Today bought a new EeePC (I broke my old and trust 901 model… ).

It came with Windows (of course). I was going to blat the whole disk with ubuntu, but decided to keep a dual boot for now.

Ubuntu 10.04 is out next month, so I went straight for the Beta release. Installation went fine (as usual). Only immediate problem was a lack of wireless LAN. After digging around some forum posts I found this helpful thread.

To install the drivers for the wireless network card I downloaded the following package.

https://launchpad.net/~markus-tisoft/+archive/rt3090/+files/rt3090-dkms_2.3.1.3-0ubuntu0~ppa1_all.deb

Simple :)

These days it’s very rare for me to have time to dedicate to writing and research. Today, however, I am on leave from my ‘day job’ and am working at Warwick (where I’m a visiting fellow). I don’t know what it is about the Arts Centre Cafe, but I’d forgotten how productive I find it as an environment. I’ve just spent the last hour working on a particularly difficult chapter and got quite a bit done. I’ve also had an interesting conversation with another researcher who was just ‘passing through’. All in all – It was definitely worth the 90 minute drive to get here.

Playing with Maven today – have been trying to establish a build from a clean repository (not .m2). Guessed that you could set the local repository, but took ages to find the prop…

mvn -o install -Dsettings.localRepository=/var/tmp/m2

does the trick