Basically, I ran into some problems with the harddrive partitions but I did manage to eventually get it up and running. Its not as pretty as I would like, but its almost there.
Its a Dell Mini 10 with a 260Gig harddrive. It was purchased as a factory refurb with Windows 7 starter ed. pre-installed. Upon further inspection it has 3 partitions, a small 500Mb boot loader for windows, a 9Gb recovery partition and the rest is free space for the windows. My plan was to resize the huge 250Gb partition and leave about 40Gb for Linux Mint. The problem I ran into was that the big partition throws up errors in the partitioning software. I used the install options for Linux mint, Ubuntu 10.04, and a live GParted iso and couldn't get any of them to resize or edit the partition. My only option was to either kill and restart the big partition or resize another partition. I don't really want to backup and restore the big partition just yet but i could resize the 9Gb one... so i gave in after a lot of experimenting and internet searching.
I split the restore partition down since it was only about half full and am now running Linux mint on the system. There is about 2Gb of free space to toy around with, as my wife mainly wanted to dabble in a bit of Linux just for the speedy startup and stable use space isnt that big of a deal.
After the install there was a lot of updating to be done as expected, but there was a strange issue with the Broadcom Wireless Modem. The odd part is that the Ubuntu Live iso worked fine with the WiFi. I have had situations with a live cd/usb not working with everything (screen resolution, WiFi, video cards) but then working great once installed and updated. The Linux mint iso never worked with the WiFi... after going through the package manager it is now working well.
So, all told - Linux Mint is up and running on the Dell Mini 10, WiFi and all. The next step is to tackle the possibly corrupted 250Gb partition and maybe reinstalling windows 7 properly and getting two equal sized partitions.
In other news - I finally received my invite to the android app creator from Google. I sat on the invite for about 2 weeks as I didn't have any idea of what to build with it. While out "improving my golf game" I came up with a pretty good idea for an android app. I don't know where to start, but hopefully starting simple will leave room for branching out to something bigger.
I have access to the MyTouch 3G, MyTouch Slide, maybe a G1, a couple Evo 4Gs, and with any luck a Samsung Fascinate. If you have a phone that isn't any of those, and have any interest in side loading beta apps that could potentially break your expensive phone and/or void your warranty... I may be in need of beta testers.
I will try to be more regular with the updates... I'm toying with the idea of going back to Ubuntu (probably 10.10beta) from Linux mint, I cant push the apps to my own phone and I suspect Linux Mint is the issue since every other step has worked.
No interesting links this time, hopefully ill have more next post.
Thanks for reading....
Rob.