real life usage...

So, I took it on holiday, loaded up with video.

Battery life was good, I think about 3 maybe close to 4 hours in total, enough for 2 feature films on a rather slow cross-channel ferry to France (and back).

Brightness control is something I need to investigate I think, mostly for battery life implications, but also because it's not automatically set so on some occasions (in near-dark, or very bright / daylight), it needs a tweak.

Video playback was an interesting one. VLC handles my mp4 files quite happily, no problems. I saw some artefacting, but i'm putting that down to a corrupt rips (from a no-doubt ruined kids' dvd) - i'll recheck playback on another PC. Opening DVD files was another beast; the VLC gui to open a dvd disk (that's actually video_ts files on disk) is painful.. something to investigate. (I also need to buy a 3.5mm earphone splitter, one ear each was painful, literally...)

The other thing I missed was a decent internet browser, I was using my phone (windows mobile, pocket IE and/or google maps mobile) for most quick things, but for more complex things (like, er, search), mobile browsers don't quite cut it. So, i'll be exploring how to get my PCMCIA data card working - and i'm expecting pain, it's bad enough on Windows XP.

And after that, well, maybe bluetooth dongle via GPS. But that's for the future.

Next steps, hardware buttons I think.

screen rotation

It seems xrandr works, specifically with the -o flag.

Quite quickly too. I'll create a script to toggle it, for now, i've got two buttons; one for landscape and one for portrait, with a little widget on screen (in the panel).

I'll link that script to the hardware button.

For now, I use it in landscape mode 99% of the time, so nothing significant.

Epiphany web browser

As much as I like firefox, I like a change sometimes, and I like the notion of a smaller, cleaner, quicker browser.

So I installed Epiphany (via synaptic, as usual). I quite like it, so time will tell.

Also had about 14 updates to the system last night as well, which may take some getting used to. Windows, maybe one update every 6 months, Mac, one every month or three, Linux (so far) 2 in as many weeks...

xvkbd..?

Installed this too, seems slightly neater than onboard, so I may swap.

Particularly as onboard doesn't seem to allow me to enter popup sudo password requests (when running things like synaptic gui)

DVD playback

My dock came with a DVD player, and unfortunately, xubuntu didn't come with a DVD player app (or at least, none of the standard 'multimedia' apps worked).

Quick google, and found ogle. Installed via synaptic, works a treat, with real DVD disks, or with images (ie folder full of VOBs) on disk.

Happy.

Didn't think of using vlc, but may try it.

Need to also work out how to change application/file associations, all my videos open up with the standard xubuntu one (which seems so lacking on codecs that i've forgotten it's name...)

firewire / ieee 1394

Realised I had a firewire connector, so, out come the external hard disk that I usually have connected to the mac.

Mounted on desktop, managed to read and write - very quickly - with no problems. No drivers, changes, digging out vi, Just Works. Faith partially restored.

Now, how to eject using GUI...? It seems I may need to add a custom panel item with 'eject /sda' or similar. Or just pull it out...

on my ease of use criteria

Having now had a look at the gok user manual, it seems indeed very powerful.

However, that's perhaps the problem - it's too powerful. I want to click a button/widget, and have an on-screen keyboard appear (something I have setup now with onboard).

Secondly, I should not have had to look at a user manual to work out how to get a qwerty keyboard on screen...

I've still a funny feeling something isn't quite right, since nothing besides the main menu (3x3 grid) actually appears. So thirdly, it should Just Work, and it doesn't seem to.

I'm afraid gok, like to many other linux features, don't, or at least, 'don't well'. It's no surprise there's so much talk of linux acceptance on the desktop... even if I am using a tablet, not a true desktop.