The Economist Suggests Linux For Netbooks 445
Trepidity writes "In its roundup of how to choose a netbook, The Economist suggests that users 'avoid the temptation' to go for a Windows-based netbook, and in particular to treat them as mini laptops on which you'll install a range of apps. In their view, by the time you add the specs needed to run Windows and Windows apps effectively, you might as well have just bought a smallish laptop. Instead, they suggest the sweet spot is ultra-lite, Linux-based netbooks, with a focus on pre-installed software that caters to common tasks. They particularly like OpenOffice, which they rate as easier to use than MS Word and having 'no compatibility problems,' as well as various photo-management software." Besides which, does Windows offer spinning cubes for coffee-shop demos?
No compatibility problems? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:No compatibility problems? (Score:5, Interesting)
Even for non net books, Linux is just better than windows for mobiles. It uses significantly less resources and my usable battery life has increased by at least 30% from switching from Vista to Ubuntu. Mind you this is on a high end laptop, Vista feels like a dog while Linux(Ubuntu) runs smoothly.
Re:No compatibility problems? (Score:5, Informative)
openoffice.org-dmaths
Formula editor improvements for OpenOffice.org
This is a package you can install on ubuntu to add additional support to openoffice concerning formulas. Have you tried this?
latex (Score:5, Insightful)
LaTeX
Typesetting system well-suited for typesetting math
This is a package you can install on ubuntu to add support for typesetting math-rich documents. Havee you tried this?
Re:latex (Score:5, Informative)
Can Word and Oo.org embed LaTeX type inline?
OOoLatex is a set of macros designed to bring the power of LaTeX into OpenOffice. [sourceforge.net]
Re:latex (Score:4, Informative)
The software is technically named "OpenOffice.org", not "Open Office". Thus the small o is for ".org". I don't particularly like that naming, but that's how they did it. I, like you, think just plain old "Open Office" would have made more sense. There may have been some concern of trademark issues with Microsoft's "Office" product had they not added the ".org" to the end.
Re:latex (Score:4, Informative)
Wikipedia: "The project and software are informally referred to as OpenOffice, but this term is a trademark held by a company in the Netherlands co-founded by Wouter Hanegraaff and is also in use by Orange UK. [2], requiring the project to adopt OpenOffice.org as its formal name."
Re:No compatibility problems? (Score:4, Informative)
Hardware compatibility, or keyboard compatibility? (Score:3, Interesting)
Even for non net books, Linux is just better than windows for mobiles.
Unlike with a desktop computer, you can't easily replace the screen, keyboard, and pointing device of a laptop computer. So how do you try a Linux laptop when the local stores don't sell any Linux laptop other than an ASUS Eee PC? Do you try a Windows model in-store and mail-order the Linux version? Do you try a Windows model, put everything listed in Device Manager into Google to make sure it works with Linux, buy the laptop, and wipe it with Ubuntu? Or do you buy your Linux laptops sight unseen and pay th
Re:Hardware compatibility, or keyboard compatibili (Score:5, Informative)
If you're planning to use Ubuntu, the best approach is to scope out the laptop on the Ubuntu Wiki [ubuntu.com] first. It isn't absolutely comprehensive, but it does cover the majority of popular laptops. I assume that other major distros have their own compatibility lists, and if your distro of choice doesn't, well, use the Ubuntu list, and at least you know that someone somewhere got your laptop working under Linux.
Re:Hardware compatibility, or keyboard compatibili (Score:5, Informative)
At that point, you can test most (if not all) of the peripherals to see if they work nicely.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
No, but you can use an external USB one.
That's a definite "yes", not a "maybe". You just use something like unetbootin [sourceforge.net] to copy the live CD to a USB stick, then boot from that. It's all GUI-driven, so it's pretty straightforward.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Don't tell this to Dell (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm the tech director for a small girls' school and we've decided to experiment with the Dell Mini 9s... That is, until our rep at Dell informed us that we couldn't purchase the mini's in quantity as a school with Linux installed.
Now, we want Linux because I don't want the girls filling these things up with crap software, slowing them down, killing them with viruses, etc.
In addition, there's something to be said for such a quick startup time. Teachers want their students ready to be taught as soon as possible. What we don't need is little Ashley's Facebook virus-laden netbook taking 5 minutes to get to a usable state.
The end result (after some complaining) was that they would offer the netbook to us for the same cost as the XP version - which smells pretty suspicious to me, no?
Dell is not as serious about Linux as people seem to think they are. Just because consumer models are available does not mean corporate and educational versions are as well.
Re:Don't tell this to Dell (Score:5, Interesting)
Tell your Dell rep you've decided to go with the Asus EeePC instead. Linux friendly and cheap.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Dell internally treats enterprise/government and small business/home as two separate companies. For example they use different advertising agencies, different help desks, different software to price out their systems. The only thing they share is they both draw on Dell's manufacturing capacity in a sort of client / vendor way.
The corporate side may not yet understand what their customers want in a netbook so they want to sell a basic configuration. Because once they start supporting a LInux they are goin
Re:No compatibility problems? (Score:4, Interesting)
You know I've seen the same problems *within* Word.
I use Word 97 at home, and Word 2003 at work, and I often see formatting problems during the conversion. Sometimes even just moving from my computer to my bosses' computer causes problems (varying width of the document), even though we are running the same 2003 edition. How can we "blame" OpenOffice for compatibility problems, if even Microsoft can't keep its own suite of software compatible?
Overall I think OpenOffice does okay. Certainly better than WordPerfect's reading of Word files (which was a giant fail).
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
You have a fundamental misunderstanding of how word processing works.
Word processors are designed to be WYSIWYG with the "Get" being the printed page and the "See" being the displayed page, and therefore they format the page based on the printer definitions. You move the file from one computer to another and they have different printers, then the page is reformatted to fit that printer.
Most people don't understand this, and expect the document to look the same. It won't. That's why Adobe created Acrobat,
Re:No compatibility problems? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:No compatibility problems? (Score:4, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
I don't know abut Ubuntu, but on many distros, you can turn off or suspend real-time indexing. Otherwise, you're indexing the file system, any web pages you crawl, etc. That takes a lot of juice.
In ubuntu it is too hard to turn off indexing. It always DOSs the machine for me and the speed control seems to have no effect.
IMHO it should be off by default.
Re:No compatibility problems? (Score:4, Interesting)
I remember a few weeks ago I get an email from the computer science cluster admin yelling at me for going way over quota. I wrote back, puzzled, because I hadn't used the account for much of anything in years.
Turns out it was some "beagle" thing they were using, it had, over the years, continually indexed my home dir until eventually it bumped me over quota (I was at about 50% after I deleted all the beagle shit, so at least it plausibly had something to index)
Proposal: merge indexing and backup service;)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Beagle is a huge problem on single-core machines. At least on dual-core, you still have enough spare cycles so you can turn do a "ps ax | grep beagled" and then "kill -9" it.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Yeah, my complaint with Ubuntu is that they have too much of this "scan everything on the hard drive, taking up a ton of CPU for something you might not use"
I resorted to "chmod a-x /usr/bin/nasty_program", to keep it off.
How about not starting those scanning things unless I actually use the service?
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
There are tons of /b/tards spouting all kinds of 4chan shit here. "[citation needed]" is probably the only thing that became a meme outside of Wikipedia through being mentioned in xkcd, so I don't think, it's fair to blame it.
Re:No compatibility problems? (Score:5, Informative)
Too hard?
-System->Preferences->Search and Indexing
-Uncheck "Enable Indexing"
And lastly in 8.10 it is off by default.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Linux is generally not "snappy" as you call it because things aren't programmed that way.
Linux is very "snappy", do not mistake the Linux OS to complete software system. It is not Linux OS fault if there is preinstalled application on system what slows things down, or the application itselfs are slow. OS can be damn fast and powerfull but applications slow and terrible. Still unwise persons believe that OS is slow then. I dont blame Windows NT from being slow if the Crysis does not work as fast on my computer as on highend computer of my friend!
The reality is that an OS is useless without applications, so people naturally think of the entire setup when using words like slow, unstable, unreliable, Vista (-1 redundant).
An OS can be the fastest, most reliable and stable one out there but unless it has applications that preserve those features than it has no inherent advantage over other OS's; at least not from a users point of view.
Technical arguments and benchmarks are nice; but what counts is how it performs in the user environment. Users don't c
Re:No compatibility problems? (Score:4, Insightful)
Because 95+% of my friends/colleagues have Office and saying "Download this application" to correctly read this file does not make you popular. There are right and wrong ways to be an evangelist. Forcing OO downloads is the wrong way.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Sun make a plugin for word to support opendocument files, microsoft also make such a plugin but it doesnt work anywhere near as well, and finally microsoft are supposedly going to implement opendocument support some time next year in a service pack.
Re:No compatibility problems? (Score:4, Insightful)
Two possible reasons: many academic publishers accept only Word; and many proprietary programs (like Endnote) work only with Word.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
>>>MS Word users have used hard returns and a bunch of spaces on the beginning of the next line because they're too stupid to figure out how to do an indented paragraph.
Shouldn't OpenOffice be able to handle that very easily? If it can't properly decode that simple formatting, then something wrong's IMHO.
I'm guessing that wasn't on their radar screen (Score:5, Insightful)
The target market for netbooks is generally "normal people", who are more or less by definition not editing Word documents with mathematical formulas in them.
Re: (Score:2)
Re:I'm guessing that wasn't on their radar screen (Score:5, Informative)
If editing formulas was really a big concern for you you would be using LaTeX like all the cool kids.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:I'm guessing that wasn't on their radar screen (Score:4, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Well, you'll only be in college for 4 years.
Nope. I'm a part-timer, takes a lot longer that way.
Then, welcome to the mathematical community, where you will be laughed at for doing anything in word.
Nope, I'm already in the engineering community (we use equations too) and like I say, customers want Word format documents.
Also (and more importantly) you'll probably get carpel tunnel syndrome from using "equation editor."
Yes, that's why I use laTeX when I can, but the option isn't always open to me. At least my present employer is relaxed about my having it on my work computer -- as far as my previous employer was concerned, it wasn't in list of official company software, so I couldn't have it. Those folks who think people get to choose the software th
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Do they really want word, or just something they can read on their machine? I've heard that LaTeX to PDF conversion tools are pretty cool :P
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:I'm guessing that wasn't on their radar screen (Score:4, Informative)
That wouldn't be allowed at work, on the grounds that nobody could take over and edit the equations if I went under a bus.
There are things like the OOolatex plugin [sourceforge.net] that provide a managed method for such image insertion, allowing you to simply select and equation, call up a dialog box with the TeX, re-edit, and re-insert the new rendering conveniently and easily. It's a very basic plugin for OpenOffice.org. I am pretty sure very similar things exist for Microsoft Word. At that point the only difficulty in someone else editing the equations is their inability to read and write LaTeX; and if they have any business writing and editing any number of equations they should know LaTeX.
Where do all you folks work, that you can choose the tools you work with? And how do they manage business continuity?
Any sane person who writes a lot of equations for a living will happily grab LaTeX, even if it is in the form of a plugin for standard word processors described above. Once you have an entire department/work group saying that this small free piece of software is going to have a very significant boost to their productivity very few companies say no. I doubt these people are getting to pick and choose thier softare completely, but they can request software that is going to have a large positive impact on their productivity, and they will often get it.
Re:I'm guessing that wasn't on their radar screen (Score:5, Funny)
Re:I'm guessing that wasn't on their radar screen (Score:4, Insightful)
Logistics. It is easier to have all your papers on your computer then a huge package to carry back.
For example I had 2 classes. Human Resource Management, and Topics in Information System. Both required a 14 page paper, One the professor wanted it handed in in paper format the other electronically (you can guess who required what). Needless to say for a class of 30 students average. 30*14 is 420+ pages or papers for the professor to carry to her car bring home. organize, mark up, grade, and bring back to the class and hand them back. Sending them online is a bit easier for some professors as it doesn't require all the moving.
But the advantage is for the student for electronic submission. First once they are done with the paper they can send it in and not worry about having the paper for that class. Next issues such a paper and ink quality don't effect the first impression, I have a lot of budget paper that is a bit more yellow then the expensive high quality paper. I also have High Gloss High white paper for the final projects, and I have a good quality solid ink printer. So for my final projects when I need to hand them in on Paper they look professionally printed. Vs. an InkJet with little white lines of color and looks rather dull. First impression my be the difference between say a B or a B+ Or an A- to an A.
Electronic submission levels the playing field where the InkJet peoples presentation can be just as good at the Solid Ink or Color Laser people.
Secondly if the professor takes the time to Mark up digitally you have a better chance of understanding what the heck they are trying to comment on. For example when I handed in a program via Paper in my undergrad the professor made this comment. "This is the slickest code I have ever seen. Slick not Sick." This was actually a good professor and caught himself on writing a note that may be misread. But other professors will go Red Ink crazy even with complements or good suggestions to help with the learning process but for the life of me I can't read a single sentence.
Third there is an issue of archiving. Professors sometimes like to keep their students previous papers and show them to their new classes so they have a good idea on what is expected of them. Having paper copies could get messy real fast and finding them that much more difficult.
Fourth. Stopping the excuses. Durring normal paper submission and the student said. I couldn't get you the paper because my printer broke. You would need to wait for the next class (depending on your teaching schedule) to get the new version. A digital submission make sure the kid is honest and once whatever excuse has been completed you get the paper before you are ready to do work on it.
Disabled professors. If you are a professor and you are blind a digital copy would be much easier to convert to spoken word or printed out in brail vs. going threw the OCR layer first.
Search and replace. Ok you are bit of a gammer or spelling nazi. And the student spelt one important vocabulary word wrong but did it consistently except for having it bug you every time you see it like that just do a replace with the correct spelling (if you take points off such things it makes sure you don't take points off for repeating the same mistake) Also if you are reading threw these paper quickly there is often a lot of fluff in these papers, students need to make sure they are not coping other peoples work who often write the idea so much clearly and directly it is difficult to make it in your own words (and then reference the idea) without getting a bit fluffy in content. Having papers full of fluff sometimes you may want to search for some text or key points for a faster grading process.
From a writing teacher (Score:4, Interesting)
Even when people email me their work, I still print it out and mark it up. A few reasons:
1) The markup tools in Word, etc., are much more suited to what they're designed for: collaboration. I use them all the time when I'm working with colleagues on joint research papers. But for paper comments, they are slow and kludgy.
2) On paper, I can do things like circle a phrase and draw an angry red arrow back to where it should actually be. I can do a lot more than just add margin notes, and I can communicate state of mind better. A typed "Huh?" on a comment does not communicate my total inability to work out what the student is trying to say the way a big, red one with a giant question mark and an underline or two does.
3) Turning things in electronically is great for the student, not for the teacher. See, for this to work, I have to have all my students in my address book. This is a lot harder than you'd imagine, especially with people who have the same names, people who don't use their university mail, etc. When it's paper, I look at it, comment it, rate it, put the grade in my computer, and move on. It gets back to you the next class, when I'm going to see you anyway. Mailing them back to each person is akin to me having to put printed copies in a student's pigeon hole. It's an extra clerical task that takes time from doing more important things and is failure-prone (and here in Japan, sending the wrong paper to the wrong student can get you sued/fired--privacy law).
4) There's been a lot of research on corrective feedback for writing. Guess what? It's useless. You give it, some students get better, some don't. You don't, same thing. Now, as a student, no one wants to just turn in something that took them hours and hours and get nothing back, and, as a teacher, I don't want people to think I'm not even reading them, because, truthfully, I read every word, all the time (I like to see what people have to say), so we comment them, knowing full well that people either won't read them or will read them but not take them to heart. So, what I'm saying is that there's no reason for these comments to live on forever on our hard drives. Paper will get read and tossed. That's the appropriate life cycle for that exchange.
5) Finally, you can't search a paper to speed up grading. If there's fluff in there, I'm going to nail your ass. Every sentence is important, and if it's not, I need to read it anyway to tell you that it's not. No one wants to get a grade on a paper based on a couple sentences.
Basically, as a student, turning things in electronically is great. As a teacher, in my personal opinion and experience, not so much.
Re:I'm guessing that wasn't on their radar screen (Score:5, Insightful)
Odd; I always thought most people would rather have a PDF than a Word doc, unless they were collaborating with you. Certainly, if you're submitting a final, formatted document you'd want to use a format that specifies the rendered output exactly (PDF, Postscript, whatever Microsoft's new-ish one is) instead of one like ODF, Office formats, and TeX input files, which don't.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
As a minor nitpick, TeX input (in conjunction with all images and other source files) does specify the rendered output exactly. Donald Knuth went to great lengths to ensure that a given TeX input will render identically on every machine on which TeX runs, even going so far as to use fixed-decimal numeric representations rather than whatever floating-point formats a given architecture may natively support.
Not that I'd send a TeX/LaTeX input file to someone when a PDF or PostScript file would suffice, of cou
Re:I'm guessing that wasn't on their radar screen (Score:4, Funny)
Re:I'm guessing that wasn't on their radar screen (Score:4, Informative)
eXpensive Piece of Shit?
Heh, not quite. Xml Paper Standard.
Essentially, a slimmed down PDF-like format, but designed exclusively for digital representation of print media (so no embedded forms, audio, video, etc). It also uses a zipped XML format, and can be digitally signed. I believe the idea is this will be a native printer language like Postscript (not entirely sure why it's better - maybe just more descriptive?), and MS is incorporating this standard throughout the Windows printing pipeline, which is supposed to make WSIWYG printing easier / more reliable for Windows programmers. Apparently, printer manufacturers are signing on, so it may gain enough traction to stick around for a while.
I happened to learn about this format because I needed to create a utility to export scripts (as in, the kind actors read) from our text database for voice-recording studios, which has standardized and very specific formatting requirements. Because we use .NET and WPF for our tools, it was fairly simple to output to .XPS format. RTF didn't have quite enough formatting support, and .doc files - pfft, yeah, right.
So far, so good. The California studios seem to be able to open and print them, which is all I needed.
Re:No compatibility problems? (Score:5, Insightful)
In my experience, OpenOffice certainly does open some documents in a way that looks strange. In the vast majority of those cases, those documents also look strange when moving between different versions of Word. So, compatibility isn't absolutely 100% perfect with a specific version of word, but it is damn near 100% compatibility if you consider "Word" as a whole, rather than "Word" as the exact specific version of Word you happen to have installed on the specific system you use most.
And, most of those documents are indeed stuff like formulae which aren't widely used, and for which Word is sometimes not really the best tool for the job. When I worked in academia IT, I had the insane good fortune to work in a department where everybody was comfortable with the idea of using latex for their papers. I think I had to deal with fewer than half a dozen issues related to latex in the whole time I worked there. OTOH, when I was in Windows support, I'd call half a dozen MS Word issues a light week!
Re:No compatibility problems? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:No compatibility problems? (Score:4, Informative)
>Not earlier. Unless my memory is failing me, .sxw was the default file type until not long ago.
Two major versions and 3 years ago
Re:No compatibility problems? (Score:5, Funny)
We have an XML open standard: Office Open XML. The free software community just refuses to implement it because they hate innovation and enjoy kicking puppies.
Re:No compatibility problems? (Score:4, Insightful)
I absolutely beg to differ...
Office Open XML is as from being open as we are from getting into another galaxy.
First, the bad news. Office Open XML has several thousand pages of documentation for the file format, some of which refers to proprietary ways older Microsoft products operated (e.g. implement feature X of Office 97) without giving code or direct examples. Second, Microsoft ended up attempting to go through ECMA to race against ODF to be the first to be an industry-standard. During this process, Microsoft was accused of encouraging certain voting irregularities. Based upon their past history including their case with the DOJ, some credence might be lent to that train of thought.
Second, the good news... ODF has been ratified as the ISO 26300 standard, in 2006. The documentation was on the order of several hundred pages long. In addition, very little resistance was present during the adoption process, as the OpenDocument folks went through the proper channels and made sure that all involved parties were aware of their steps.
Do you honestly think that a standard controlled by a company who has historically focused on proprietary products is more open than one which was built from a grassroots effort and industry coalition?
Re:No compatibility problems? (Score:5, Funny)
+++ BEGIN MESSAGE +++
Dear Earthlings and in particular readers of Slashdot,
We are a species from, what you call, the Pleiades, who have been watching your planet for a number of weeks. Our mission is to ascertain whether contact with your planet would be mutually beneficial.
We were of the belief that a cultural exchange, and maybe some donation of hardware -- particularly something to help you with pollution and climate change, so that you don't all die soon -- would be a good thing. However, our anthropologists were worried by the number of stupid people down there who may jeopardise the mission, and cause harm to you or us. We resolved to keep monitoring for a little while longer, to continue assessing you. I can now inform you that we have made our decision. The reason we are posting it on this site, and beneath this comment, is the parent post was the deciding factor; it made our course of action clear.
Nosbig, joke comprehension is an indicator of intelligence (or lack thereof). That you mis-understood the parent's joke is forgiveable, but speaking out about it is not. If we made contact, and during the first meeting made a joke about sharks with frickin' laser beams. Could we be sure that you would not shout, "They've got lasers! They're going to try to kill us all!!1!one" causing mass panic? It's this sort of stupidity that worries us, and means contact cannot be made at present.
So, there will be no gifts of technology or cultural exchanges, you have Nosbig to thank for this. Presently we will be f*cking back off to the Pleiades, our home and native land. However, all is not lost: we will be observing Slashdot tradition when someone misinterprets a joke, but as we will be flying approximately 2,500 kilometres over Nosbig, and there is no sound in space, I have ordered the entire crew onto the bridge, where we will all shout *WHHHOOOOOOOOOOSH* the moment we pass over him. I expect a joke has never flown so far over someone's head as now.
Good bye and good luck Earthpeople, hope the lifestyle comes together.
+++ END MESSAGE +++
CARRIER LOST
Re:No compatibility problems? (Score:4, Interesting)
I guess you mean OpenOffice Writer.
Let's see: I write scientific articles choke-full of all sorts of formulas. And I have never ever had a single problem with OpenOffice's formula editor. To be quite frank, I find it superior to Word's, in that I can better predict the outcome of what I'm doing, and can better control the layout of my formulas.
So, I don't like to say this, but your arguments against formulas in OpenOffice is really some kind of horseshit.
Re:No compatibility problems? (Score:4, Funny)
Well.... f*ck. I can't go back and edit my post now.
I hereby officially retract what I wrote there, about horseshit. I stand by what I wrote about OO.o's excellent formula editor, though.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Try LyX for a week and then tell us what you think of OO.org's equation editor.
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Nonsense, OpenOffice Word has a ton of problems with mathematical formulas, also I've had problems with images that open fine on msword but don't under OpenOffice. Otherwise it works well, I've moved from Word to OpenOffice.
That's been my experience as well. I use NeoOffice on my Mac; and while it is generally compatible I occasionally get some strange artifacts when opening PowerPoint files. Overall, however, NO/OO is compatible enough to be a viable alternative; you just need to verify the files will open properly if it is a "mission critical" file; such as one you are planning to have printed, or will be use as a presentation, from a machine that may not be running NO/OO.
OpenOffice is still mediocre (Score:4, Interesting)
I've been using OpenOffice since 1.0, and I'm now on 3.0. I don't think I've used Microsoft Word in the last year, although I still have a valid copy of Word 97 around.
OpenOffice actually works now; it doesn't crash or garble documents. But its interface is painful and amateurish.
With enough effort, you can work around these problems. But this is just a word processor. It should just work. And this is version 3; they've been at this for a decade now.
This is a generic problem with open source user applications. They need real usability testing, where naive users are videoed doing various tasks while commenting on what bugs them. They seldom get it.
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The vast majority of people using mini-notebooks aren't going to be concerned about math formulas. Really, they aren't.
Spinning cubes? (Score:4, Funny)
Besides which, does Windows offer spinning cubes for coffee-shop demos?
No, just flying chairs
Re:Spinning cubes? (Score:5, Insightful)
No, just flying chairs
There really should be a screen saver for that.
Re:Spinning cubes? (Score:5, Funny)
Flying Toasters?
THATS BRILLIANT!
Maybe we could make a program that only runs after the screen has gone black...we could call it...After...Black. Or something.
It's right for you. Will you be allowed to buy it? (Score:5, Interesting)
The big problem here is whether you'll be allowed to buy a mini notebook with 1GB and a 120-160 MB hard disk without Windows. Microsoft certainly does not want notebook vendors selling them that way, and has effective strategies to induce them not to do so.
I expect they start with legal bribes, price structures effecting both the vendors larger systems and the smaller ones, and if that doesn't work the patent portfolio comes out and they discuss whether you'd like to cross-license on their terms or be sued.
All of which means you won't see many of the Linux machines at retail. So, the customer has to self-install, which is beyond most of them.
Re:It's right for you. Will you be allowed to buy (Score:2)
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Theres nothing illegal about it. Microsoft does dictate hardware specs to manufacturers, as they have in the past and will continue in the future. If the manufacturer wants to continue selling MS products on their machine, they have to play by their rules. Why do you think they cant sell you a system with no OS?
Re: (Score:3)
some people just refuse to use/want or buy windows, i am one of them...
Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)
Re:It's right for you. Will you be allowed to buy (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm not quite as cynical as you in that I don't think Microsoft can stop this revolution.
In order to make money they have to charge something for their software. Linux will always be cheaper than a Windows machine.
Apple were smart in positioning themselves as the luxury computer brand.
Linux has made inroads in cheap ultra-portables. Windows has no-where to go. It's too slow for ultra-portables, it's too low quality for a luxury product.
Ultra-portables are probably the future of computing. We're getting to the point where mobile contracts are being sold with a free ultra-portable.
To me, it's much like what happened when the RIAA got in bed with Walmart. The RIAA stabbed record stores in the back by dealing with Walmart.
The record stores had their interests aligned with the RIAA. The more music they sold, the more money they made and the more money the RIAA made.
However, Walmart was a different animal. To Walmart, music was just something that took up shelf space. Suddenly the RIAA was competing with every other product.
The RIAA found that it couldn't dictate the terms any more because Walmart had no qualms about dropping their product if they couldn't get a good deal. The RIAA, owing a good chunk of its revenue to Walmart, suddenly found itself to be Oliver saying: "Please sir, can I have some more?"
In the past Micrsoft could bully system builders because they are like the record stores used to be . They have a vested interest in selling units which is mutually beneficial for both the system builder and Microsoft.
However, computers are now becoming so cheap that they're being given away as a part of other deals. The people crafting these deals don't give a crap if it's Microsoft or not. They can't be bullied because their main line of business has little to do with Microsoft.
Economics is a force more powerful than any individual company. Microsoft is not above this. Vista, to me, just confirmed that Microsoft is just another company. They don't need to make too many more mistakes before it starts to hurt really badly.
I think we're beginning to see the end of the Microsoft monoculture.
Re:It's right for you. Will you be allowed to buy (Score:5, Informative)
The advertisements all over the Economist page (top and bottom banners and embedded in the article itself) are for the Asus N series [asus.com] notebooks. Which make a point of promoting the Express Gate [wikipedia.org] instant-on linux environment built into the motherboard.
So even if they buy one with Windows XP or Vista installed, the first thing to run when they switch it on will be Linux with FireFox.
Re:It's right for you. Will you be allowed to buy (Score:5, Informative)
Look around at prices online. If that's really the case then why is it I can get a Win XP Acer Aspire One 8.9-Inch Netbook (e.g. @ Amazon.com) with 1 GB RAM, 120 GB Hard Drive, and 3 Cell Battery for $350, but the Linpus Linux Lite one only has 512 MB RAM, 8 GB Solid State Drive instead of a HD, and a standard battery, and that's about $300.
The hardware differences alone should be more than a $50 drop in price. It's like you're getting a discount for adding Win XP to the device.
If you start with the $350 XP model and deduct the cost of the hardware differences, and deduct the cost of XP, the Linux one by comparison should probably be more like $200.
Well.. for a start, you are buying in America, so the models offered may be different. And you are compairing two different modles, so the pricing will also not be as simple as guessing a price for the storage.
The Asus Eee 901 had varying prices all over the world. Just about every permutation of hardware and price was available. It depends on the importer. And perhaps you are in a less Linux friendly market. The UK pricing for the 901 was identical for both Windows and Linux, but the Linux one had a bigger SSD.
If you go to the Amazon.co.uk website and look at the Acer Aspire One, model A150, the Linpus Linux version is £215.30, and the Windows version is £283.37. So the Linux one is £68.07 cheaper for identical hardware (about the full retail price of an OEM copy of XP home). Pricing varies according to market assumptions made by the manufacturer and the importer.
As to the difference in price with the two models you are looking at, Perhaps the SSD is more expensive than a 2.5 inch hard drive, so the retail price would also be different. Dissimilar models make it much harder to assess.
You misunderstood (Score:4, Insightful)
Since when is a $300-400 netbook PC a "luxury product"?
It's not - he's defining the more expensive laptops that way. He's saying people will either want a very cheap ultra-portable, or decide to splurge on a higher end laptop such as Apple offers.
Plus, a netbook with 512MB RAM and a 1.6GHz Atom processor (which, BTW, has hyper-threading) is easily 15x the minimum requirements for XP Home
Indeed, what a shame Microsoft has no interest in further sales of XP Home. And I would argue that Linux desktops on really constrained devices are probably still better.
1998 called. It wants its issues back. (Score:4, Insightful)
You talk as if this is something MS might try, when we all know that they've been doing it routinely all along. But this kind of tactic doesn't seem to be working with netbooks. Companies seem to have no trouble making and selling simple Linux netbooks.
The sad thing is that this is not entirely a win for Linux. Yes, it means increased market share. But it only succeeds because there's a basic set of Internet tools that everybody uses and that can be implemented on any widely-used OS. That being the case, vendors might as well use an OS that doesn't come with license fees.
But that means nobody will be able to make a living writing applications for these netbooks — they already have all the software their users need. Most desktop applications will continue to be coded against Microsoft's convoluted, inconsistent, and buggy APIs and platforms.
Re: (Score:2)
Lots of people make money coding for cell phones and PDAs. There is plenty of demand for software for netbooks and Unix platforms are easy to write for.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Are you sure about that? When I see the demographics: kids, college students, train commuters it seems like form factor is what is driving netbooks. But yes I would assume people who are spending little won't spend as much on software....
And I'm not talking about serious applications. Serious applications don't do well on cell phones but complex alarm clocks, mini games and expense report mangers do.
Re:1998 called. It wants its issues back. (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm the sort of person who's always getting asked to help people with their computers. (I guess all geeks have this experience, but I think I do it more than most, because I'm good at explaining things, which is also what I do for a living [google.com].) My experience with this is that most people who use computers outside their jobs use them three things, and three things only: web surfing, email, word processing. Unless they become interested in the technology for its own sake and are in danger of turning into computer geeks (and that's certainly a growing demographic!), they're not interested in expanding their skill set much past this point. Indeed, they tend to resist getting in deeper than they actually have to.
Now, I could be mistaken, but it's my perception that these are the people who are driving the growing popularity of Linux-based netbooks. It's hard to see who else could be driving it — previous attempt to get people to adopt Linux as an alternative to Windows have failed miserably. We all know why: there's too much application lockin on this platform. But if the only applications you're running are the three I just mentioned, application lockin ceases to be an issue.
Maybe I'm wrong, and it is all about the form factor and battery life. But I don't think so.
Re: (Score:2)
But that means nobody will be able to make a living writing applications for these netbooks — they already have all the software their users need. Most desktop applications will continue to be coded against Microsoft's convoluted, inconsistent, and buggy APIs and platforms.
My nephew runs commercial games on his ipod touch.
Re:1998 called. It wants its issues back. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:1998 called. It wants its issues back. (Score:5, Interesting)
Netbooks increase the application space, which means more opportunities for niche software. For example, now that netbooks are so cheap, more companies will give their employees one to use on the road. So now there's more opportunity to add value by writing code for a particular business need that just opened up because of the cheap netbook? Or for charging for modifying gpl software to cater to a particular need, and contribute back to "the community" at the same time?
Re:1998 called. It wants its issues back. (Score:5, Insightful)
People can make a living writing applications that have depth, like PhotoShop, or are timely, like TurboTax for the specific tax year, or that have tremendous liability and accuracy issues, like TurboTax, or that, again like TurboTax, aren't written for love, and aren't written by programmers at all but by accountants.
If your software doesn't have depth, or timeliness, etc., it's too late to make money from it. This isn't particularly an Open Source issue.
That leaves us with games, and netbooks aren't game machines, and all of the content you vend via web sites, which is probably where any money to be made will come from.
Re:It's right for you. Will you be allowed to buy (Score:5, Insightful)
The big problem here is whether you'll be allowed to buy a mini notebook with 1GB and a 120-160 MB hard disk without Windows. Microsoft certainly does not want notebook vendors selling them that way, and has effective strategies to induce them not to do so.
I expect they start with legal bribes, price structures effecting both the vendors larger systems and the smaller ones, and if that doesn't work the patent portfolio comes out and they discuss whether you'd like to cross-license on their terms or be sued.
That won't mean anything to a chinese company willing to sell a netbook online for a hundred bucks.
Re:It's right for you. Will you be allowed to buy (Score:4, Informative)
So buy it with Windows and get [networkworld.com] your [linuxjournal.com] refund [linux.com].
Consider the refund as a payment by Microsoft for you installing Linux.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:It's right for you. Will you be allowed to buy (Score:4, Interesting)
I have it in black, with 160 GB disk. They had the unit at Fry's, with Windows, for USD$350. No Linux. Amazon is fine, but IMO retail stores count for more.
I'm not a big fan of Limpus (pun indended). It's handicapped. Someone had to make it even dumber than Windows. It doesn't represent Linux as well as something like Ubuntu or Debian. Certainly someone used to Windows would not have much trouble with the Ubuntu menu.
It's a wash (Score:5, Informative)
gOS Linux at $300
7" screen, VIA CPU, 512 MB RAM, 30 GB HDD
Windows XP at $350
8.9" screen, Atom CPU, 1 GB RAM, 120 GB HDD.
SUSE Linux at $400
9" Screen, VIA CPU, 512 MB RAM, 4 GB Flash, and a webcam. Not sold in stores.
Windows XP at $400
9" Screen, 1 GB RAM, 160 GB HDD and a webcam. In some stores. Mini-Laptops [walmart.com]
The Economist ~ understates ~ the advantages of being able to run your Windows apps on your netbook - and there is really nothing in F/OSS of interest to the general consumer market that isn't available for Windows.
Re: (Score:3)
MS will litteraly give XP away to the vendors now ratherthan risk having people/customers break free of the win32 app stack.
Finally! (Score:4, Funny)
Finally, the big breakthrough.
This time it's definitely true: 2009 is the year of Linux on the deskt... netbook!
The manufacturers should be careful (Score:5, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Xandros has been around a long time. If you count the old Corel Linux they have been active since 1999. I don't know what happened in your case but Xandros is not some fly by night, incompetent Linux.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
BTW, Ubuntu's "Netbook Remix [launchpad.net]" desktop is absolutely brilliant on tiny netbooks like the 701. It's as easy to use as the Xandros desktop, but fully functional and customizable.
From an Economist reader (Score:5, Informative)
The blurb may be a little misleading, since it seems to suggest that this is some kind of recommendation from the Economist, which doesn't do product reviews in general.
This is part of a (very interesting) collection of "end of year technology roundup" type articles (see for instance my favorite article [economist.com] on quieter tank treads). All the writer really says is "if you buy one of these the point is low cost and simplicity -- so don't be tempted to spend extra on Windows, or you might as well buy a laptop".
The author is actually kind of against the choice of Linux in a way, as he makes it sound like adding extra software is a royal pain: "Admittedly, installing third-party software can be a bit of a fiddle, and some of the advice available online threatens to lure users into the tangled depths of the Linux undergrowth, where few people will want to venture"...
JF
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
True, but it's not like he's wrong.
As long as the software you want is in the package manager you're probably OK, but keep in mind that for normal people, they're already in the tangled undergrowth by the time they've gotten to "dependencies".
Weird advice (Score:4, Interesting)
I just got an Acer Aspire One with 8GB SSD and their bizarre Linpus Lite distro installed. It runs fine, but I torched it in favor of Win XP by the end of the evening, simply because XP was the only other OS that fully supported the hardware. As far as performance goes, the thing actually runs OK under XP (format as FAT32). The big drawback is that the Intel SSD is brutally slow when writing, so the trick to getting good performance is to disable unnecessary writes and caching wherever possible in the OS.
Honestly, it makes more sense to spend the extra $50 to get the Asipre One with larger battery, 160GB HD and pre-installed Windows for almost everybody. The keyboard is 89%, which is large enough for me to touch type on without issues, although the touchpad has to be one of the most craptacular pointing devices ever incorporated in a notebook - the buttons are located beside it - one on the left, one on the right. Nasty.
Screw you (Score:3, Insightful)
People who think that netbooks are some special kind of device don't get it. Netbooks succeed where devices like the N810 fail because they *are* real notebooks.
I have an EEE 900HA, which I upgraded to a 100GB 7200 RPM Hitachi HDD (taken from my ThinkPad after I upgraded it to 250GB Seagate) and 2GB of memory. I run Ubuntu 8.10 and Vista on it.
It's a full laptop. It's not a limited, special-purpose device.
I can load Eclipse on it. Or VS2008. Or Word. Or Firefox. Or iTunes.
People who say, "Why not just buy a small laptop" don't get it. I did buy a small laptop. It just happens to be a cheap, low-power, small laptop.
Re:Linux is for servers - not laptops (Score:5, Informative)
You probably installed Linux on your laptops yourself though, right? And it was distributions that hadn't been designed with your hardware in mind specifically, right?
If you buy a netbook and the OEM Linux distro, customized by the manufacturer, doesn't run the hardware properly, please let us know.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
If you buy a netbook and the OEM Linux distro, customized by the manufacturer, doesn't run the hardware properly, please let us know.
Okay. I bought a HP2133 (model FU337EA#AK8) as a Christmas present for my sister. It came with Novell SLED 10. The out-of-the-box-installation was completely unusable. Besides choosing a distro that's a real PITA to get forum support [hp2133guide.com] about (and in cases like these, it's pretty much the only support you'll get), the hardware they included had linux support ranging from poor to horrible.
Here's a list of the worst problems:
-Graphics drivers. The laptop uses a VIA graphics card, and out of the box, it only run
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Yes it is difficult but lots of people are doing it:
Acer uses a custom Fedora: http://www.linpus.com/ [linpus.com]
Dell and others use a custom Ubuntu http://www.canonical.com/netbooks [canonical.com]
Mandriva has a mini version (I don't know who is using it) called mini (i can't link since it is on their OEM subsite)
and there are others.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
vim [sourceforge.net] works perfectly well under Windows.
If you can't find a replacement for the others, look at cygwin [cygwin.com] to run many more *nix programs and utilities... including a real shell ("cli").
You can work around many Windows shortcomings and end up with something that works for you.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Vim is available for Windows [vim.org], both as a console mode application and native Win32 GUI. Quite a few programmers I know actually use it as their primary editor.
Perl is absolutely there. Don't bother with ActiveState, go for Strawberry Perl [strawberryperl.com] for maximum portability.
Regarding CLI in general, I'd suggest looking into PowerShell. MS is investing pretty h
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I much prefer Impress 3. I put the current slide, next slide, and speakers notes on the built-in screen, and the current slide on the projector. It has a built-in clock.
Big enough on the 8.9" screen for me to see.
Works better than delivering with PowerPoint, so I prefer to use it; even when delivering PowerPoint sourced presentations.
I likewise prefer Writer to Word. Spreadsheets are a bit of a wash for me. (I use Perl, Octave and other tools to reduce data to CSV form, which is then imported into a spreads