Came across this open source free-ware media player that is out there for Windows, Mac OSX and Linux. It can be skinned, plays just about anything and its called UMPlayer.

UMPlayer comes packed with dozens of advanced features, such as skinnable interface, built-in subtitles search, audio / subtitles sync, enhanced filter rendering and YouTube™ player / recorder, yet has a simple and intuitive user interface that was designed for ease of use.

With over 270 built-in Audio and Video codecs UMPlayer can handle nearly all media formats, including AAC, AC3, ASF, AVI, DIVX, FLV, H.263, Matroska, MOV, MP3, MP4, MPEG, OGG, QT, RealMedia, VOB, Vorbis, WAV, WMA, WMV, XVID and many more.

In an effort to present the ideal Tablet / small computer for mobile staff at work, one of the computers we tried was the Viliv X70. While it is not obious form the picture above, this runs Windows XP, has a built in webcam (as you can see on the right) and is touch screen. Around the back is insteresting as it has some sort of a bracket which I imagine you can get a car kit for and maybe use it as a rather large GPS?

Specifications

It features an Intel Atom Silverthorne 1.33Ghz CPU. The Screen is a 7” touchscreen which runs at 1024×768.  Storage is a choice of SSD (8/16GIG) or HDD (30/60GIG). It has WiFI (b/g) and WiMAx plus Bluetooth along with GPS. Battery life is quoted as 6 Hours continuous movie playback and 200 Hours standby time. As for dimension – 210(W) x 117(H) x 22.5 (T) mm. The thing weighs 600G

In Use

I tested the time it took from switching it on till the OS was ready and this was in fact only 60 seconds max, this is of course windows not loaded with various programs or any AntiVirus to slow it down. The problem came when you try and use it – the fact the screen is so small means you will struggle to press boxes to close programs or windows and that joystick which you *think* is a mouse does nothing of the sort. The A Button is left Mouse while the B Button is Right mouse.

I have always stated that Windows is not designed to be tablet friendly and this is where the likes of Android or iOS comes into play. As this is a standard computer of sorts, you can load any version of Linux you wanted bia memory stick which might work out better for you.

How much is this costing me?

If you look at this device and think, this is a Netbook in fact with a touch screen and the keyboard ripped out – you would be expecting to pay in the order of £250 to £300 right? What if I told you it would come in at the wallet busting £647 ( Well over $1000).

While a company can withstand that cost if the product fills the need, I am not 100% sure that consumers will be too happy parting cash for this one. Looking at how heavy this is I was surprised that in fact it is slightly lighter (and only just) than the iPad (which weighs 680g) but then again the iPad is 9.7” while this is only 7”.

I would have done a much more in-depth review of the device but given the fact most are not going to be buying this anytime soon when there is just so much better (and cheaper) devices out there, I have chosen to list only the basic’s. What else can you do with this device? You can load some form of routing software and as it has a GPS – you can mount it in your car and job done but most mobile phones do this anyhow plus a TomTom is just so much neater and cheaper.

Yes folks – Today the fine people over Linux Mint have released there next version entitled Linux Mint 10, which is based on Ubuntu 10.10 but with the added goodness that is Mint. You can find all the relevant Info www.linuxmint.com, which at the time of writing this post is slow due to the large number of people hitting the site.

Today Fedora have released Version 14 - Feodra is based on Redhat. Fore a complete list of what is new – you can check the Fedora Wiki Page – Spice & libjpegturbo seem to be the main things for ordinary users as well as 2.6.35 kernel.

Netbooks are often seen as not only been very portable but lasting longer then the equivalent laptop and one of the reasons I bought one all them years ago was to save me from having to carry out a normal sized laptop which never seen to last the stated life span on battery. Recently I choose to install Jolicloud onto my said netbook and while I was there, I wanted to see just how long it might last me on battery power – the results were a lot less then I expected.

Acer Aspire One A150

I bought this netbook when they first come out and I remember making sure I bought one with the least amount of Ram but a decent sized hard drive (120Gigs). The Specifications reads Intel Atom N270 / 1.6 GHz, 1.5Gig Ram, 120Gig Hard Drive, 8.9″ TFT running at 1024×600, a 3-cell Lithium Ion battery with a claimed run time of upto 3 hours and it is 1KG.I have replaced the wireless card in this with a Dell Wireless N Model (when I was using this as a Hackintosh).

The test

I ran BBC iPlayer which played a movie (dawn of the dead) which is using the screen, the wireless and the hard disk as it streams the movie. From a full charge, 30 Minitues later and the battery is down to 50%, so given this, if you wanted to watch a movie on battery alone – you will run short way before the movie is finished, in fact you will get half way through.

Hibernation

I closed the lid and it put the laptop into hibernation mode, thus saving battery, upon opening the lid, nothing happened. I had to press the power button for the netbook to wake up. It was a shame it never had some sort of quick suspend feature as this is one of the reasons why an Apple laptop is so good on battery, if you close the lid on an Apple Laptop, it is saves power and goes to sleep – open the lid and it is back to life.

I know a friend of mine took a train journey to Scotland – a good 5 hours I think to get there and he managed to use Apple Laptop all the way (on and off) and even had enough power left when he got to the other end before it needed power – yet here we have a netbook seeming to struggle keeping alive for one hour.

6 Cell Battery

You can get a 6 Cell Battery which is claimed at 8-9 hours, this adds of course weight and bulk to a small computer. You have to think how they test these laptops to get to the claimed 3 Hours, maybe that’s how long it lasts if it is doing nothing?

I have a desktop machine which I use purely for Linux, the specifications are Core 2 Duo 1.83GHz, 5GIG Ram, 80Gig Hard Drive, 19″ Widescreen TFT and nVidia 7600GT Graphics card. The on-board network has failed and it has an Intel gigbit server card installed (which Windows 7 will not recognise) and a PCI 54G Wireless Card. I had tested Fedora 13 on VMWare and liked the look of it – I set about wiping the present Ubuntu 10.10 and wanted to use Fedora instead on this machine – this is were it started to go wrong..

Fedora 13

Fedora is based from RedHat and much like every distro out there, you can choose the Gnome Look, KDE or various others. Of course one is going to look much like the next if they all run on Gnome for example, what is important here is how easy it is to install software, drivers and generally keep the system running.

I liked the look of the icons so off I went and wiped my current (working) Ubuntu 10.10 install and got this thing running. I do like using Compiz, not so much for the flashy bits but more for the multiple screens, quick switching of applications and finding out what is running at the time. This is were I got stuck to be honest, it told me my current graphics card does not support 3D – Wait, What!!

Using a different Driver

Fedora uses nouveau driver, this is free and not written by nVidia and it looks like it does not think my 7600GT is capable of 3D. After spending time on google, typing many items into Terminal and failing – I start to wonder why I wiped my machine in the first place. I looked around and found that Linux Mint has in fact a new version – currently Version 10 and out in Release Candidate stage.

Linux Mint 10 RC

Not long after Ubuntu finally got to 10.10, Linux Mint which is based off Ubuntu (which itself is based off Debian) gets there new version ready. The best way to describe Mint is you take a mix of Gnome and KDE, add in the various codecs that Ubuntu cannot distribute and you have Mint.

3D Comes as Standard

Once installed, there was an icon informing me there is a driver I can install, supplied by nVidia and once this is selected and installed – we have Compiz in all the glory. What I did like about adding stuff here is you press what looks like the ‘start’ button and type and if it is a package that is not installed, you can do it right there.

Use what works for you

Many people who use Linux say “Ubuntu is bad, use Slackware” or “Fedora is better then Ubuntu” – what I say in fact is your better of using what you know and if your more comfortable type ‘apt-get’ instead of ‘yum’ then go with that. This was the case of Mint vs. Fedora, I coul dhave took the time and got 3D Working in Fedora but I felt it easier and better for me to just install a distro I know how to get working..

If you recall, I bought myself the Icy Box External SATA holder and for most part I used this as a means to add extra drives as required (mostly 2.5″ models) for storing data. As this device operates with eSATA (as well as USB) – this means it can be as fast as a normal internal harddrive. I pondered on the thought of having various operating systems per drive and by selecting this on bootup – I can indeed boot into another OS without ditrubing my present system

Preparing the disk

On my internal Drive on my Dell I have Windows 7 64Bit, I did not want to upset this by adding Linux although it is not that bad an idea (same end result). The Laptop I have already has Ubuntu 10.04 64bit installed, so the task at hand was to make a exact image of this onto another 80GIG SATA 2.5″ Drive.

I used the Ultimate Boot CD for Windows to boot the Laptop which gives a Windows like OS and the ability to run Norton Ghost, I had attached a 60GIG USB Drive with the idea to make a image of the Linux box. Ghost kept telling me that Linux needed to run CHKDSK, I tried this and it made no difference. In the end I got a USB Lead and plugged the Caddy into the Laptop and use a direct Image copying program to amke a 100% exact duplicate of the drive. As this was USB, this took some time.

Will it work?

After re-attaching the eSATA to my Dell machine and the 80GIG Drive which now has a copy of Ubuntu Installed – I pressed F12 (to select the Boot device). There was a large list offered and finally I worked out that the one to pick was Toshiba which had 80 in the title somewhere. Soon I was booting up Ubuntu desktop and as the Laptop also had ATI – I was good to go for Compiz. Everything worked as expected, it was fast and easy to boot into Linux when needed although if I was going to work with Linux, I would probably be happy enough with VMWARE for example as Virtually it runs very fast (due to Core i7 and 9GIG RAM).

Other possibilites

What about Hackintosh? You can install or have an attempt at least and just pick this external drive and if it does work – you just press F12 and boot into the drive, instant OSX and should you instead want to use Windows 7, then simply reboot – no dead machine. I can imagine you can do the Same with USB2 Drive but it will be a lot slower – so be warned.

iReboot is NeoSmart Technologies’ simple yet effective reboot helper tool. iReboot sits in your taskbar at startup (only taking up 400KB of memory!) and lets you choose which operating system you want to reboot into. Instead of pressing restart, waiting for Windows to shut down, waiting for your BIOS to post, then selecting the operating system you want to boot into (within the bootloader time-limit!); you just select that entry from iReboot and let it do the rest! If you liked EasyBCD, you’ll just love iReboot!

Universal USB Installer is a Live Linux USB Creator that allows you to choose from a selection of Linux Distributions to put on your USB Flash Drive. The Universal USB Installer is easy to use. Simply choose a Live Linux Distribution, the ISO file, your Flash Drive and, Click Install. Other features include; Persistence (if available), and the ability to format the flash drive (recommended) to ensure a clean install. Upon completion, you should have a ready to run bootable USB Flash Drive with your select Linux version installed.

Currently USB Installable Live Linux Distributions

• Ubuntu 9.10 Desktop i386 – Site
• Xubuntu 9.10 Desktop i386 – Site
• Kubuntu 9.10 Desktop i386 – Site
• Ubuntu Rescue Remix Revision 1 – Site
• Ubuntu NetBook Remix 9.10 – Site
• Ubuntu Server 9.10 32bit/64bit Installer – Site
• Linux Mint 8 – Site
• YlmF OS V1.0 – Site
• Crunchbang 9.04 – Site
• KNOPPIX V6.2 – Site
• gOS 3.1 gadgets – Site
• Ultimate Boot CD V4.11 – Site
• Gentoo 10.1 – Site
• xPUD 0.9.2 – Site
• Simply MEPIS 8.0.15 – Site
• RIP Linux 9.3 – Site
• EEEBuntu 3.0 (Netbook Distro) – Site
• PartedMagic 4.8 – Site
• DSL (Damn Small Linux) 4.4.9 – Site
• EasyPeasy 1.5 (NetBook Distro) – Site
• DBAN (Hard Disk Nuker) – Site
• Puppy Linux 4.3.1 – Site
• Puppy Arcade 7 (Console Game Emulator) – Site
• Kiwi Linux 9.04 – Site
• SLAX 6.1.2 – Site
• SliTaZ Cooking – Site
• Ophcrack XP – Site
• Clonezilla – Site
• Jolicloud (NetBook Distro) – Site
• Dynebolic 2.5.2 DHORUBA – Site
• PLoP Linux 4.0.5 (a minimalist Linux Rescue System) – Site

More Live Linux Distributions will be added as time permits.

Notes: If you run Universal USB Installer from the same directory containing an installable ISO, the script will autodetect the ISO and bypass step 2 once the proper Distro has been selected.

Currently this tool does not support installing and booting from multiple Linux Distributions. Only One Distribution can be installed at any given point in time. A multiboot feature may be added in the future.

Download Universal USB Installer

I dug out yet another Old Laptop – this time A Dell Latitude C840. The Tech specs I shall post in one second but for this exercise, I choose to download Ubuntu 10.04 Beta One (been new and all) and went to work installing Ubuntu plus working with Compiz to give me a radical 3D Desktop – this was not to be as you shall soon find out..

The tech specs

Running a Mobile Pentium 4 at 1.8GHz, it has 1GIG Ram, 40GIG IDE Hard drive and a nVidia GeForce4 440 Go graphics chip which runs the screen at 1400×1050. The battery has since died and this only runs off the main power supply but it still is more then capable when running Windows.

Install

Ubuntu 10.04 installed just fine and I was soon up and running but it warned me that the HD is about to fail as it has so many read errors. I enabled compiz and rebooted the machine as instructed – this was the last time I saw anything on the screen as such.

The problem with the Graphics

I almost gave up to be honest at this stage but I went on a *working* windows machine and I soon found out that the nVidia GeForce4 440 Go graphics chip has an issue in Linux – shock and horror !! The problem it seems is that it enables the VGA Connector as the default device instead of the screen actually built into the machine.

I had a few options but I took the one which basically edited the xorg.conf file and added a line to use the default device of DFP (Digital Flat Panel). Once I rebooted I had the desktop up and running once again.

No 3D Graphics?

I went through and enabled all the normal settings such as Cube and so forth but NONE worked, so here we have actually two issues – the Windows Key (use in many settings for 3D) does not even get picked up and also the driver and/or the card is incapable of actually doing 3D Graphics.

Conclusion

I do expect that a *new* device not work as it should on Linux but I expect people to solve the problems of older hardware due to it been out for a long time and I am sure I am not the only person ever to own a nVidia GeForce4 440 Go graphics chip. This is why time and time again – I keep saying that Windows (even though it costs money) beats this Linux hands down time and time again for the desktop – I shall be installing Windows 7 on this machine later.