Ed Smiley's Blog

While I was visiting Oreilly’s Safari Bookshelf (aside: Great service BTW, ~$40, all you can eat books plus download 5 chapters a month to PDF files) and saw that they have support for their service on a Kindle. Quite a while back, I looked and thought if Safari works on the Kindle, then I would buy one.  So I went looking thinking that perhaps the price has dropped a bit or maybe people were off-loading them preparing for the Apple Ipad.  No such luck, Kindle 1′s seem to be hovering around $200 on Ebay and Kindle 2′s around $250 (retail price).  So now what?

I did a little bit of searching and came across this post from LifeHacker: Turn Your Netbook into Feature Rich E-book Reader.  Looks easy enough, figured I would give it a go.  I picked up an Emachines EM250 netbook right after Christmas.  Could not resist; 10 inch screen, 250GB HD, SD card, 1GB RAM (upgradable to 2gb) all for $228.  This machine is pretty much a re-branded Acer Aspire One 250.

I started with the Intel graphics program to see if it had a built in function.  Nope, nothing there.  Then I moved onto trying EEERotate.  No dice either.  Next, figuring since the netbook came with the super crippled Windows 7 Starter Edition, I figured that I needed to upgrade the version to something better.  So I went with Windows 7 Ultimate and reinstalled the system. However, still no way to rotate.  Then I went to the all telling Google for answers.  Plenty of answers, but nothing worked.  Tried some registry hacks for the Intel Drivers, downloaded Pivot Pro, MagicRotation, iRotate.  Nothing worked…

Hmm, my netbook reader perhaps was not going to come to fruition.  In one last ditched effort, I booted into my encrypted version of Backtack 4 on an SD card (Thanks to Kevin Riggins‘ great tutorial and video) to see if the screen would rotate.  Sure enough, built right in was the option to rotate and it worked flawlessly.

Since we originally bought the netbook to be something light that we could drag along on trips, I decided to go with a dual book scenario with Windows 7 and Ubuntu Netbook Remix (UNR).  Dropped back to Windows 7 Starter edition with a reinstall.  Now onto UNR.

Incredibly amazed that I could pop in the CD, boot up, get a dialog to shrink the partition, install GRUB for dual boot, and about 15 minutes later have a dual boot Win7/UNR netbook.  There was only 1 hardware issue and that was with wireless and the Broadcom 4312 chips.  Simple apt-getting and a reboot solves that:

sudo apt-get install bcmwl-kernel-source

So now I have my dual-boot e-book reader.  However, when the screen is rotated, the trackpad stays at normal orientation.  Some might think that is not a big deal.  If you are in that camp, give it a try sometime.   Now back to the great Google to see if I can rotate the trackpad.

Found a great page from Aapo Rantalainen that gives step by step instructions for patching the Synaptics driver in Ubuntu to allow for rotation of the touchpad.  Using an alias, I am able to rotate both the screen and trackpad using one command.

After using this setup for a few days, I am very happy with the entire setup.  The netbook is really the size and weight of a heavy paperback book.  So if you have a netbook and are looking for a nice Ebook reader for no additional costs, give this a shot!  The only con to this setup is no always on internet (3G or CDMA), but usually near wireless at home and work where I would read the most.

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