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No Speaker: 

DW:  The fine people at Viglen gave us a unit to review. What was it called again? It was the MPC

AP:  MPC-L

DW:  Ahh

AP:  I guess L means Linux

DW:  Most of us have had a play with it, some of us more than most, and er, yeah, Ciemon you had a play with it, what do you think?

CD:  Yeah I had it for a couple of weeks. It's a nice little box actually. Tiny little thing, it's probably about the same sort of dimensions as an A5 piece of paper

AP:  It's about half a video cassette

CD:  Yeah, something like that.Lightweight and really that's the big thing, maybe that's what the 'L' stands for, it is lightweight. It's tiny little thing, not incredibly powerful, and so you've really got to think about what do you want to use this thing for.

DW:  I think one of the things that really impressed us about this unit was that it actually comes shipped with Ubuntu, but it wasn't a current one was it, it was a fairly old one

CD:  Yeah, Alan had it firstYeah, I had it out of the box and it was running the XFCE Xubuntu but I think it was running Feisty (7.04), which seems so long ago now that I started playing with it, I think it was Feisty which is 7.04.

TW:  Yeah, so it's quite old already

AP:  It's still supported, I mean it's not the latest current version, and it arrived in a tatty box so it could well have been a review unit that's done the rounds

TW:  and I guess Xubuntu changes at a slower pace than the other mainstream Ubuntu

AP:  No not really, it keeps up, same release schedule as the other versions

TW:  Yeah, I wonder whether there would be a sea-change between Feisty and Hardy you'd actually see.

AP:  Well one big change I noticed, I did actually upgrade it from Feisty to Gutsy and then from Gutsy to Hardy and I broke it.

DW:  Colour me unsurprised!

AP:  It was just a software breakage which I filed a bug and it has been fixed so if anyone else has one of these and they upgrade it to Hardy it should be okay because the fix has gone through, it was a video driver problem. So when I took it out of the box and plugged it in to a display it all just kinda worked but I was kinda surprised by a couple of things. For example there's no flash player installed which compared with the efficientpc we looked at last time, that's useful.But actually when you come to do some browsing you realise why flash is disabled because the CPU can't really cope with it. If you go to youtube the framerate is really low and the other reference site - the bbc iplayer is just unusable so for flash type stuff no it's probably not ideal.And the other thing was automatic updates were turned off so I don't know if that was deliberate that they'd done or all of this could be lumped together as the fact that this is a review unit and it's probably done the rounds, round some journalists, so I'd forgive all of that, because any geek worth their salt is going to reinstall anyway.