I left my Zonbu on at home today to download the latest Ubuntu ISO. Since its almost 700 MB, and in high demand, it took around an hour. I headed back to work before it was done. As I’ve said before, the Zonbu makes a really energy efficient download host.
Only one problem. When I got home at the end of the day, my machine was frozen. Odd.
I rebooted it, and when I went to login it took about 1.5 hours to take me to my desktop. I wandered over and did an ALT-F1 to read the console and it appeared to say something about corrupted S3 cache, but it wasn’t at all clear. The main graphical window actually had no update at all. I’m still not sure what was happening or why it couldn’t let me on to the desktop and do any data synch post desktop initialization.
If there is a process that needs to complete in the event of a previous crash, then some kind of percentage progress meter needs to be displayed to say what is going on, and ideally after the desktop is started. Average end users are going to think their device is bricked with the current approach.
These are the kinds of rough edges Zonbu needs to polish off before the Christmas season.
-Mr. Zonbu
Real life with the Zonbu Mini-PC 
I’ve had a couple of crashes in a similar “Why have you done that?” situation, but the recovery time has been a lot quicker (my S3 is only about 3GB). It is a bit disturbing though, and for the Grandma user, I guess that holding down the power key to kill the machine is quite drastic. It also lost my keyboard (back to the blasted American version) and desktop picture. There was talk of a crash reported being built into this version – but I didn’t notice it pop-up. Anyone else?