Monday flower

Today my wife took her mother to sort out the funeral, and I'm on dog sitting duties for a few days. As I'd originally planned to take the day off I didn't do a lot today, and the dog had several walks.

We came back with a small form-factor computer that was redundant. My mother-in-law had used it to play her Learn English CDs and DVS on. It's a smallish, shoe box shaped computer, small screen and wireless keyboard (missing mouse) running Windows XP! I couldn't get wireless keyboard to ever play ball, but as there wasn't much on the box, I just wiped the disk and installed Linux on it. The dog may be clever but he wasn't much help while I did this.

The computer is okay but old and underpowered. I may be able to add more RAM to it, but the little Atom CPU is never going to be fast, and more annoying is the Intel GMA500/PowerVR graphics chipset for which there are no drivers for Linux, so it's pretty poor at playing video and would be utterly useless for playing games on. Because Intel is and always has been an also ran when it comes to graphics compared to Nvidia and AMD/ATI, they have oddly been very open and cooperative with the open source community and Linux with their graphics cards, except this specific chipset which was based on a British design and the firm refused point blank to help, so it's basically almost useless. As it's a small form factor computer, it's virtually impossible to upgrade either - a bit like a laptop. It works but I'm not quite sure what use it actually is...

Today's back blip is however another poppy flower that seems to have survived the recent heat.