Mikey, I've been using Linux since SuSE 5.3 (must be 10 years ago). Whilst many things on the server side required some tinkering in the past, that just got better and better. But the desktop side was woeful. It required someone with incredible patience to put up with it (in that first year of using Linux I remember my joy, after weeks of trying, when I finally got XWindows to work, even though it looked terrible because of the video resolution).. Whilst every year Linux advocates said 'this is the year of the linux desktop', I never believed them and it never transpired. But what I've seen on my Acer Aspire One has amazed me. Everything works. In fact, I get better wireless reception on that piece of el cheapo kit than I get on my powerbook, my ibook, or my compaq Laptop. (My powerbook often loses the signal; the ibook can't even find the network.)
Once I enabled the full desktop on the AA1 (it required editing a couple of lines in a file), and had access to the Fedora repositories I could install things like Erlang and Smalltalk in a couple of clicks. Python and perl were already pre-installed. As was OpenOffice. A couple more clicks, and I was printing to PDF, just like in OS X. Multiple desktops, just like OS X (I know *nix had them before OS X). It is great to finally be using a Linux laptop: I've been waiting for this day for 10 years. I love OS X, but the laptop prices are pretty outrageous - I could buy 9 AA1s for the price of my 17" powerbook, and the AA1s have all the *nix power, are faster, weigh less, and have better battery life (of course, the screen is much smaller). My AA1 boots to the desktop in 8 seconds, and has everything else started and connected in 40 seconds (including negotating the wireless network connection). My powerbook takes 88 seconds. My Vista laptop (with at least twice the cpu power of the AA1 and the powerbook) takes 114 seconds -- and that's with Aero switched off and no AV (with AV running it was taking so long to copy files and to extract from archives that it was driving me crazy). On the AA1 I'm running Lotus Notes under WINE. I would say that WINE is working even better than Windows, because Notes is just as fast as on native Windows, but there's no fear of viruses. I installed a few more pieces of Windows software in WINE - they all worked (with the sole exception of Rev). WINE is an amazing achievement. I never thought they would get there but they have. I'm sending them the cost of a Windows license, because otherwise I would not have been able to run Notes on my AA1. I made a few observations on my visit to the pc store. On day 3 of that week I went to look at the Asus, knowing that I needed a very lightweight laptop, but my memory was that the Asus was just not of adequate quality. Whilst in the store I saw the AA1, and thought 'finally, something with a reasonable build quality'. The Asus and the AA1 were the only two UMPCs on display. On day 4, I went back to check that Rev would work on the AA1, and as it appeared to do so I bought it. When paying for it (in an otherwise empty store), the people behind me were also buying an AA1. On day 7, I went back to get something else, and now the store had a whole section displaying UMPCs - about 8 in total (mostly Linux). That store carries at most 2 kinds of Mac. It's quite clear that these UMPCs are satisfying a huge unanticipated market. Of course, some of them come with Windows pre-installed (hard to know what the percentages are, and hard to know just how much leverage MS has exerted to ensure that happens -- look at what happened with OLPC). Nevertheless, it's clear from looking at the AA1's user forums that a lot of new people are being introduced to linux this way. There are currently 7585 posts from Linux users vs 2849 from Windows users. Bernard On Fri, Oct 3, 2008 at 6:37 PM, Mikey <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Well, as long as this has morphed into a Linux discussion, here we go. > > 1) On the bad news side, the most annoying thing is the lack of > hardware drivers for various gear, and the need to therefore work > around some of those issues. On this lappie, there isn't a straight > wireless radio driver, so I'm reading through several threads on how > to fix that - time that I'd rather spend doing something else. There > isn't a native driver for my mouse, so one of the things I'm used to > being able to do with it (and I just do by instinct) causes something > entirely different to happen instead. A couple of printer brands > don't work. For as much help as most of the forums are, there is a > lot of time to be invested and unfortunately some dead ends that are > there. Some applications don't run on it, even virtualized, > apparently. > > 2) On the good news side, this machine is a POC. It really is. It's > using a chipset and motherboard that's 4 years old (even though the > machine was new last year). When I have to get into Vista, I yearn to > return to Linux. It is SO DAMN FAST by comparison. Holy crap is it > fast. It is hard to believe ow slow Vista (and even XP are) compared > to Linux. It's unbelievable. There are also nifty things built in > (that run fast) that I don't ever remember seeing in Windoze. > > So, I'm hoping that we can get everything resolved, because I know > that I have to replace my old lappie shortly. Thankfully I've been so > busy the last few days doing things that I can easily do in Linux that > I haven't had to think about it. Hopefully it will stay that way. > _______________________________________________ > use-revolution mailing list > [email protected] > Please visit this url to subscribe, unsubscribe and manage your > subscription preferences: > http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/use-revolution > _______________________________________________ use-revolution mailing list [email protected] Please visit this url to subscribe, unsubscribe and manage your subscription preferences: http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/use-revolution
