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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?
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.
Besides which, does Windows offer spinning cubes for coffee-shop demos?
No, just flying chairs
I am a free slashdotter. I will not be modded, blogged, DRM'd, patented, podcasted or RFID'd. My life is my own.
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.
Bruce Perens.
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.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
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.
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.
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.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
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.
yeah, i would rather buy a PC or laptop without an OS (or with Linux) than with windows included,,,
some people just refuse to use/want or buy windows, i am one of them...
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
Finally, the big breakthrough.
This time it's definitely true: 2009 is the year of Linux on the deskt... netbook!
So buy it with Windows and get your refund.
Consider the refund as a payment by Microsoft for you installing Linux.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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.
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 the restocking fee if you can't stand the keyboard or screen?
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.
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?
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!
Yes it is difficult but lots of people are doing it:
Acer uses a custom Fedora: http://www.linpus.com/
Dell and others use a custom Ubuntu http://www.canonical.com/netbooks
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.
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.
A decent Perl distro for Windows is free.
vim works perfectly well under Windows.
If you can't find a replacement for the others, look at cygwin 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.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
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.
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.
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.
"...Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam..."
Oops. My Acer Aspire One has 1G RAM and 160GB disk. It works great with Debian, the only big issue I've found so far is that it used up all the MTRRs (memory type and range registers) and that made X slower. I was able to free one up for X.
Bruce Perens.
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.
Bruce Perens.
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.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
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 spreadsheet for final formatting; application of colour, etc). OpenOffice.org3 does VBA for more compatibility (hasn't yet been an issue), and can edit PDFs (major feature for me).
All in all, I view OpenOffice.org3 as a plus. Along with that, I use FireFox, and Evolution, so why would I bother with Windows(tm)? Linux (or any other base) that can support these applications is just fine.
Pick the one that works well and is least expensive. Would be BSD or Linux -- Windows(tm) isn't even in the running.
More for less, sounds good to me. I do save in Microsoft Office(tm) 97 formats for external presentation, which (so far) hasn't been a problem.
So, "Linux is usable for Business" for me.
Just another "Cubible(sic) Joe" 2 17 3061
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 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 runs in an awful looking 640x480-stretched-to-fit-the-screen-VESA-mode. There are some pre-compiled 3D VIA binaries for a few kernels of some distros. There's also some source code for 2D drivers that I couldn't get to compile. (Fortunately some kind soul did get them to compile, and was kind enough to make the binaries publicly available.) Of course getting it working it wasn't that easy. You see HP offers 2 different screen sizes on this laptop, and this model naturally carried the less common one. It took me three days and several forum posts to find the obscure lines to edit in xorg.conf (And I do mean obscure, not just tweaking the resolution or modlines.) Option "PanelID" "17" in combination with a few other tweaks, I believe was the key to success.
-Audio drivers. Well, they'll work out of the box it would seem, as long as you don't want to use the headphone jacks or a microphone. HP appears to be using a not-quite-supported ADI SoundMax AD1984A soundcard. If you want to use, say Skype, you need to download the latest nightly ALSA build and compile that. Then you'll get the mic and jacks working as well. The only problem remaining is that every once in a while artsd thinks that hogging all the CPU cycles is a really good idea, and the ordinary Skype package won't work. You'll want the one labelled static-oss.
-Wireless. So far I believe the community has identified 5 different WLAN-cards used in these laptops. All from Broadcom. If you follow the instructions in the wikis really, really carefully, you'll probably have it working in an hour or two. :-P
So to sum it up: The SLED system that came with the netbook was an unusable mess. I switched to Kubuntu that I somehow managed to get working through a lot of effort, patience, and community support. The HP netbooks look very nice, and have better keyboards that most comparable systems, but given the level of half-assedness to the default install it's hard to recommend them to anyone. (The other alternative is Vista which is much more expensive, and even harder to recommend.) It would seem that HP just assumes that people buying these things are just going to pirate XP anyway, so why bother with quality control?
Oh, and I've got an Asus EEE myself. No problems whatsoever, with that one. Didn't quite like the default install, so I installed Mandriva instead. Still no problems.
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.
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.
Ironically, Express Gate needs a working Windows XP or Vista installation on the same machine, otherwise it can't run and can't be installed.
There are rumors that Microsoft simply does not want any quickly booting GNU/Linux installations anywhere, and they will put the thumbscrews to the right people to get that.
And just to add something to another part of this thread: None of the Linux-based ASUS 1000H models are available in Switzerland, for example. I can't get them even though I'm a reseller and stock ASUS products. Behind the scenes negotiations can accomplish a lot in this market :(
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.
Vim is available for Windows, 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 for maximum portability.
Regarding CLI in general, I'd suggest looking into PowerShell. MS is investing pretty heavily into it and seem determined to move all Windows admins to it (oh, those poor MCSEs!). It is in general pretty nicely done, and logically extends and generalizes the original concept of the Unix shell in a way that makes more sense for some use cases (raw byte streams are not always the best way of passing data around).
If you're just feeling nostalgic for bash and zsh, you have several options. The GNU-Win32 project provides native (MinGW-based) ports for a lot of Unix utilities, including bash. Cygwin is a popular alternative that provides more faithful emulation of Unix environment on top of Win32 - including fork(), symlinks, and so on. Finally, there's Microsoft SUA ("Subsystem for Unix Applications"), which is a WinNT POSIX-compatible subsystem. Note that, unlike Cygwin, it's not build on top of Win32 - it's another subsystem, working in parallel to Win32, directly on top of the NT kernel. It has quite a few Unix utilities ported to it, including bash and Perl. This one actually comes for free in Win2008, and also Vista Enterprise and Ultimate editions.
No, but you can use an external USB one.
That's a definite "yes", not a "maybe". You just use something like unetbootin to copy the live CD to a USB stick, then boot from that. It's all GUI-driven, so it's pretty straightforward.
while that is a good resource, i always recommend people check out linux on laptops first, and if they can't find their laptop model and/or linux flavor, to then move onto another list like the ubuntu wiki.
When you recognize love in another and realize how precious it is, everything else seems so insignificant.
I had something similar to that occur when I first started using Linux. Mind you, this was in 1999 on what was a decent desktop pc. The problem was the modem, it was one of those damned soft modems that required special drivers to run. I spent a long time trying to get it to work and waiting for open source drivers to be developed. Eventually I gave up trying to get internet to work, however it was a pain in the butt using Linux without net access. That problem was fixed when I built my next computer and made sure not to buy components that I knew would work in both windows and Linux.
Similarly, next time you buy a computer, make sure you buy one without odd hardware. Get one with a good popular chip set and video card. As long as you use what a majority of people use, say sticking to Intel Wireless/USB chipsets with Nvidia/ATI video cards, then you won't have any problems.