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A Windows CE Shell For Netbooks
nerdyH writes "Netbooks such as the Acer Aspire One and Lenovo Ideapad S9 usually ship with SSD storage and the Linux operating system in low-end configurations, or else with hard drives and Windows XP Home at the higher end of the market. Therefore, customers who want a "Windows experience" have no choice but to shell out for extra RAM and disk storage, potentially impacting battery life. Perhaps not for long. Quarta Mobile says its open-source (yes, open source) "MID-Shell for Windows Embedded CE 6.0" provides a Microsoft-based alternative to Linux for low-end devices with SSDs (solid state disks)."
Why yes, I want a WINDOWS experience. It will involve bending shoes together. Or something.
What on earth? Windows CE is a fabulous example of software that sells in magazines and looks good on feature lists but basically doesn't bloody work. There's a reason the accursed iPhone is so popular, and especially so with anyone who's suffered a WinCE phone and done the wince of WinCE.
http://rocknerd.co.uk
From my smartphone experiences, there isn't even a decent web browser for the WinCE platform. Opera sucks slightly less than IE mobile. About half the websites I tried to use functioned correctly. Fahgeddabout it
Amen, I want Linux on the high end too. So I went and built myself something reasonably high-end: ASUS P5Q3 Deluxe mobo, Intel Q6600, 4GB of DDR3 RAM, 512MB 9800GT graphics card...so it's not the absolute shizzle but it's the best machine I've ever owned. Put it all together, and have spent the week since discovering just how shocking support is for P45 chipset motherboards still - primarily the ASUS P5xx boards apparently, but MSI and others seem to have serious issues too.
So far, the best result I've gotten is to successfully boot an Ubuntu 8.04.1 LiveCD (which will only happen with AHCI enabled, otherwise nothing) and run the installation. After that, nothing, can't even get GRUB to load. 8.10 with latest kernel apparently might do the job when it's released, but as of now (Alpha 5) it won't load at all.
So maybe I'm straying slightly offtopic but I've got karma to burn and here's as good a place as any to ask: what distro should I be trying for newish, high-endish hardware support? openSUSE? Gentoo? PC-BSD? Just wait for Intrepid's final release? I went from XP to Ubuntu about four years ago and haven't ever had occasion to try any of the others but I'm open to suggestions...