Not so nice surprises

The GUI is acting up a bit. Inconsistent behaviour and sticky help bubbles.

Regardless of whether you use the zones-page or alt-tab between apps, sooner or later help bubbles will stick around after you've changed the application - obviously taking up some precious screen estate. I've only found one way of getting rid of the bubble so far: quitting the application that is listed. Considering the length that some site titles can be, it can be rather frustrating.

My uPnP server is showing up again in the media player, but clicking video, pictures and music still shows nothing. I suppose it's progress, though.

Nice surprises

After firing up my Aspire today and performing an update, I've seen plenty of nice new things. The major woohoo-feature is: auto-connect to WiFi. Yes, finally it's no longer necessary to go and click "connect".

My "people"-page was automatically populated and my "status"-page actually showed that I was connected to various services. I'll have to poke around a bit and see if other new features have been updated.

I still can't access my Twitter-section in the status-page, as it's placed below all my IM services with no way to scroll to it.

Perhaps the browser has seen some improvements as well. At least I can post here. I've previously had problems actually commenting on here (ironically), but I'll test whether comments work now by replying to this in a few moments (had to fire up Firefox to get there).

I seem to be having less problems with accidentally activating the Moblin menu while using the browser. It seems like a small delay has been put in and I suppose it works - at least since I mostly use the keyboard to switch between applications.

IM-win!

Finally there's libpurple in the Moblin repository. What does this mean to you? It means you can finally get on AIM, MSN etcetera from Moblin without jumping through hoops. Your online friends will show up under "People" once you start the IM client (it would be nice if it could just hop on automatically - perhaps a future version).

It did have a somewhat confusing effect on the Status page, however: My Twitter field is no longer visible as it has been pushed down by my IM accounts - and it seems I can't really do anything with those in the Status area. Only the "People nearby" (which I take to be Zeroconf) has an active "change" field, that lets me set my status.

I guess a scrolling / sorting feature for Status will be incoming briefly.

A temporary browser fix

While the embedded browser is being fixed in Moblin, I've resorted to running Firefox on its own. Actually it overall works much better: There's fullscreen browsing where ctrl-l brings the URL field up, all pages work as expected and there are no focus stealing issues between Moblin's toolbar and the browser.

It may not be the optimal solution, but it's certainly workable for now :-)

I must say that the built-in browser has improved recently, though. More sites load and they seem to load a bit faster as well.

The peculiar case of networking

I've yet to fully understand the Media section of Moblin, as I've so far been unable to use the player beyond the media that came with the distribution. I'm a bit confused by what is actually presented to me, when I click the Moblin toolbar's Media button. I have a feeling that it behaves a bit like the m_zone and that you have to launch the media player (from Applications) to properly navigate your collection. That's OK. I've added it to the m_zone as a shortcut.

I have at times seen traces of uPnP support, but lately it has not shown up at all. On my network I have several servers, so one would think that at least one should work - but alas none have. I've tried to move some data across using smb instead, but Nautilus doesn't feel like connecting to my servers - even though it displays them in the Network section of Nautilus. I've tried to connect using a smb:// style syntax instead, but get the message that it's not supported.

I could of course just copy stuff across using scp or ftp, but I'm really not interested in keeping it locally on the machine.

I'm wondering if I'm missing some obvious way of getting the media to show up in the media player.

A slightly grave wifi issue

It seems that the wifi driver is rather unstable on the Acer Aspire One. The first time I attempted to do an upgrade, the machine continually locked up on me. At first I thought it was fixed with one of the updates, but a later big update again caused lockups. Is anyone else experiencing this?

It doesn't happen during normal use - only when moving larger amounts of data (probably 100+ MB).