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The Economist Suggests Linux For Netbooks
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?
If editing formulas was really a big concern for you you would be using LaTeX like all the cool kids.
Try turning off desktop effects. Most slowness in Ubuntu are related to eye candy and un/badly supported graphics cards and chipsets. If you do have a brand name video card, install the proprietary driver. Or just install IceWM. It's in the Ubuntu repositories along with scores of other window managers.
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.
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
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.
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?
So buy it with Windows and get your refund.
Consider the refund as a payment by Microsoft for you installing Linux.
ODF (the format used by OpenOffice.org now and earlier) is an XML open standard.
Too hard?
-System->Preferences->Search and Indexing
-Uncheck "Enable Indexing"
And lastly in 8.10 it is off by default.
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Formatting of mathematical formulae can break between MS Office 2003 and 2007, too. 2007 does support the old, compatible equation editor, but it's not the default, and the add-in for 2003 for viewing 2007 documents renders 2007 equations as poor-quality images. So although no compatibility problems might be an overstatement, OO.o is probably no worse for eBook compatibility (where macros won't matter) than Word.
Quidnam Latine loqui modo coepi?
I bought an Asus EEE PC 900A from Bestbuy. At $280, it is a bargain. However, I really hated Xandros on it (disclaimer, all my machines are either Debain or kubuntu). What kind of f*ck head installs an OS on 4GB SSD and leave on 100MB or so for updates. What is more, after my first update attempt the disk became full and update applet stopped in middle of a download. After several reboots, the applet always started automatically and always hanged. Wireless was also similarly not connecting. Add this to the fact that several programs took forever to run, I said f*ck with Xandros, and installed Ubuntu-eee. The difference is like night and day. I suggest EEE PC with ubuntu to everybody. Install once and leave it there. The moral of the story? If a dedicated linux user since 1994 is frustrated with a linux based netbook, why the regular people shouldn't be? The manufacturers MUST use Ubuntu-EEE or similar stable, easy to use and efficient distro.
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.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
The advertisements all over the Economist page (top and bottom banners and embedded in the article itself) are for the Asus N series notebooks. Which make a point of promoting the Express Gate 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.
>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
Climate Progress - Hell and High Water
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 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
If you're planning to use Ubuntu, the best approach is to scope out the laptop on the Ubuntu Wiki 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.
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.
DRM: Terminator crops for your mind!
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 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.
Craft Beer Programming T-shirts
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.
It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his job depends on not understanding it.
Can Word and Oo.org embed LaTeX type inline?
OOoLatex is a set of macros designed to bring the power of LaTeX into OpenOffice.
At that point, you can test most (if not all) of the peripherals to see if they work nicely.
Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.
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.
"That which does not kill us makes us stranger." -Trevor Goodchild
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."
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