom software on there in addition to the default applications…”

Read more over at DownloadSquad.com.

-Mr. Zonbu

Zonbu Storage Update & Response To Zonbu questions

I wrote yesterday about my experience with the Zonbu S3 online storage model.

A member of the Zonbu team read the post and provided a lengthy response, asking a number of questions to help determine if there is an issue.

I’m going to formally respond here so the relevant items are outlined and updated…