Jerrah

Western Digital has recently started shipping a new range of hard drives that claim to have a reduced energy consumption compared to the competition.

• 38% reduced power consumption
• Consumes 4-5w less that competitors drives
• Save up to $14.00 per year in electricity costs
• Reduced heat and noise

This reduction apparently equates to a reduction of CO² emissions by up to 13.8 kilograms per drive per year – the equivalent of taking a car off the road for 3 days each year.

Whilst this may or may not sound like much, think of how many computers are purchased every year.

I’ve noticed that some people have been giving advice that people should be using the dpkg command to install pretty much any software on the EeePC that isn’t in the default Synaptic repository. Whilst this will install most software and I advised using it with the Skype beta, it’s best only using the command if the software isn’t in a repository.

Some of the software you might wish to install may require other software and if these dependencies aren’t met it could cause problems with your system. Fortunately apt-get and the Synaptic package manager can resolve dependencies and will install everything that is required.

In the case of the Opera browser, a quick google search gave me the repository that Opera have provided. This page lists a number of repositories that can be added to the Synaptic package manager, or to the apt-get sources list that can be located at /etc/apt/sources.list on the EeePC.

In order to write changes to the apt sources you will need root access so I’d suggest running the command sudo kwrite /etc/apt/sources.list which will open a graphical editor and gives you the ability to add extra sources to the list.

You should then be able to install opera with:

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get install opera