Mandriva

What did I do this week ? This week i decide to test some new Mandirva 2008.1 features with my cooker boxes.

• Have a look at new Mandriva theme : the default set of wallpapers are great
• Users faces icons could be improved IMHO and should be made bigger, because they look ugly on my 1280x1024 screen ( cf bug #38604 )
• Explore the indexthtml and desktop-data-common packages to find corrupted or unused files ( cf bug #38608 and bug #38610 )
• Have a look at the new hour based Mandriva wallpapers. Whereas interesting on the paper, I couldn't test it, and there's seems to have serious usability issues to allow a user to use this feature ( cf bug #38613 and bug #38612 ). On top of that, it seems that since the introduction of this feature, using the standard slideshow support in kdesktop will make it crash ( cf bug #38598 )
• Noticed a very weird issue under Gnome when trying to create shortcuts for OpenOffice.org apps on the desktop from the applications menu. If in the desktop file of the application, the icon name contains a dot, then the icon will not appear on the desktop. ( cf bug #38654 )
• Give a try to draksnapshot
• Set up VMWare server under one of my Mandriva 2008.0 server

No, Michael, Mandriva Linux is NOT a purely "KDE distribution" and it hasn't been for the last 7 years !

• All our tools, including our installer, are developed using GTK2 (mostly using Perl bindings for Gtk)
• our theme (Ia Ora) is available in both GNOME (ie Gtk2) and KDE (Qt) flavor, to make sure applications have a similar look, even if they are not run under their "native" environment
• we favor default applications to "native" ones for each desktop (ie using KDE applications under KDE and GNOME apps under GNOME)
• we try to develop features and graphics design in both environments at the same time
  
• we ship our live CDs (called Mandriva One) in two flavors (KDE and GNOME)
• people using our classic installer products (either Powerpack or Free) are asked if they want to install GNOME or KDE (or any other environments we ship, like XFCE)
• we even offered a GNOME based Mandriva Flash to all attendee to GUADEC last year in Birmingham.
• for Firefox, we even split the gnome specific modules in a separate package which is installed by defaut only for GNOME install
• we developped a XSettings server for KDE which tries to ensure GTK2 applications looks decent under KDE, following KDE settings (unfortunately, it is not possible to do the same for Qt/KDE apps under GNOME)

So, I repeat, Mandriva Linux is NOT a purely KDE distribution. It might have been 8 or 9 years ago, when it was originally created, but it is no longer the case for more than half a decade now.

I came back from Taiwan 10 days ago, and have only uploaded the photos of the first four days yet (out of three weeks), so don't except do watch them all soon :)

It was great, people there are really nice and helpful (sometimes too much, you can't watch a map more than 30s before someone offer you some help). I need to go back there, for several reasons including that I did not visit the beautiful eastern part of the island !

Since I'm back, except fixing bugs, I added support for sound keys in the EeePc (generating input events for mute and volume keys in asus_acpi), I think this solution is more clean that having a shell script launching amixer. I also binded fn+f6 to webcam toggling as I could not find what this key is intended to do. I then discovered the asus-laptop module, so I will have to port all of this to it before discussing it upstream...

Bon après 1H de dev, j'ai ajouté le support pour spécifier la langue des posts dans mon blog. La langue est aussi exportée via la flux RSS pour ceux qui voudraient trier les posts. Il faudrait que je fasse la même chose pour les FAQ et HOWTO ...

[FR]Bon, à partir de cette minute, je vais consacrer 1H de dev à mon blog. On va voir ce que je vais pouvoir ajouter comme fonctionnalités :)

This week’s TechMail is Set up ISC’s dhcpd server which discusses setting up dhcpd, and how you can use it to assign static IP addresses — using the convenience of DHCP-supplied configurations with the convenience of static IP addresses for client machines (and servers).

As usual, I take a day or two when a new Mandriva version is in RC status to install and play around with it. If you’ve been reading here for a while, you know that the machine I throw to the dogs is my Toshiba Libretto. Asus may have a cute thing with the Eee PC, but I’ll stick with my Libretto. You’ll also recall that with every release since I’ve had the Libretto, there is always something that needs to be tweaked or that just doesn’t work out quite right.

Well, 2008.1 works completely out-of-the-box. X resolution is properly set, madwifi is properly setup, the SD card reader works.. everything just works. The only thing I don’t know about is the fingerprint scanner, but I’m not sure what we have for biometric packages, if anything (but I also haven’t really looked beyond MCC because anything else would be a “hack”). Now, I haven’t played with it extensively yet… today was a cooker upgrade from when I was bored one night a few weeks ago and had installed beta2 on it, but then never had the opportunity to play with it more. So after a urpmi –auto-select, reboot, and some playing, I’m impressed. Metisse was a little slow (but looked pretty sharp)… definitely wouldn’t use it everyday but it makes for nice “check this out” factor.

KDE4 looks pretty nifty… Tried to urpmi task-kde4 and got some conflicting files amongst various packages so didn’t get everything installed, but it still runs well enough (I think I’m just missing some office-related stuff). KDE3 looks… well.. the same. So does GNOME, but in the case of GNOME that’s ok because GNOME always looks sharp. =)

All in all, as of right now, I’m impressed. I’ve had to do exactly zero dickering to make everything (except the fingerprint reader) work. Very nice.

The real test will be the HP tablet, but that’s going to run 2008 until 2008.1 is done as that’s a production machine and the Libretto is my “road warrior” machine and since I’m plunked in this super-comfy chair all day and really only leave the house when I’m going stir crazy or need to buy coffee or water, it’s ok if something breaks on that machine.

At any rate, congrats to the development team! So far so good. Sound works (I don’t care about PulseAudio vs the other audio systems as much as some do.. I just care if it works), so that’s a good thing too. Will throw some mp3’s and video files on there tomorrow to see how well the other apps work. So, short of task-kde4 (which is in contribs, although that shouldn’t be an excuse), everything is working great.

As usual, I take a day or two when a new Mandriva version is in RC status to install and play around with it. If you’ve been reading here for a while, you know that the machine I throw to the dogs is my Toshiba Libretto. Asus may have a cute thing with the Eee PC, but I’ll stick with my Libretto. You’ll also recall that with every release since I’ve had the Libretto, there is always something that needs to be tweaked or that just doesn’t work out quite right.

Well, 2008.1 works completely out-of-the-box. X resolution is properly set, madwifi is properly setup, the SD card reader works.. everything just works. The only thing I don’t know about is the fingerprint scanner, but I’m not sure what we have for biometric packages, if anything (but I also haven’t really looked beyond MCC because anything else would be a “hack”). Now, I haven’t played with it extensively yet… today was a cooker upgrade from when I was bored one night a few weeks ago and had installed beta2 on it, but then never had the opportunity to play with it more. So after a urpmi –auto-select, reboot, and some playing, I’m impressed. Metisse was a little slow (but looked pretty sharp)… definitely wouldn’t use it everyday but it makes for nice “check this out” factor.

KDE4 looks pretty nifty… Tried to urpmi task-kde4 and got some conflicting files amongst various packages so didn’t get everything installed, but it still runs well enough (I think I’m just missing some office-related stuff). KDE3 looks… well.. the same. So does GNOME, but in the case of GNOME that’s ok because GNOME always looks sharp. =)

All in all, as of right now, I’m impressed. I’ve had to do exactly zero dickering to make everything (except the fingerprint reader) work. Very nice.

The real test will be the HP tablet, but that’s going to run 2008 until 2008.1 is done as that’s a production machine and the Libretto is my “road warrior” machine and since I’m plunked in this super-comfy chair all day and really only leave the house when I’m going stir crazy or need to buy coffee or water, it’s ok if something breaks on that machine.

At any rate, congrats to the development team! So far so good. Sound works (I don’t care about PulseAudio vs the other audio systems as much as some do.. I just care if it works), so that’s a good thing too. Will throw some mp3’s and video files on there tomorrow to see how well the other apps work. So, short of task-kde4 (which is in contribs, although that shouldn’t be an excuse), everything is working great.

So as the Bugzilla mail piles up happily in my inbox (I’m glad it’s an electronic inbox, if it was a real one, it would have toppled over and caused me a serious head injury by now), I spent today doing…other things.

The What’s Coming in Mandriva Linux 2008 Spring page on the Wiki is now in good shape: spent a few hours polishing it up and submitting stories about to various news outlets. Also had to post stories for our latest Store offer: it’s called OS Refugee, it’s actually a resurrection of a program we ran a LONG time ago, and it goes like this: if you’ve got a license for any other commercial operating system (i.e. Windows) you can trade it in for a 35% discount on 2008 Powerpack, 2008 Flash, or a Powerpack subscription. Neat, yes? Details are here.

Also spent a bit of time booting RC1 on my systems and filing bugs on the stuff that doesn’t work. It can be surprisingly hard to find time to actually test the product ‘clean’ in between all the time spent promoting it, fixing it, and discussing it :). My systems all run Cooker, so there’s some stuff I don’t get to see unless I burn a One CD and test it out (like the installation process, hardware detection, and state of the default desktop).

In between, a bit of packaging: Mandriva now has a package for BillReminder, in both Cooker and 2008 /contrib/backports. I updated avant-window-navigator’s applets (awn-extras-applets) in 2008 /contrib/backports, which I forgot to do before, and updated swi-prolog to 5.6.51 in both Cooker and 2008 /main/backports. Finally, I continued to keep the packages for Elisa up to date. I picked up Elisa for packaging months ago as I found it an interesting package, but now it seems we’re going to have some kind of deal to promote it in 2008 Spring, so I have Anne and various others on my ass filing bugs on every little thing that doesn’t work. Eek! The packages are now in decent shape and we should ship a nice clean Elisa 0.3.4 in 2008 Spring. I am also in the process of backporting the packages to 2008. In case you didn’t notice - I love /backports. Also updated: Conduit, Tracker, Mediatomb and Deluge.

Sooo, I've improved the rpm4 compatibility wrapper for rpm5, a lot of C++ fixes has been applied to it as well as a couple of other to rpm5 code upstream otherwise as well, I've added new function wrappers for apt-get, and since noone objected, I've also pushed the compatibility wrapper upstream at http://rpm5.org/cvs/chngview?cn=9804 . :)

So this means that apt-get has been succesfully been ported to rpm 5.0 as well! I haven't really tested apt-get much besides getting it to build without warnings, so since it lacks regression tests and I don't use it myself, I leave it to others to test. :p

I would think that it should work fairly well though, at least urpmi works excellent with this compatibility wrapper, and not much changes needed to be done besides the C++ fixes.

I've posted the patch to apt-get mailing list, so I hope it gets applied upstream some time soon, in the meanwhile you can fetch the patch at http://lists.laiskiainen.org/pipermail/apt-rpm-laiskiainen.org/2008-March/000828.html .

Be sure to notice that this patch is against latest apt-get from git and requires latest code from rpm5.org rpm-5_0 branch (or soon to be released rpm 5.0.3), I've still to look into this one for HEAD..

Oh well, cheers to all, I know at least rpm5.org based distros like PCLinuxOS and Ark Linux should benefit from this a lot and help them migrate to rpm 5.0. :)

PS: I'll try make some rpm 5.0 packages for Mandriva available soon for anyone interested. ;)

I read this really eye-opening piece on the death of HD-DVD to Blu-ray, and Microsoft’s stakes, involvement, and (typically) underhanded activity regarding it. The piece is called Lessons from the Death of HD-DVD. I didn’t pay much attention to the next-gen hi-def “format wars” beyond the tech specs and features. I knew that Microsoft was involved with HD-DVD, but I didn’t realize the extent. Wow.

Boy am I glad that Blu-ray won out. I actually didn’t think they would, considering Sony has had failures with Beta and UMD (well, failures in terms of where they wanted those formats to go). Seriously, Sony makes a killer gaming system (the PS2 is still incredible, and the PS3 is no shabby piece of hardware either). But this time they did things right with Blu-ray. I actually bent and got a PS3 a few months ago, not for any desire or want of Blu-ray, but simply for the games, now that there’s some good titles to choose from (Heavenly Sword is freaking amazing!). I don’t think I would have regretted the purchase if HD-DVD won the “war”, but the nice thing is now I can watch the winning format without ponying up for another player.

Although, truth be told, when I was looking at standalone blu-ray players, I came to the conclusion that I may just buy another PS3 (probably for Christmas this year I think) to act as the “blu-ray” player of the house. You certainly get more bang for your buck.

This week’s TechMail is Secure temporary files in Linux which discusses how to properly secure temporary files, using things like loopback filesystems, separate partitions for /tmp and using appropriate mount flags. It’s pretty simplistic stuff, but can make a huge difference on the security of your system.

Last week’s TechMail tip was Encrypting and decrypting files with GnuPG, which covers some stuff about using gpg to deal with encryption of files (instead of just using gpg for mail).

The fifth pre-release of Mandriva Linux 2008 Spring is here. This pre-release includes the all-new artwork for the 2008 Spring release, further improvements to the Mandriva software management tools, WPA-EAP support in the network configuration tools, KDE 3.5.9 and available 4.0.1, some new default applications in KDE and GNOME, and the latest pre-release of OpenOffice.org 2.4. See here for download information.

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Yep, the 2008 Spring pre-release cycle just hit the late beta…err, I mean, release candidate…stage. RC1 has lots of juicy stuff, including the new look for 2008 Spring (which is very pretty), KDE 3.5.9 and 4.0.1, some new default applications, the drakconnect / ndiswrapper bug finally fixed!, WPA-EAP support, new NVIDIA / ATI drivers, and - as the publicists say - Much, Much More. Details on the Wiki, please do test it and post bugs.

I've just finished porting urpmi (and rpmtools) to rpm 5.0, making it the first dependency solver supporting rpm 5.0! :)

With a lot help from Jeff this job was mostly done through a C function wrapper making it easy to port applications and supporting both rpm5.org & rpm.org without having to do major modifications and ugly #ifdefs and what not. This wrapper is available at http://svn.mandriva.com/cgi-bin/viewvc.cgi/soft/rpm/perl-URPM/trunk/rpm5compat.h?view=log , but I will probably commit it to rpm5.org upstream soon unless noone objects as it should be usable to many others. There will still be needs for making adaptions in term of freeing of memory when using this as rpm 4 does it in a bit too different way for this wrapper to handle.

Some interesting things were noticed when doing urpmi regression tests with both rpm 4.4.2.3-rc1 & rpm 5.0.3(pre):

rpm 4.4.2.3-rc1:

Failed 3/30 test scripts. 105/2567 subtests failed.

Files=30, Tests=2567, 493 wallclock secs (274.52 cusr + 51.11 csys = 325.63 CPU)

Failed 3/30 test programs. 105/2567 subtests failed.

rpm 5.0.3(pre):

Failed 5/30 test scripts. 57/2558 subtests failed.

Files=30, Tests=2558, 1127 wallclock secs (249.68 cusr + 51.86 csys = 301.54 CPU)

Failed 5/30 test programs. 57/2558 subtests failed.

So there seems to be less regressions with rpm5 currently, this was surprising considering it being a quite recent major release! :)

With urpmi working I was also finally able to update my whole system for the first time in a month, about time! :D This will help out a lot in further rpm5 developments and being able to focus on more issues, I've been working on cleaning up and commiting our patches from rpm package in Mandriva to upstream and there's only a couple left to review, then they've all made it. This is about time since the amount of patches that's been maintained locally is everything but modest, oldest patch I found was done by Chmouel eight years ago!

This is not the last you'll hear from rpm5.org team! ;)

So, um, I don’t do this often, but I could do with some help.

Basically: I am drowning in an unending sea of bugs.

Last year we set up a much better process for handling bugs than we previously had. There is now a proper policy for bugs defining exactly what can, should, and can’t be done to them, in what order, and by whom. This includes a proper triage process, which means that all bug reports are / should be handled by the ‘triage team’ before being passed to the maintainer of the package involved. During this process the triager ensures the bug is one that should properly be handled by the Mandriva bug process (or re-directs it elsewhere if not), ensures that all necessary information to fix the bug is present, and that all the attributes of the bug are set correctly.

I haven’t run any statistical analysis of this yet, but I’m about 95% sure that this process means we’re handling bugs a lot better than we used to. More of them are getting fixed and people are happier with our responses and response times.

So, what’s the problem?

The problem is that it’s eating, on average, about four hours of my life per day.

The way this was envisaged to work was that I would be the Bugmaster - in overall charge of this process, but not actually in charge of *doing it all*. There is a Bug Squad, the members of whom are supposed to make up the triage team, and the plan was for them to do most of the work of actually triaging / wrangling bugs. My role was to be overseeing the whole process, managing the Bug Squad, resolving disputes about the policy and so forth.

In practice, it’s just not happening this way. Aside from the superhuman Pacho Ramos, without whom this whole process would have fallen apart months ago, most of the people who signed up for the Bug Squad just don’t do much or any triaging work.

This isn’t their fault - it’s a volunteer system and anyone will tell you that most volunteer systems have this problem; people sign up from the best intentions and then, for a variety of reasons, many of them just can’t commit to doing the work they originally thought they could. I’m certainly not blaming any of those people for this situation. It just happens.

The problem is that that means, between us, me and Pacho are doing over 90% of the actual triaging work. At this point of the release cycle, bugs change fast. There’s a mailing list where notifications of any significant change to a bug are sent. I basically have to read all of those mails, every day (I have a few tricks for skipping some, but not really many). At present it gets about 250-300 mails a day. I’m averaging something like 50 bug actions per day. This is taking up, as I mentioned at the start, an average of four hours per day. That’s 50% of ‘normal’ working hours, or about 30% of the hours I actually work - a ton of time that I wasn’t envisioned to be spending on this, that could at least in theory be entirely covered by other people, and that I could otherwise be using to write newsletters or invent more stories to try and get into the news about Mandriva or work on packaging or finally merge the Knowledge Base and the Wiki or any of the other fifty dozen things that I just never have time to do.

This is a common problem at Mandriva - ask anyone who works here and they’ll probably be able to tell you at least two or three things they do not because it was really formally planned at any stage that they should do it, but just because someone has to and it doesn’t look like anyone else will. As I wrote on the forums lately, we’re trying to do something (develop a completely independent, full-size, commercial and supported Linux distribution) that most of our competitors use about 3-4x as many resources to do, and that means this kind of situation is sort of inevitable. However, in this case, it’s actually one that doesn’t have to happen. So this is a really long-winded plea for some people to please, please, PLEASE join the bug squad and volunteer a bit of your time to triage and generally herd bugs.

It’s actually a really good thing to volunteer for. It gives you an immediate and visible impact on the process of actually developing the distribution. You can see exactly the consequences of your actions, right away. It gives you a nice warm fuzzy glow when you know you’ve been part of the process of getting someone’s problems fixed, and you often get actual thanks from people just for helping out. It’s also something you don’t need masses of technical knowledge to do. You do need kind of a baseline level of knowledge in order to be able to understand most reports filed and know what information is needed before they can be fixed, and in general as you develop more knowledge you will be able to triage more efficiently, but you can help out even with just moderate experience, and it’s quite easy to learn. It’s not something you need to be a Perl black belt or whatever to do.

It doesn’t need to be a lot of time, either. It’s taking *me* a lot of time but that’s because, as I said, there’s really only two of us working on it. The more people there are, the less time each has to spend. If we really had, say, ten people working on this, it’d only take a half hour or so per day from each person to cover just about every report. That’s not a big time commitment.

So, again, please - if you’re reading this, and you’d like to help out Mandriva, and you have moderate experience with Mandriva and with Linux, please volunteer for the Bug Squad. It’s not too hard and pretty rewarding (I should say “it’s drop-dead easy and super-fun!” but I don’t like to exaggerate, possibly not a good quality in PR :>). You can read how to volunteer on the Bug Squad wiki page. Thanks!

Soo, I'm just back at my hotel after FOSDEM. It didn't seem like much people were hanging around for going out afterwards, so it ended up being me and Jeff Johnson going out eating and ending the night early. Just like last year, FOSDEM was really nice this year as well. It's amazing how many interesting people, talks and projects you get the chance to interact with and frequently having long talks and discussions that's rarely boring! :)

This year the most interesting things were numerous talks related to (not surprisingly) packaging, long and many talks about rpm5 with Jeff and other rpm5.org people, Mancoosi with Stéphane Lauriere, talks about the new dep solver zypp by Micahel Scröder of SuSE and the talk about packagekit by Richard Hughes. Lots of new things to learn, get inspiration & ideas from and wanting to make use of. :D

I also hanged out with the Centos guys for dinner last night and had some discussions and talks, very interesting, also somewhat weird, it's amazing how different organization, technical philosophy and other issues for Fedora/Centos/RedHat/* is from what I'm used to at Mandriva! Very cool to get to learn of other things besides my heavily Mandriva biased world. Biased as I am, I do have my opinions about what is correct different from much of their opinions, but not on all topics, discussing such things makes us all learn a lot and get some different perspectives that are really nice. :)

One things that was a huge disappointment this year though was the lack of Mandriva presence, last year we did at least have a non-public room with many more people from Mandriva and also people from the community. This year I think I was the only Mandriva Linux person that weren't a part of the french group. This is really sad to see, having some sort of minimal presence at such events shouldn't be that hard to do on Mandriva's behalf and it's actually quite important. What's worse though is how there didn't seem to be anyone from the (international) Mandriva Linux community there besides me, it might be just the fact that there wasn't obtained a room this year, but somehow I fear that it runs deeper than that.. Over the last year so many people has left Mandriva, important people that are missed a lot, not only that, there seems to be a lot of people within the community that seems to have either left or being less and less active and caring less. While technical things has improved over the last year, non-technical things has worsened it seems, people that would discuss and complain about things in the past seems to have stopped complaining, but to me it seems the reason for this is that they've stopped caring in general. :/ Apathy and decrease of interest seems to be a problem among those who like me have been involved for the longest time, which I personally hates the most, these are after all the people I've known and been in touch with for so long and becoming friends with. Since there's a lot of new people joining the community over the years, these issues might not be seen as new people will help make up for those becoming inactive while not being aware of or as tired of issues, it's a real shame to see as it will prevent the growth and dedication of people..

It might be just me, with different perception mixed with some sentimentality and frustration, but I think these things has gone down hill, especially since Warly, which were THE greatest and most important guy left, and also all too many other great ones left since. None the less, I still have faith in this distribution and even the company behind it, good changes has come as well over the last year and the company performs better (which is very good since me and my brother bought around 50K of shares a little while back ;p), but I still think these changes are only improving some things in short term (which is of course really needed since the company needs to stay alive and make profits;), but real changes are needed and real issues really needs to be fixed and acknowledged! Actually thinking ahead in longer terms really needs to be done and not be dismissed as mutually exclusive.. Oh well, I won't rant further about issues that might not be visible or make sense to many, might even step on someones' toes as well.. ;p I'm just a bit frustrated after putting a lot of work, passion and dedication into this distribution since the beginning of this millenium, becoming sentimental would be expected, right? :)

I anyways hope that we can do better next year, giving things priority and trying to do some planning in time should help a lot, maybe trying to apply for a room together with some other project might help out as well. Much can be done, it's just a matter of doing it! :)

I myself has just recently started to get the movitation and ability to do stuff again, so I do really hope that I finally can accomplish and realise some of my ideas and plans for things related to these things and after FOSDEM I'm even more motivated and filled with ideas and inspiration. Such events are really great! :) I sure hope to see more of you next year, there's tons of new people that has come over the years that I have yet to meet. :)

Update: It seems like I put up a bit wrong impression implying that Mandriva intentionally didn't have a room at FOSDEM which was absolutely not the case. Mandriva did apply but were rejected since applications were evaluated individually and with Mandriva lacking resources and possibility to organize as well as others, it probably weren't considered as fair to give us a room. And for a secret room as last year they didn't want to give us a non-official room some other place due to security issues from previous year. So my suggestions in this blog was rather how to have a better chance at getting a room next year. :)

Sooo, long time since blogging..

But I am at FOSDEM at least! :)

Being out drinking last night till I got bored and then drinking out of boredom before calling it the night, I'm really positively surprised that I woke up early and isn't hung over, just incredibly hungry. So now I'm gonna head down to the breakfast at my hotel (this year I'm sleeping at a hotel with my own room, bathroom with even a bath tub in it in stead of at a cheap youth hostel sharing room with several other people snoring, ahhhh, sooo niiice hotel:) and then off to FOSDEM. If anyone wants to say hi or just punch me in the face while I'm here in brussels, you can reach me at +47 41681061. :)

Having read the (not so enthusiastic) reviews of the first Cloudbook users, it seems that most software-related complaints of early Cloudbookers revolve around screen resolution, wifi performance and slow boot. While I offer no ready-to-use solution for these problems, here are some pointers that could help hobbyists or desperate users:

• VIA video of course won’t run with IEGD, but the (somewhat ugly) VNC-based hack for the Eeepc could work. X compositing or RandR could work depending on 3D performance, availability of RandR 1.2 for VIA graphic chips and quality compromises, but both solutions require development (i.e. possible but not available yet).
• Wifi performance issues may be related to RTL8187 rate control not working properly (it always tries to use the highest possible bitrate reducing range dramatically). Using a recent Windows driver with ndiswrapper should solve most problems, or reducing the bitrate manually should increase range using the native driver.
• Faster boot can be achived using finit (a reimplementation of the Eeepc fastinit), but some customization to finit-alt will be necessary to boot Ubuntu.

On a side note, finit-alt worked quite well booting Mandriva 2008 with Enlightenment in the Dreambook IL1, another VIA-based mini-laptop (possibly booting even faster than the Eeepc because the Intel driver for Xorg takes a while to initialize).

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