This is one really cool machine!

It has a GUI interface (point and click) that is well thought out and easy to use – even a Windows user will find this to be very easy to use!  The machine I purchased has 1-Gig of 533-MHz memory, a 4-Gig solid-state hard drive (sounds small but wait and read on), Bluetooth and 802.11G Wireless Networking capabilities.  The default applications software installed is geared towards ‘normal’ consumer use – which means it has a web browser (Firefox), several business applications (OpenOffice), games and accessories installed from Dell.  All of the applications integrate seemlessly with the operating system and the is a graphical interface to activate the different applications.

So what you may say – sounds like linux to me!  Well – you are correct, it IS linux!  Being linux is not a bad thing – take the 4-gig solid-state storage – you could not put a Windows XP operating system and all of the installed applications in 4-gigs and still have almost a gig free for other uses!  One other nice thing about linux vs Windows – the linux operating system always has run about 2X to 3X times faster than Windows on the same hardware (has to do with how the different systems use the hardware and how the different systems actually operate).

OK – so it runs linux, but how is that an advantage for configuring WiFi???

Glad you asked!

Since the machine has a web browser you can configure most wireless access points and wireless routers on-site with a small laptop instead of lugging around a full-sized (and heavier) laptop or worse yet taking the wireless access point or wireless router back to a desktop machine.  You can make screen-shots of the configurations and store them on the mini-9 just as you can any other computer with a web browser as the FireFox on the mini-9 is a full-featured version, not a stripped down version!

You can install “Putty”, a network and serial port terminal program (there is a version for Windows as well) to communicate with a device through a serial or wired network connection (this includes the internet) or through the wireless interface – which is the way I use the program to communicate with publicip gateway controllers.  I normally setup the publicip gateway controller to run in CLI mode (NoX – No X GUI) to conserve RAM memory in the gateway controller and use the command line interface to do all the configuration and testing/trouble-shooting.

Now – you may wonder, since the mini-9 does NOT have a serial interface, how I can “talk” to serial devices – that is easy – I just plug in a serial to USB adaptor and the mini-9 detects it and configures it as a serial port on the machine!  Very Very Very Cool!

If you are wondering about storage space well here is how you get additional space – just plub in an external USB thumb drive or an external 2.5? USB hard drive!  The Ubuntu operating system detects the external drive, mounts it to the system and shows you the contents!  This is very cool – I have had a 2-Terabyte (yes – that is 2000 Gigabyte) external hard drive system connected to the mini-9 and the mini-9 detects it and mounts it as a hard drive system!  Talk about storage space!!!

Well – enough rambling – suffice it to say the Dell mini-9 n-book is one sweet machine and at the price of around $400 it is even better!  Oh – did I mention you can get it with a 1.3-Megapixel Camera built in too?

Gary McKinney

The “problem” with the site going down is there was a great deal of information on the site that dealt with issues people had with the PublicIP system and the fixes and work arounds people had come up with to take care of the issues. It is a great loss of information that has given me a reason to start this blog site!

Hopefully you will find the information you are seeking here – and if not leave a posting as to what it is you are looking for as someone else probably has an answer!