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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