A brief update & Putty tips

You’re all probably wondering what happened to me; work, essentially.

I had to go to the Cayman Islands on business, and was away for a week.  I’m back in my tropical island lair now and hope to get some big updates out this week.

In the mean time, let me say this, with the latest update the Zonbu has become even more useful and it really is starting to replace my PC for all my day-to-day tasks.  When I started this blog, I set out to see if that was feasible, and I have to say the Zonbu is performing admirably at 80% of what I need during the week.  The lack of webcam support is still a black mark against it, but if you know someone who has web centric needs, or just wants an affordable and relatively painless device to access the web, the Zonbu is it.

I’ll elabtorate in more detail soon, but with all the media support built-in, OpenOffice present and configured to launch attachments, as well as some basic music and photo mangement tools, as well as CD burning functionality – it is hard to beat for the money.

Putty Tips

Before I forget, one of the new “hidden apps” is Putty, the SSH/Telnet client.  You can access it via ALT-F2 and typing “putty” in place of the default text.  Putty sports a phonebook so it can remember all your entries.

By the way, a “grande merci” to the Zonbu team for slipping Putty in for Mr. Zonbu and all the other network admins out there.

Tip #1 – To access the context sensitive menu from within a session, use ALT-Right Click.  This will allow you to open duplicate sessions, reset the terminal and do a few other hand things (like copy the entire scrollback buffer in to the clipboard).

Tip #2 – This is one I use ALL the time.  To do a quick cut and paste, simply highlight any text in the Putty session window, make sure your cursor is positioned at the desired target location and hit the middle mouse button to paste back the highlighted text.

More soon.

-Mr. Zonbu

PS – Today I twice experience crashes running my favorite screen saver (the one where your desktop is mapped on to a fluttering flag).  I have no idea what the issue was, full lockup.  I haven’t seen that before on my home Zonbu.

PPS – Performance is starting t be a minor issue now that I have all but stopped using my desktop PC for my day-to-day work.  A lot of the new Flash sites, including video, tax the Zonbu to 100% CPU.  It may be that a mildly faster processor is needed to really hit the sweet spot.  And I reiterate my earlier suggestion of 1 Gig of RAM with half reserved for the OS/Application stack loaded in memory, as well as the video card shared memory with the other half for regular system RAM/tasks.

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