Linux for spare

I have tried to use my little Nokia n800 tablet to blog in the past and find the lack of physical keyboard to be ultra annoying. I honestly haven't given the handwriting recognition a chance at all, so I may try that, but my experience is that it is never 100% and not easily edited/corrected like typing with a keyboard. Meaning, I don't type 100% accurate either, but it's a synch to hit and even hold the backspace button and re-type something.

The on-screen keyboard of the n800 is great, but you can't touch-type or type really fast with it because you have to sort of hunt and peck with the stylus. I've also tried the full-screen finger keyboard on the n800, and while this makes life better for typing, it is still less than perfect and has it's own flaws.

My desktop PC is by far my favorite device to use for everything having to do with computers, but it is a "desktop" and sits in my office in the basement. So, I'm essentially anti-social to the family when I'm down there. I have an old laptop that my mother-in-law was using and the HDD got fried... so it sat for a while until I figured I'd try it as a Linux install for blogging and internet browsing for upstairs. It has a really nice screen with higher than usual resolution (1400x1050) and lot's of other goodies. My one worry is that it may not be long for this world because the fan seems to be on it's last leg. At any rate, I dropped a 100GB HDD I had sort of lying around and got Ubuntu 8.10 installed on it in a snap. We'll see if it can last a while for me. If not, I may try and pickup a used one like this for cheap.

Hopefully, this will allow me to browse and blog with greater ease. I think I would love an Asus EeePC, but I can't see shelling out that much for an ultra-small laptop. If all I am doing is browsing the web and blogging/twitting with it, then it doesn't have to have a lot of horsepower... but screen size and resolution make all the difference in the world for those things.

Plus, I kind of wanted to keep Linux in my life in ways... so this can help with that.