Trains in Central Europe
========================

In last  few days I  traveled from  Ostrava to Obertraun  (Austria) and
back. By  train, of course.  One way was about  6 hours (plus  time for
train changes) so it  was a good opportunity to use  my GPD Pocket mini
laptop.  Of course  I used  the  GPD only  during the  boring parts  of
journey (the Alps in Austria are great  so 2 from these 4 hours I spent
by looking from the window).

There  were trains  which had  no  WiFi -  the  IC trains  on the  line
Warzsava- Wien.  On way to  Wien there  were power outlets  (230V under
every seat)  and nice tables  but in  the opposite direction  there was
nothing.  The  same  was  in  the Salzkamergut  Express  from  Wien  to
Obertraun). This Express has also extremely uncomfortable seats, by the
way. This  Express is  often used by  Chinese tourists so  it is  a bit
surprising that the hospitable Austrians  have decided to torture their
guests in this way...

The rest was superb:  the local R/Rex trains had WiFi  and the same was
on the  line from Attnang-Puchheim  to Wien (there were  modern RailJet
trains). Every  seat in all  these trains has  table big enough  for my
GPD. But the local trains were going  through Alps so there was no time
to use the computer ;-)

I must say that when there was WiFi then it worked very well. This time
I  have to  say  that services  of the  Austrian  railways were  almost
excellent (sans the Salzkamergut Express experience).

If you are  interested about my experience with the  GPD Pocket: I have
had to learn how to effectively used some displaced characters and some
symbols  which are  on the  Czech  keyboard map.  And the  rest is  not
special - it is a normal Ubuntu  PC with all of its pluses and minuses.
It's  only unusually  light and  small. It  is good  when one  needs to
transport it but it  means than some support is needed  if one wants to
use  it as  a  lap-top device  (in  the  case when  there  is no  table
available in the train).

The time is probably not a problem. I newer traveled for so long but it
seems that  8 hours  of work  are possible (and  probably more  than 12
hours without WiFi).

The most power  hungry application seems to be  the Firefox (especially
on pages  with tons  of Javascipt code  like the Ebay  is). It  is also
noticeable by constantly  running fan - it runs on  high speed which is
relatively loud (it is almost  unnoticeable inside train). When Firefox
renders simpler pages or when run  anything but Firefox then the fan is
unnoticeable.

This month  I'm going  to travel by  train both to  Prague and  to East
Slovakia so I will see how they will be.