David North

I finally got round to putting Linux on my Advent 4211 yesterday. There are various ways and means of doing this; the ones which worked for me were:

• Use the installation image optimised for small screens
• Follow these instructions to make a bootable USB drive from the image (note: it’s ‘cat’, not ‘zcat’ as the ubuntu image is not zipped. I know they’re Debian instructions, but they seem to work)
• Use the script given in this forum post (run as root) to get the WiFi working.

The end results are really rather impressive; here’s a pretty picture:

Ubuntu Linux running on my Advent 4211

Here’s one for all you progammers out there: what happens to the values of x and y if you type the following in, say, Python?


>>> x = 5
>>> y = 6
>>> x,y = y,x


I’d always half-thought, without really considering it, that you’d end up with x=6 and y=6, i.e. that the above was syntactic sugar for:


>>> x = y
>>> y = x


Actually, though, it turns out…


>>> x=5
>>> y=6
>>> x,y=y,x
>>> print x,y
6 5