Sunday 14 September 2008

Welcome One And All


A warm welcome to pretty much anyone who has stopped by to take a look !

OK what's this all about ? Well, I recently took delivery of one of these little gems pictured on the left I signed up to a USB mobile broadband deal with Carphone Warehouse and was offered this item ffor "free" if i extended the minimum contract period and paid them another tenner (in effect, getting an interest free loan from them to buy the thing what was available for sale for about £250.

You can read the low-down on this item here which I believe is the website of one of the software designers. I wish them well but I have to say I have become seriously disappointed since taking delivery of the item in question. It arrived equipped with their 'port' of the ubuntu linux operating system, and no factory reinstall process. And that, you can say, is where my problems have sprung from. Because twenty years in the IT business has led me to believe that a man with no backup is a fool.

And no sooner had I worked out how to back up the system in a way I could understand, than the web book's hard drive went south for the winter. I really don't know what happenned, all I know is that I turned it on expecting to see the login prompt and instead received a string of 'grub error 2" / "grub error 15" messages and when I finally worked out how to hook up a 'rescue' system, the disk was reported to have about a zillion errors on it.

Time for a rethink. Do I fancy a two hour phone call to Elonex Software Support at £1 a minute to the phone line advertised on their site ? Not really. Do I fancy fighting it out with Carphone Warehouse under the Sale of Goods Act ? Well, they already refused my right to cancel the contract enshrined in BRITISH law when they failed to deliver the damn USB dongle for a week, so that shows you what they lhink of the law.

If the developers read this and see how their business partners are treating their customers and want to do something useful about it, drop me an email or leave a comment (!) I'm sure we can do something under the GPL to sort matters out for anyone in the same shitty position as I am, but who has LESS technical knowledge...

But MY answer is to start over and load this hardware with a version of the OS I know and trust. Arch Linux

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