Zein’s perfect netbook:

o Linux based (No Windows tax for me!)
o 9″ or 10″ screen.
o Atom 1.6Ghz
o 1GB RAM
o Large track pad (the Acer for example is too small)
o 4GB (at least and 8GB at most) of storage.
o 4 hours (at least) battery life.
o 1.3 MP Webcam
o Wifi
o bluetooth (optional)

And so I got very excited when I saw that the Dell Mini 9 had been released. The Dell is a lot more customizable at purchase time them the EEEPC, Aspire One or the MSI Wind and therefore a lot cheaper since you only pay for what you want. I got a surprise when I discovered that the Linux and Windows XP versions are identical in price!!

Here are screen shots of the 2 systems after configuration. Both are $US 454 (after $40 instant savings on the XP version) and while that is a lot less then an EEEPC 901. I am baffled to as why I am not saving by not paying any windows tax! I would have expected the Linux version to be at least $US 50 less than the windows version.

The Linux version
The XP version

I got in Krakow on the 22nd at about 9:30 AM. The hotel wouldn’t let me check in until 2:00 PM so I had to walk about the city. I found a shopping mall and worked on my presentation. By the time I checked in, had a shower and prayed Duhr and Aser, I was dead tired so I went to bed. I woke up at 11:00 PM. By the time I had finished my presentation, it was 6:00AM on the 23rd. So I got ready, had breakfast and set of for the conference.

The conference

I arrived at 7:30 and picked up my registration material. They gave me a backpack that was 10 times better than the crappy backpack I got at SC07.

Keynote speakers were a mix of brilliant and boring. I was really happy with the talk by Maria E. Orlowska about “Intrinsic Limits in Context Modeling”. She spoke about problems that people are promising to solve yet have been proved to be unsolvable. She states that context modeling is the way forward but we need to understand what the limits are. I like part of her talk that highlighted that when speed and size of our computing abilities have increased, computing itself has remained static in terms of what we can compute.

I was very Nervous about giving my presentation but It went very well. Now that I have got that over with, I can enjoy the conference. Other presentations of interest were by Intel about there 45nm shrink process and some linear algebra work on the cell processor.

I believe that Islam is a practical religion and that its laws reflect that practicality. I also believe that when faced with different opinions from reputable scholars, it is our job to chose the opinion that maximizes benefit for the Muslim Umah.

Faced with my brothers gentle request to accommodate him, I started to research the subject. I immediately aimed my browser at Islam Online where I know there exists a fatwa bank. I found a few articles and several fatwas on the subject.

articles on the subject:
Delivering the Friday Sermon in a Language Other than Arabic
Role of Friday Khutbah
Friday Khutbah in the Language of the Audience
There, I found a multitude of fatwas that permit giving the khutba in a languge other than Arabic.
I also found this link from the Islamic Research Foundation International, Inc. whom I have never heard of.

I think that it is safe to say that there is no problem in giving the khutba in English.

If you look at what is available on the market you can see that the cost of these devices are tremendous. The much cheaper alternative is to build something myself. I had a dual PIII 800MHz machine but I thought that was an over kill. I want this to consume the least possible amount of power and to run as cool as possible. When I found a old celeron machine at Uni I decided that I would put something together. I attached 3x 14GB IDE hard disks and a CD drive and had myself an ugly but functional machine.

I looked at FreeNAS which is based on monowall which in turn is a based on a minimal FreeBSD system. What is really cool about FreeNAS that it easily fits on a USB or CF disk and moves your machine towards being an appliance with all the benefits that include less heat and better reliability.

Being a bit paranoid I decided I would not accept anything less than ZFS for my data. I believe it is the only file system that detects silent data corruption. It also has a lot of hype surrounding it and I have being wanting to play around with it for a while. The current versions of FreeNAS do not have ZFS support, but when FreeBSD 7.0 comes out it will have native ZFS support. This means that FreeNAS will gain ZFS support at some stage. I, however do not want to wait.

Enter Nexenta, a distribution based on opensolaris with a GNU userland. I wasn’t completely at home, coming from a Linux background and I noticed that some of the command line tools support different command line options, but here is the best thing about Nexenta… It uses apt for its package management. I truly believe that apt is the best tool out there and is what drew me to Debian in the first place. It also has some nifty features like support for ZFS root file system and a tool called apt-clone that takes a ZFS snapshot of the system before major upgrades and allows you to revert if the upgrade goes wrong. All this without rebooting so no downtime. To summarize Nexenta is an interesting project and I will use it to build my NAS.

I installed Nexenta Alpha7 and created a zpool out of 2 of the disks changed the mount point to /mydata and shared it via NFS (ZFS has built in NFS/NFS4)

zpool create mydata mirror c0d1 c1d0
zfs set mountpoint=/mydata mydata
zfs set sharenfs=on mydata

After a while I realized that the Alpha7 version was not the latest and I wasn’t able to upgrade to the latest via apt! I installed Nexenta 1.0 RC3 and was able to import my old (mydata) ZFS pool. running zpool import will show all available pools that can be imported.

root@sun:~# zpool import
  pool: home
    id: 14253621109838762705
 state: ONLINE
status: The pool is formatted using an older on-disk version.
action: The pool can be imported using its name or numeric identifier, though
        some features will not be available without an explicit 'zpool upgrade'.
config:
 
        home        ONLINE
          c0d0s1    ONLINE
 
  pool: mydata
    id: 7749473723610951541
 state: ONLINE
status: The pool is formatted using an older on-disk version.
action: The pool can be imported using its name or numeric identifier, though
        some features will not be available without an explicit 'zpool upgrade'.
config:
 
        mydata      ONLINE
          mirror    ONLINE
            c0d1    ONLINE
            c1d0    ONLINE

I had to use -f (force) to import my previous pool

root@sun:~# zpool import mydata
cannot import 'mydata': pool may be in use from other system
use '-f' to import anyway
root@sun:~# zpool import -f mydata

I was then able to upgrade the ZFS pool

root@sun:~# zpool upgrade
This system is currently running ZFS pool version 10.
 
The following pools are out of date, and can be upgraded.  After being
upgraded, these pools will no longer be accessible by older software versions.
 
VER  POOL
---  ------------
 3   mydata
 
Use 'zpool upgrade -v' for a list of available versions and their associated
features.
root@sun:~# zpool upgrade mydata
This system is currently running ZFS pool version 10.
 
Successfully upgraded 'mydata' from version 3 to version 10

And finaly I get to see my pool up and running

root@sun:~# zpool list mydata
NAME     SIZE   USED  AVAIL    CAP  HEALTH  ALTROOT
mydata  12.6G  9.30G  3.33G    73%  ONLINE  -
root@sun:~# zfs list mydata
NAME     USED  AVAIL  REFER  MOUNTPOINT
mydata  9.30G  3.13G  9.30G  /mydata

I must say I am happy with my NAS. All I need is to get some large disks in there and I am good to go. I also look forward to get some experience with Nexenta and ZFS. I wonder if you can fit Nexenta onto a 128MB or 256MB CF card?

Also of interest is the Everex cloudbook (also $399) based on the VIA nanobook design. It has been announced to start selling on the 25th of this month. The cloud book as a longer battery life and a 30GB HDD (vs the 4GB SSD on the EeePC). If after looking at the pictures, you are wondering where the touch pad is then take a look at this video

Anyway between them there should be a very cool laptop waiting to be bought when I visit the USA in July. If you are as interested as I am then suscribe to the RSS feeds of Cloudbooker and Eeeuser