The "Mini-me" tale and adventure begins in earnest

The adventure didn't start well, but now that "Mini-me" and I have settle in, we are finding that life is good.
The crucial find was the ubuntu post that finally laid out the directions to taming the Broadcom 43xx wifi beast. This WAS the key to my happiness with the little HP2133 mini-note UMPC. Yes, my primary needs had been met:

1. Able to read SDHC cards -- YES
2. Able to read and preview Nikon NEF raw files -- YES! YES! YES!!!
3. Transfer and store image files from SD cards to harddrive as secondary backup -- YES

But without wifi, my dreams of coffee shops and other "around town" hot spot surfing was crushed. You could say my needs were met but the joy of having a comfortable-to-carry PC was not realized. And really, in this day, wifi is almost a requirement.

My first real world test of mini-me didn't exactly go off with out a hitch. Turns out accessing a full 4G SD card is not a quick "turn around" experience. In fact F-stop never did come up in time to show off to the gathered audience--BUMMER! But it was a valuable learning experience and may cause me to rethink my strategy of bigger and bigger memory cards.

(Side note: don't be fooled by the x speed factor on SDHC. I paid twice the price of a normal class 6 SDHC for one that claimed x133 speed. Results are NOT noticable. In fact there was no difference in performace--at least in the camera Nikon d80. Buy the regular class 6 SDHC cards and don't pay premium prices for x??? cards)

As you may have read in the previous post, I switched OS's in favor of Ubuntu. This left me with a problem. HP did not include a restore disk. It was on the hard drive. A nice feature, but not so nice in that it was using HD space. HP redeemed itself by making available the install image. YEAH!!! Why so excited? Especially if I'm not going to use the SUSE OS? Well, out of the box, the only thing that didn't work flawlessly was the webcam and that was due to lack of software. The power management of Ubuntu 8.04 isn't handling suspend and hibernate all that well. With the install disk, I'll be able to interrogate the settings and hopefully make mini-me a happy sleeper.

Check back often or, even better, follow the RSS, as I plan to journal the adventure of UMPC computing.