The other day when I installed Moblin back onto my Macbook with VMware, I just sort of went the route of set it, and forget it. I didn’t spend a lot of time playing, and didn’t pay a whole lot of attention either. I noticed the interface had changed, and like it, but that was about the extent of it.

Now I hear about it being slow, and I just went back to play and see WTF. Sure enough too, the UI was slow, and not very responsive. The rollover effects on the menu bar icons take about 2.5 seconds to go from down to over states, and the load time of the OS is considerably slower than before.

First thing I did was throw more RAM at it, 1gb in fact. No diff. So then I added the second virtual process and kicked the RAM to 1.3gb. Still nothing. I tired installing the VMware Tools, but they don’t see to go, and I haven’t gotten any further than that. There are visual issue too. The menu bar doesn’t span the width of the screen, so icons overlap – even if I up the resolution.

It’s still in beta, so I’m not really hashing on it – but it is buggy and the latest updates to the UI seem to have affected the function of it. At least on a VM, and that may be an issue all unto itself. Still, I have to hesitate to put it on my netbook for fear of these issues being present there as well.

Just tonight I ran across the moblin project that the good folks over at Intel are working on and it sounds too good to be true. Boot times are insanely fast – like 5 seconds, and the download is impossibly small at 264mb. Well from what I have seen so far, this thing is pretty dang sweet.

First, I simply boot from the ISO on my lappy, and BAM! around 7 or so seconds later I have it running. Sweet! If only Windows could load 10 times slower I would be happy, happy, happy. So now I want to install it to run under VMware Fusion, can't be that hard – I already have Windows 7 and Ubuntu running…. After about 20 minutes of playing around with the OS selector, I get it to install (sans kernal panics) using the FreeBSD option. The thing that caught me up to start with though was having to allocate the disk – first. Without the disk allocated, it wouldn't see the virtual drive. Now it's running like a champ.

I think it's official that I have crossed over the transgeekridion line, I mean not even 1 minute after I read something about a super slim, quick version of Linux for netbooks, I download it and try to get it running on my Mac. I would have tried on my desktop by it runs an AMD chip, so I figured it might implod or something equally as obsidious.

You can get the source code to create custom images all to you own liking using the Moblin Image Creator (or MIC2  if you prefer) if you are of the uber-geek variety, or just download prebuilt ISOs and run with the fun from there. I opted for door number three simply because I like instant gratification.

The netbook trend is very exciting to me, and I have been trying to come up with a good excuse to get a netbook for a couple of months now – I mean come on! For $350 bucks, why not – hell, get two they're cheap. Any way, yay for Intel -moblin is way cool and chock full of potential.

My wife and I have been remodeling her office for the past several weeks and since we finally got the new floor and cabinets in, I decided to rebuild her computer into a cabinet fit unit rather than the Aspire box case that I originally bought for it. It's been an okay machine other than the Celeron D runs very hot compared to my AMD; but it's bulky and wouldn't fit very well on her smaller desk surface.

I basically trashed the case for parts, keeping only the power button and LEDs from the parts installed. I did pull out the front panel USB, audio and FireWire board – but I didn't wind up putting it back in. Since the motherboard tray just slides out of the chassis, it was easy to keep everything altogether and I did very little cutting. The only part I had to really destroy was the front bezel to get the power switch out in a way that I could reuse the housing. These are the parts I kept, and these are the parts I didn't.

I was originally going to go and get some 1/4 or 3/8 inch plexiglass, and glue all of the pieces together, figuring that would be the easiest way to go about it. I'm glad I decided to use some of the left over good plywood I had instead – because it would have been a huge pain in the arse otherwise. Using 1/3 ply, I cut the bottom and face, plus 2 small corner pieces to add more rigidity to the face of it. After removing the LEDs from the other case, I decided to go to Radio Shack and get some new ones with a chrome casing, the main reason was to get them to fit better, but they look a lot better too.

After cutting the CD slot, slot for the LCD temperature display, two holes for the LEDs and the hole for the power button I set about painting and going through final assembly. The bulk of the work was done in a single day – I wasn't going for winning any awards – just getting it done really. Pictured is the completed case.

It turned out alright – nothing to really write home about – but it was fun, and I learned a lot about what works and what doesn't when doing this sort of thing. First and foremost I learned I don't have the right tools for doing really fine and precise wood work. A coping saw is very difficult to use, and always make sure something is right-side-up before you silicon it into place. After getting it fit into the cabinet as well, I had to make a couple of modifications – in particular I had to add a case fan back into it to keep it cool. I thought having it be open would be enough, but no.

One thing that would have been nice though is to have had a hard drive cage to mount the DVD and hard drive rather than custom fabricating aluminum mounts for everything. I still want to build another custom PC – but right now I have no idea what I would do.