Episode: 2007
Title: HPR2007: My new laptop
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr2007/hpr2007.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-18 13:13:58

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This is HPR episode 2007 entitled, My New App Top.
It is hosted by Dave Morris and in about 17 minutes long.
The summer is, I won an Entra-Air App Top Top Top Camp 2015, I talk about it here.
This episode of HPR is brought to you by An Honesthost.com.
Get 15% discount on all shared hosting with the offer code HPR15, that's HPR15.
Better web hosting that's Honest and Fair at An Honesthost.com.
Hello everyone this is Dave Morris, I'm going to tell you the story of my new laptop today.
Well I went to Ogcamp in Liverpool at the end of October 2015 and I did what I normally
do, which is going by some raffle tickets.
It's always wrecking, it's a way of contributing towards the expenses of the conference or
unconferences as it really is.
And I didn't pay a huge lot of attention to the prizes and never that much of a raffle fan
in terms of expecting to win anything.
But anyway, the star prize this time was a laptop donated by the company called Entra-Air
Limited and they were also a significant sponsor of the event and there the laptop was one of
the most impressive prizes ever offered at Ogcamp.
There'd been some nice prizes, there was a Nexus 7 few years ago which caused quite a lot of
excitement but this was this was really something special.
So there was a lot of excitement about this and a lot of comments and jokes about who
was going to win it.
So on the Sunday, which was the last day of the proceedings, I went to the final parts of
the final events of the conference and the drawing of the raffle was the sort of highlight.
Dan Lynch, who was there, Dan Lynch was from the Linux Outlaws as was and he'd not been very
well so he'd not been very much around but it was great to see him in attendance overseeing the
raffle ticket process.
By the way, I've linked to Dan's blog in my notes because he's been unwell and has had
some major surgery lately and if you know about Dan might be good to go and check out his
his blog to see stuff about what's been happening to him.
Anyway, so things got pretty tense as the drawing got close to the end and attention got very,
very high when the first number was drawn for the laptop and was called and everybody was sort
of looking around who's got this, who's got it and nobody responded.
Whoever had bought that ticket was not in the room so the only thing to do is to draw again
and another number came up and you can imagine my shock and surprise when I realized that
I had the winning ticket. I'd won the star prize of the old camp raffle.
In fact, I was so stunned that I've never won anything like this. I was hardly paying attention
to what I had in my hand. I just had the Sheeper tickets there and JWP was sitting beside me
sort of pointed at, hey Dave, you've actually won. I could hardly believe it.
Anyway, the process involved being awarded this laptop and having my picture taken
in that sort of stuff. There are pictures available on various media but I haven't pointed at them.
So if you really want to see them, I'm sure you can find them.
So let me tell you about the laptop then. The company entryway limited based in Liverpool
and they sell Ubuntu Linux computers of various sorts, laptops and small desktops and I think
a steam steam machine as well. They were there demonstrating their stuff at OgCamp and it looked
really nice. The model I've got is called the Kratos K-R-A-T-O-S. I've linked to it on their website
in the notes. It's a grey colour, dark grey colour and the case has got a sort of brushed metal
look to it. So the specifications on the entryway website have changed a little from the model
that I've got. I think it's been upgraded a bit since I got this one but and you can get it
with other processes. I think now quite a range of processes and configurations. I was interviewed
on the TuX Jam podcast on the two back. January I think they did it and with Kevin McNalo and one of
the questions they asked was whether I'd recorded an HBR show about the laptop and if not why not.
Which prompted me to put together this episode so thanks to them for that suggestion. To be
obviously hadn't occurred to me to even do it at the time. I felt a bit like I was boasting and I
wasn't very keen on doing that. Anyway I think I've been convinced that people might be interested in
the whole business of owning one of these things. So let me tell you a little bit about the specs
of the device. It's got a Core i3 processor, 250 gigahertz and it's got a gig of memory and a 120
gigabyte SSD. It's a 1080p 15.6 inch screen. It's got sound within it and it seems to be a sound
blaster sound system in it judging by the labels on the front and it's also got an Nvidia G4's GTX
950M graphics card in it. There are onboard graphics and those are on by default were on when I
when I first started using it and but you can switch on the Nvidia card through the Nvidia app.
I think the pretty obvious that the Intel graphics are cheaper to run and so they're the default
they tend to not to gobble up your battery quite serrapically I guess. On the networking side it's got
an Intel wireless interface. It's got Bluetooth which I've never owned in a laptop before. Well I've
got a Pi3 which has got Bluetooth on it so I've got them both talking to each other but there's
not quite sure exactly what to do with it. At the moment don't have any Bluetooth devices and
obviously it's got a gigabit ethernet interface. It's got the usual camera and it's got VGA connection
which is lucky because I don't have that many HDMI monitors in the house so I can connect a monitor
to it if I want to. It's got four USBs, one of which is this weird USB 3e SATA device which I didn't
actually appreciate. It didn't appreciate it had when I first was checking it out. I'm not quite
sure what I'm going to do with it but something to investigate. It's got one USB 2 and two USB 3 ports
in addition to that. It does have an HDMI connector of course. I didn't know laptops came with
card slots in all cases but this one certainly has one so it's great for uploading stuff off
well actually uploading stuff off this zoom recorder. I'm recording this one for example. It's
got an SD card in it. It's got a DVD re-writer which is quite nice. I didn't think laptops came
with them anymore so I was happy to find that and it's got two audio jacks. It came installed with
the Ubuntu 1510 Wally Werewolf being presumably produced in the back end of 2015. It was pretty
straightforward to to set it up. So I'll talk about my impressions of the device. I've never bought
a new laptop, a full blown laptop before. I do have an ASUS triple EPC network. It's the 1000 and
something machine and I bought it originally because I was a contractor and I wanted something
easily portable to my clients premises where I could just plug a keyboard mouse and monitor
into it and use it like that and I wasn't sure I wanted to buy a laptop for that that purpose at
the time. My contract worked in last more than a couple of years. I also have another i3 system
and this is a laptop my daughter had when and she passed it on to me when she went up great to
something but better. It's an HP G62 Notebook. It's about five or six years old now and one of the
reasons she wanted to move away from it was because it became more or less unusable for windows.
It was always overheating and it would shut down quite quite regularly so after I took it
yeah she got herself a new one and I took it off. I stripped it down, gave it a good clean
and the fan was was quite clogged up with dust and stuff put a new battery in it and installed
linux on it and it's been okay it's been not too bad though it gets still gets pretty hot
it still seems to suffer from overheating so I put it on a desktop laptop cooler for that reason
also the battery even though it's a new placement one it's not that brilliant so it tends not to be
a portable machine it tends to be a little desktop machine I keep around. The the entryway
machine seems like a really well built machine and the fact that it's tailored for running linux
is obviously a great advantage whereas the the ASUS the ASUS is not bad the HP has a few issues
with its hardware and stuff even though it's quite an old machine and of course having a laptop
with an SSD makes an enormous difference compared to what I've been used to. I'm slightly less
taken with the fact that it's got Ubuntu I can see where they chose Ubuntu it's the obvious
choice to make I'm not wild about Unity um obviously that's that's possibly down to the fact that I'm
not really used to that style of desktop interface I don't get on too well with Unity but I'm
prepared to give it a shot. My early days with linux were with red hat linux back in the 90s I guess
late 90s and that that was being made available for just general desktop use then it turned into
Fedora and I used that quite some time with KDE then I moved on to Ubuntu and that started to
to become more popular and I ran KDE on that on the ASUS I ran Ubuntu netbook remix on it at one
point that was that was quite successful I enjoyed using that but soon around the time that Unity
was released a sort of Unity thing came into the the remix the netbook remix and it started to
really bog down on my my little netbook and it became unusable really. So I I moved over to
CrunchBang linux on that machine which was absolutely perfect for it ran that for several years but
sadly as I'm sure you know CrunchBang has fizzled out well it's been replaced by by others I haven't
yet moved on to one of the alternative for CrunchBangs it's on the list of things to do don't use
that netbook all that often to be honest it's great for taking to conferences and stuff but otherwise
I don't tend to use it one day to the next so on the entry where I'm going to carry on with
Ubuntu and Unity for the moment but I'm thinking I'll eventually put something else on it
Debian is one possibility I run Debian testing on my desktop and I really like the fact that it's
so much so up to date and it gives me access to all of the latest versions of things that I want to
mess around with and I don't have to do that massive upgrade twice a year I was always falling
file of that in the days when I ran Ubuntu and finding the upgrades sometimes crash my machine
totally and I had to reinstall it so not had that problem with Debian testing although sometimes
some apps get a little bit shaky as they get released into testing maybe a little bit too early
I might try try it slackware on this machine or perhaps even arch but I'm not convinced that that's
going to be good for me I don't know I need to try it out and see how I get on maybe put that on
the HP just to see how it works one thing I particularly noticed about the Kratos is there's a much
lighter machine than that old HP it's given that it's similar power possibly better power and certainly
a nicer screen and generally a nicer machine it's it's much lighter than it two and a half kilos
it weighs and the old occasions when I've lugged it around that's certainly quite noticeable the
any other impression I have of it is that the keyboard seems a little strange I said in my notes
I'm not much of a laptop user not that seasoned and don't have that much experience but and obviously
I use a desktop keyboard much of the time on my desktop machine in fact I've got an IBM
an old IBM keyboard waiting to be finished off that my son's been working on for me really
clacky old thing and I quite quite enjoy that style of keyboard but the keys on the the
enterware do seem a little small given the available space I made three pictures of the keyboard
on the enterware on the aces and on the HP I put them on the on the website in the in the notes I
mean and obviously laptop keyboards have got constraints they can't be as big or as
clickety there's not enough room for all of the the mechanics as there are on dedicated keyboards
but the enterware machine seems to have really tiny keys to my my way of thinking and I've got
big fat fingers so it's I don't find it that easy to type on I guess but anyway I'm probably just
revealing my ignorance of the laptop world and saying but I must say that the touchpad on
the enterware is really nice to use the aces one is horrible and never could get on with that
and the HP one I just turn it off and use them mouse for everything but the entryway is nice it's
it's something I would use if I if I didn't have room for a mouse so on the tux jam podcast I was
asked if I would recommend entryware and I said in answer that question yes I think I would
I like the fact that they're selling and supporting systems that run Linux and they're there aren't
many companies that do this and I don't think there have been all that many in the UK and it's
good to see somebody who is stepping into that position there are a number of other UK companies
offering system either without an operating system or with the option of installing Linux and
the tux jam guys have listed them on list some of them anyway I guess on the website and I've linked
to that just in case you want to check it out for yourself I've have looked at the the companies
myself when I was in the market for a new machine and they certainly look pretty good so I've
never bought anything so I can't recommend anything I always try to buy hardware either with Linux
pre-installed or with no operation the option of having no operating system at all to avoid the
whole windows tax so-called thing and in 2008 I bought a desktop machine never having owned
one before I'd always used remainted machines from my work they they they would often give them away
to anybody I wanted them when they when they became up for replacement so I've got still got several
old beige boxes knocking around the house anyway I bought a machine from a company called
Efficient PC based in London it was a core two it was a core duo system with a gig of memory and
500 gig hard disk which is pretty big for that time actually and I got it with kabuntu and they
would install whatever you asked for from a from a list and that ran very well for about five years
that went to it was a great great little machine it was really quite good value to think about
300 pounds at that time of course don't think Efficient PC is still in business though there
seems to be a website store but I don't think they have any products on it so I'm not sure the
status of the company they were building machines from various parts in the I guess they were doing
the equipment of what I did later on which was to source all the bits and build my own
machine and then selling them with with Linux on anyway I'd seem to be doing something
bit different from that and they're offering some very desirable systems as far as I can see
so my view is that I wish them well and long may they continue so that's my little story of the
the winning and the impressions of the laptop will be fairly useful and interesting and I'll
see you next time bye now
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