The version of Linpus linux used on the Acer are XFCE based. The article and the reviews all talk about what a great interface Acer has..... People love the speed and lightweight nature AFAIKT. Quite a suprise.
BTW I read your rant. That interface obviously assumes you know networking, why did you think it was aimed at Aunt Tillie? The very first question is about configuring queues and the second is about virtual network packet formats. That doesn't sound like an end user interface to me.
As an aside, I've never owned a JetDirect device but I use it all the time as a very clean network printing protocol. So it might have been worth looking up. Don't assume you meant the first two. In fact in your case I would have configured your box to treat the other box as JetDirect, used the postscript (I believe) on the 6MP and cut the Cups out of the middle. Why introduce complexity?
Which is a real pity. Back in the early 90's Dell used to offer a terrific custom SCO "Dell Unix" with excellent support for only about $1k (which was cheap back then). So when it was hard Dell offered a Unix but now that it is easy they do a half assed job.
I'll start off by saying I've never used XFCE. But... looking at Desktop benchmarks it appears that XFCE acts a lot like a pure window manager (WMaker is the comparison). That is much lower footprint until you start treating it like a full GUI. With only 500 megs of ram losing 80-100 on pure overhead....
Wikipedia also has a good comparison. They put XFCE & ROX in a kind of 1/2 GUI 1/2 Window manager category.
I should say looking at those numbers (from 2006) I was shocked how bad Gnome did on minimal configurations. So I"m not seeing where you are getting the "more memory than Gnome" unless you mean when loaded up to the gills which is of course the point.
Yeah there was. Issue is that the store goes by volume and since users are given very little information they tend to pick the cheapest solution unless the product has established a reputation. But that seems specific to iPhone store and right now.
Verizon for example vets the apps and has a limited selection of each type. Blackberry has an active community which rates / discusses apps and certain application companies (like Magmic) which have strong reputations. So I'd argue that cell phone software market is diverse.
In any case I doubt either one of us will be too upset if people just download from the free repository. It is nice to see Dell running a.deb repository with software configured custom for their Dell Mini.
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.
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)
First off almost all of the netbooks come with multi media players. But for example you can use SongBird for linux http://getsongbird.com/ which looks a lot like iTunes, and it supports iPods (http://addons.songbirdnest.com/addon/12 )
Linpus has many gigs of linux software at their distribution site and most fedora apps work pretty well which gets you to essentially everything.
The average citizens seem to like XFCE (a classic window manager with a few apps) and not the heavy duty KDE/Gnome GUI. Not sure what to make of that but for many years I tended to use WindowMaker because I liked the speed and KDE only when I would be running lots of Kapps.
Maybe average users aren't so different if given a fair choice?
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.
All netbooks let you install software, they just require something advanced; an artificial barrier. The sort of thing an installation routine can handle.
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.
For long term storage you not have to worry about media degradation but also file formats. So far being able to read old data has been complicated over periods like 20-30 years. For example I've moved from: Apple/Mac Write, Wordstar, Wordperfect, Amipro, Word, open office write over the last 25 years.
No I meant larger. When 8' came out as the standard for mini computers it was about 10x the price per byte. But 8" technology caused an increase in capacity per dollar that was around 25% per year while 14" technology was improving at 10-15% and the law of compounding took over.
As we moved from: 14" -> 8" -> 5 1/4" -> 3 1/2" -> 2 1/2... has been a long series of slower hard drives with much larger cost per byte replacing its predecessor.
I'd be a little careful about the 80's comparison. In terms of manufacture costs, for many components looking at the same volumes the costs have actually gone up. What has happened is that the sales volumes have gone up so amazingly that methods and practices which were unthinkable in the 80s are employed today.
The costs in the 1980s would have been a lot lower if the industry were gearing up for computers in hundreds of millions of households and workplaces that needed to be flipped every 4 years or so.
I wouldn't say wider. Wealthier children already have computers they have free access to. Giving them a computer does nothing.
I agree though that "hosting in the cloud" is a terrible idea. At lets say $100 * 4m units the Aussie govt can get some very nice educational software however they want it. Educational games / tools are not like entertainment oriented games in terms of cost of development.
Bill Gates has never made the claim free software is invalid. He has made strong claims about the effects of widely used free software subsidized by governments on a commercial software industry. That is he not claiming free OSes are useless but rather they are enough of a threat to endanger what he considers a large public benefit.
Further as colin mention below he has been an advocate of University / Government releases of BSD style software.
Sure I can understand situations where Free OSes may not be optimal or even effective solutions but "invalid"? That sounds like more of a license issue (like you heard years ago regarding the GPL being a violation of anti-trust law).
Being worried was one thing. But the student made a claim that the software was legal to redistribute and until she had good reason to dispute that claim....
As for the tech staff, there is a difference between in violation of policy and illegal.
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The version of Linpus linux used on the Acer are XFCE based. The article and the reviews all talk about what a great interface Acer has..... People love the speed and lightweight nature AFAIKT. Quite a suprise.
BTW I read your rant. That interface obviously assumes you know networking, why did you think it was aimed at Aunt Tillie? The very first question is about configuring queues and the second is about virtual network packet formats. That doesn't sound like an end user interface to me.
As an aside, I've never owned a JetDirect device but I use it all the time as a very clean network printing protocol. So it might have been worth looking up. Don't assume you meant the first two. In fact in your case I would have configured your box to treat the other box as JetDirect, used the postscript (I believe) on the 6MP and cut the Cups out of the middle. Why introduce complexity?
Which is a real pity. Back in the early 90's Dell used to offer a terrific custom SCO "Dell Unix" with excellent support for only about $1k (which was cheap back then). So when it was hard Dell offered a Unix but now that it is easy they do a half assed job.
I'll start off by saying I've never used XFCE. But... looking at Desktop benchmarks it appears that XFCE acts a lot like a pure window manager (WMaker is the comparison). That is much lower footprint until you start treating it like a full GUI. With only 500 megs of ram losing 80-100 on pure overhead....
Wikipedia also has a good comparison. They put XFCE & ROX in a kind of 1/2 GUI 1/2 Window manager category.
I should say looking at those numbers (from 2006) I was shocked how bad Gnome did on minimal configurations. So I"m not seeing where you are getting the "more memory than Gnome" unless you mean when loaded up to the gills which is of course the point.
Yeah there was. Issue is that the store goes by volume and since users are given very little information they tend to pick the cheapest solution unless the product has established a reputation. But that seems specific to iPhone store and right now.
Verizon for example vets the apps and has a limited selection of each type. Blackberry has an active community which rates / discusses apps and certain application companies (like Magmic) which have strong reputations. So I'd argue that cell phone software market is diverse.
In any case I doubt either one of us will be too upset if people just download from the free repository. It is nice to see Dell running a .deb repository with software configured custom for their Dell Mini.
As an example Dell for example ships with Rhythmbox
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.
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.
First off almost all of the netbooks come with multi media players. But for example you can use SongBird for linux http://getsongbird.com/ which looks a lot like iTunes, and it supports iPods (http://addons.songbirdnest.com/addon/12 )
Linpus has many gigs of linux software at their distribution site and most fedora apps work pretty well which gets you to essentially everything.
The average citizens seem to like XFCE (a classic window manager with a few apps) and not the heavy duty KDE/Gnome GUI. Not sure what to make of that but for many years I tended to use WindowMaker because I liked the speed and KDE only when I would be running lots of Kapps.
Maybe average users aren't so different if given a fair choice?
Hey Bruce.... !
Games on cell phones are doing quite nicely. Certainly not powerful complex games but lots of quicky $5-10 games I can see selling.
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.
All netbooks let you install software, they just require something advanced; an artificial barrier. The sort of thing an installation routine can handle.
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.
For long term storage you not have to worry about media degradation but also file formats. So far being able to read old data has been complicated over periods like 20-30 years. For example I've moved from: Apple/Mac Write, Wordstar, Wordperfect, Amipro,
Word, open office write over the last 25 years.
No I meant larger. When 8' came out as the standard for mini computers it was about 10x the price per byte. But 8" technology caused an increase in capacity per dollar that was around 25% per year while 14" technology was improving at 10-15% and the law of compounding took over.
The other cases are similar.
You want to think about this exponentially not linearly. Take logs and look at the trends.
As we moved from: 14" -> 8" -> 5 1/4" -> 3 1/2" -> 2 1/2...
has been a long series of slower hard drives with much larger cost per byte replacing its predecessor.
I'd be a little careful about the 80's comparison. In terms of manufacture costs, for many components looking at the same volumes the costs have actually gone up. What has happened is that the sales volumes have gone up so amazingly that methods and practices which were unthinkable in the 80s are employed today.
The costs in the 1980s would have been a lot lower if the industry were gearing up for computers in hundreds of millions of households and workplaces that needed to be flipped every 4 years or so.
What do you mean?
I wouldn't say wider. Wealthier children already have computers they have free access to. Giving them a computer does nothing.
I agree though that "hosting in the cloud" is a terrible idea. At lets say $100 * 4m units the Aussie govt can get some very nice educational software however they want it. Educational games / tools are not like entertainment oriented games in terms of cost of development.
Bill Gates has never made the claim free software is invalid. He has made strong claims about the effects of widely used free software subsidized by governments on a commercial software industry. That is he not claiming free OSes are useless but rather they are enough of a threat to endanger what he considers a large public benefit.
Further as colin mention below he has been an advocate of University / Government releases of BSD style software.
QuantumG is correct also look at the quantities. 4m. 4m units you get to set terms to software vendors.
Sure I can understand situations where Free OSes may not be optimal or even effective solutions but "invalid"? That sounds like more of a license issue (like you heard years ago regarding the GPL being a violation of anti-trust law).
Had did this flamebait get modded +5?
Many [experts] serious consider Free OS invalid.
Name one. This was an issue a decade ago today I don't know of any.
Being worried was one thing. But the student made a claim that the software was legal to redistribute and until she had good reason to dispute that claim....
As for the tech staff, there is a difference between in violation of policy and illegal.