Several weeks back I purchased an ‘Easy and Fun TouchKit’ for my Acer Aspire One and finally got around to installing it two days ago.  I purchased the kit off of ebay for $95 plus $25 shipping, but you could also purchase it directly from the FidoHub website.

The touchscreen kit features a solderless design, so installation was fairly uncomplicated (with exception to wire management).   I video taped the install process, divided it up into three parts and uploaded them to YouTube.  A link to each video is included below for anyone who would prefer a visual guide to work with as well.

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I finally got around to softmodding my old xbox last night in order to run XBMC on it.  It is something I’ve been wanting to do for at least a year now, but had procrastinated on because I thought it would be more complicated than it actually was.

I initially made the attempt last week, but because I didn’t have an Action Replay kit (the reader or memory card) – I followed another tutorial that outlined how to use a USB flash drive with a homemade xbox-to-usb cord for transferring the Linux os & game  save exploit needed to perform the softmod.

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Because the s-video out of my Mobility Radeon 9600 wouldn’t work with the open source drivers in Ubuntu 8.10, I decided to install ATI’s proprietary driver. There was nothing listed in Ubuntu’s Restricted Driver Manager for my card – so I downloaded the Catalyst Package directly from ATI’s website.

After several failed attempts using ATI’s automatic driver installer (which resulted in a black or garbled screen after rebooting), I eventually found a manual installation guide outlined at the Unofficial ATI Linux Driver Wiki that worked for me.

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Until this past year, I’d always been a Windows user.  Unlike a lot of die hard geeks, I don’t think Microsoft is evil incarnate nor do I feel there is anything wrong with a company wanting to make a profit from their products.  However, because I have a curious mind and enjoy putzing around on my systems, I started exploring a few different Ubuntu-based Linux distros several months back.  Initially it started with Xubuntu on a system I was building for my 3 year old.  All of the hardware was pretty old, so I wanted OS that was lightweight and had minimal system requirements.

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