The excellent book Ubuntu Pocket Guide and Reference by Keir Thomas is available for free download from this link: http://www.ubuntupocketguide.com/aboutthebook.html
It's probably a little basic for a hardcore Nix head but if you are considering breathing new life into an old laptop or ditching Vista then I'm sure it will be a lot of help.
Showing posts with label linux. Show all posts
Showing posts with label linux. Show all posts
Saturday, February 07, 2009
Monday, April 14, 2008
Playstation 3
So I'm taking the plunge on my next geek venture and grabbing myself a PS3 this afternoon.
For those of you who know what a hardcore Nintendophile I am you maybe a little bit confused about this so allow me to enlighten you.
I've had a rather nifty HD LCD for about a year and a sad lack of HD content to watch on it and it occurred to me that if someone had been offering a Linux media centre that output 1080p played Blu Ray movies and had 6 (count em) 3Ghz processors for £300 quid I would have bitten their hand off.
Such a beast is a PS3. Having done a bit of digging it turns out that not only can you run Linux on PS3 it is officially supported by Sony and you can boot in and out of Linux from a menu option in the PS3 native OS. The other rather nifty fact is that the PS3 uses a standard SATA laptop hard drive which can be fairly easily replaced by the user to give it some serious media centre drive space.
Under normal circumstances I would baulk at the high price of the films and games, but luckily I have a Love Film subscription which means I can hire them out at will for no more than the cost of a regular DVD.
Anyone else out there in blog land got a PS3?
The deal I'm getting comes with Burnout, GT5 and Army of Two so if anyone fancys some multiplayer goodness let me know.
Finally apologies for those that read my blog as I've been really busy lately and haven't had the chance to update. Hopefully I'll get back to some semblance of regularity over the coming weeks.
For those of you who know what a hardcore Nintendophile I am you maybe a little bit confused about this so allow me to enlighten you.
I've had a rather nifty HD LCD for about a year and a sad lack of HD content to watch on it and it occurred to me that if someone had been offering a Linux media centre that output 1080p played Blu Ray movies and had 6 (count em) 3Ghz processors for £300 quid I would have bitten their hand off.
Such a beast is a PS3. Having done a bit of digging it turns out that not only can you run Linux on PS3 it is officially supported by Sony and you can boot in and out of Linux from a menu option in the PS3 native OS. The other rather nifty fact is that the PS3 uses a standard SATA laptop hard drive which can be fairly easily replaced by the user to give it some serious media centre drive space.
Under normal circumstances I would baulk at the high price of the films and games, but luckily I have a Love Film subscription which means I can hire them out at will for no more than the cost of a regular DVD.
Anyone else out there in blog land got a PS3?
The deal I'm getting comes with Burnout, GT5 and Army of Two so if anyone fancys some multiplayer goodness let me know.
Finally apologies for those that read my blog as I've been really busy lately and haven't had the chance to update. Hopefully I'll get back to some semblance of regularity over the coming weeks.
Friday, February 22, 2008
Linky Love 22 02 08
So many links so little time.
I've been trying to reduce my backlog of links to post, but it keeps growing faster than I can prune it, not to mention that I promised to review my Sennheiser HD600 cans ages ago, but still haven't got around to it.
I'm going to give this entry a geeky flavor and post some funny stuff next time.
Cory Doctorow recently finished podcasting the whole of Bruce Sterlings "The Hacker Crackdown" which is a very geeky, but brilliant book about the history of hacking which couldn't be further than the nonsense peddled in your average Hollywood movie.
I've had this in depth Ars Technica review of KDE 4.0 in my to read list for absolutely ages, but haven't got around to reading it until now.
I've favored Gnome over KDE since I used Linux at uni, but this release looks good enough for me to consider switching. It doesn't seem like it will be worth installing until 4.1 appears in June though.
With Nokia buying the Troll Tech technology that underpins its development and becoming an official patron things are looking great for KDE at the moment. The port to Windows and Mac OSX might also win some converts.
Voz me is a nifty little web site that converts text to Mp3s which means you can make pretty much any document into an audio book. When I was revising 12 hours a day for my uni finals (I'm not a swat I just I hadn't been to any lectures that semester and it was a month till exam time) I had to sit in a dark room fending off migraines every so often and used a speach synthesizer
in conjunction with some Bit Torrented PDF files of the Harry Potter books to stop me going crazy. Whether I would have found them any less crap if Id listened to the Stephen Fry versions rather than having it read to me by a disembodied robot voice is another story.
Continuing the uuuber geek theme Neetorama had a rather groovy overview of early computing devices. Good stuff if you like letching over retro techno porn.
If you don't visit Lifehacker you really should. They recently published an overview of all their free productivity software. I use Better Gmail, Better GReader, Better Youtube, but they have a whole bunch of great stuff.
The security of encrypted hard drives received an almighty kick in the nuts this week as some researchers got around it with the aid of a spray can and a thumb drive. It's real James bond stuff.
Finally for todays over long and super geeky installment. If you have been wondering about dabbling with Linux, but can't be bothered with partitioning drives and all that technical stuff then try this easy method to run Linux inside your Windows desktop.
I've been trying to reduce my backlog of links to post, but it keeps growing faster than I can prune it, not to mention that I promised to review my Sennheiser HD600 cans ages ago, but still haven't got around to it.
I'm going to give this entry a geeky flavor and post some funny stuff next time.
Cory Doctorow recently finished podcasting the whole of Bruce Sterlings "The Hacker Crackdown" which is a very geeky, but brilliant book about the history of hacking which couldn't be further than the nonsense peddled in your average Hollywood movie.
I've had this in depth Ars Technica review of KDE 4.0 in my to read list for absolutely ages, but haven't got around to reading it until now.
I've favored Gnome over KDE since I used Linux at uni, but this release looks good enough for me to consider switching. It doesn't seem like it will be worth installing until 4.1 appears in June though.
With Nokia buying the Troll Tech technology that underpins its development and becoming an official patron things are looking great for KDE at the moment. The port to Windows and Mac OSX might also win some converts.
Voz me is a nifty little web site that converts text to Mp3s which means you can make pretty much any document into an audio book. When I was revising 12 hours a day for my uni finals (I'm not a swat I just I hadn't been to any lectures that semester and it was a month till exam time) I had to sit in a dark room fending off migraines every so often and used a speach synthesizer
in conjunction with some Bit Torrented PDF files of the Harry Potter books to stop me going crazy. Whether I would have found them any less crap if Id listened to the Stephen Fry versions rather than having it read to me by a disembodied robot voice is another story.
Continuing the uuuber geek theme Neetorama had a rather groovy overview of early computing devices. Good stuff if you like letching over retro techno porn.
If you don't visit Lifehacker you really should. They recently published an overview of all their free productivity software. I use Better Gmail, Better GReader, Better Youtube, but they have a whole bunch of great stuff.
The security of encrypted hard drives received an almighty kick in the nuts this week as some researchers got around it with the aid of a spray can and a thumb drive. It's real James bond stuff.
Finally for todays over long and super geeky installment. If you have been wondering about dabbling with Linux, but can't be bothered with partitioning drives and all that technical stuff then try this easy method to run Linux inside your Windows desktop.
Monday, February 04, 2008
Stephen Fry Reviews The EEE PC and Claims Linux Is the Future
In the most recent instalment of Stephen Fry's rather excellent blog he not only gives a very positive review of the EEE PC. He also claims that Linux is the future.
"The two great pillars of Open Source are the GNU project and Linux. I shan’t burden you with too much detail, I’ll just make the outrageous claim that your computer will be running some descendant of those two within the next five years and that your life will be better and happier as a result."
While I'm not as optimistic as Fry I find this very interesting because:
Stephen Fry is a very clever man
Stephen Fry is well known for being an obsessive Mac fanboy.
His blog gets published in the Guardian which is the kind of mainstream exposure that Linux doesn't usually get.
"The two great pillars of Open Source are the GNU project and Linux. I shan’t burden you with too much detail, I’ll just make the outrageous claim that your computer will be running some descendant of those two within the next five years and that your life will be better and happier as a result."
While I'm not as optimistic as Fry I find this very interesting because:
Stephen Fry is a very clever man
Stephen Fry is well known for being an obsessive Mac fanboy.
His blog gets published in the Guardian which is the kind of mainstream exposure that Linux doesn't usually get.
Monday, January 28, 2008
Linky Love 28th Jan
I still haven't got around to writing my review of my Sennheiser HD600 headphones, but rest assured that I will when I get the time.
I'm really excited that Amazon will be selling DRM free music worldwide. I know a few people who have got it to work from the US store, but I can't be bothered with all that. Now if only a store would start selling FLAC files I could stop cluttering my house up with CDs.
Nokia have purchased Troll Tech. You probably haven't heard of Troll Tech unless you are a total Linux freak (It makes a tool kit that is used to make KDE ), but the interesting part of the story is that Nokia will now be a patron of Linux which is a huge boost to the mission for Linux desktops to attain feature and usability parity with XP and OSX. This is even more interesting with the news that KDE is due to be ported to Windows and Mac. I wonder if the two stories are related.
Lifehacker reported on a free web tool that can convert text into Mp3. I think this is a great idea and I might try converting some of the stories that get recomended on Boing Boing into audio to listen to on the tube.
It looks like the HD format war might not be the protracted battle that we all expected. Ars claim that Blu Ray is surging ahead, while Engadget claims that the death of HD DVD is now inevitable. Sony have also just announced that they have invented a new and improved Blu Ray module and rumours abound that a new and improved 120GB PS3 is on the way.
Finally as a bit of light relief after all that techy stuff check out this Italian guy rocking out to the Mario 2 music
I'm really excited that Amazon will be selling DRM free music worldwide. I know a few people who have got it to work from the US store, but I can't be bothered with all that. Now if only a store would start selling FLAC files I could stop cluttering my house up with CDs.
Nokia have purchased Troll Tech. You probably haven't heard of Troll Tech unless you are a total Linux freak (It makes a tool kit that is used to make KDE ), but the interesting part of the story is that Nokia will now be a patron of Linux which is a huge boost to the mission for Linux desktops to attain feature and usability parity with XP and OSX. This is even more interesting with the news that KDE is due to be ported to Windows and Mac. I wonder if the two stories are related.
Lifehacker reported on a free web tool that can convert text into Mp3. I think this is a great idea and I might try converting some of the stories that get recomended on Boing Boing into audio to listen to on the tube.
It looks like the HD format war might not be the protracted battle that we all expected. Ars claim that Blu Ray is surging ahead, while Engadget claims that the death of HD DVD is now inevitable. Sony have also just announced that they have invented a new and improved Blu Ray module and rumours abound that a new and improved 120GB PS3 is on the way.
Finally as a bit of light relief after all that techy stuff check out this Italian guy rocking out to the Mario 2 music
Wednesday, December 19, 2007
Review - BBC iPlayer Streaming Beta With Ubuntu and Firefox
As a Linux user the decision by the BBC to use proprietary Microsoft DRM for their iPlayer video downloading service came as very disappointing news. Seemingly many of the several million UK Mac and Linux users agreed with me and kicked up a fair stink over the issue. This lead to the BBC trust mandating that the iPlayer should provide support for all licence payers, not just those who run Windows.
The streaming iPlayer is the BBC's answer to the protesting OSX and Ubuntu devotees who want the freedom to catch up on last weeks Eastenders.
I will be testing it with Firefox 2 running on a fairly decrepit Ubuntu laptop to see if it offers anything for us beardy Linux users left out in the cold.
My first impression is how Mac like it all looks. I find it quite bizzare that BBC Future Media managed to come up with a platform that has the look and feel of an iPhone with an Apple referencing name which was incompatible with the Mac but I digress.
The page opens with suggested highlights you may wish to catch up on and a "Last 7 Days" button which causes a snazzy looking days of the week toolbar to fade into view. From there you can filter the content by network and time of day. The available programmes appear in a grid but unfortunately the interface truncates the title of the programme and doesn't offer the full title in a tooltip when the mouse hovers over the item. The only way to get to the full title of the content or a synopsis of the show is to click on it and open the video. There is no back button so if the content is incorrect you must start the search process again. Strangely if you click the "Last 7 Days" button once you've opened a video it opens behind the video and is effectively no use.
Once you have found your desired episode the interface is essentially a You Tube alike. On the plus side the video is 16x9 and looks relatively free from artefacts and the audio is 128Kbps which is perfectly acceptable for most purposes.
Unfortunately it has a lot to learn from the oft imitated but never bettered You Tube player. The time indication is grey on black and I find it virtually impossible to read. I could put up with the unreadable time code if it wasn't for two painful errors. Firstly the transport controls don't appear to work at all. If you attempt to move the play head it switches to a buffering icon seemingly indefinitely and secondly if you click the full screen icon it claims the feature is unavailable because my Flash player is not up to date when this is not the case. On the two programmes I attempted to watch both played to approximately half way through then faded to black and displayed the not at all helpful message "Something Went Wrong"before refusing to play further.
iPlayer is still listed as being beta software, but with a full launch planned on Christmas Eve it really should be in a better state than this by now.
As it stands the service would appear to be virtually unusable to the Firefox/Ubuntu user though I would be interested to hear what the experience of Windows users has been.
Despite all the problems I can't help thinking that more than just a conciliatory gesture to the Linux/Mac community the streaming player will prove to be the better way of accessing iPlayer content.
Throughout the history of TV the user experience has been that you get your show when you turn on the TV not the next day. If you Bit Torrent a show you have to wait, but at least then you have the option to keep it as long as you want and transfer it to your portable device/burn it to DVD as you require.
The BBC p2p service is rendered obsolete when you can easily download platform agnostic content unburdened with DRM from Pirate Bay. This method has the disadvantage of it dubious legal status, but could you imagine any court in the land punishing a licence payer for getting hold of content they were unable to watch through official channels because the content is crippled with proprietary Digital Restrictions Management.
I look forward to seeing how the service develops and matures over time but for now it simply doesn't function as it should.
The streaming iPlayer is the BBC's answer to the protesting OSX and Ubuntu devotees who want the freedom to catch up on last weeks Eastenders.
I will be testing it with Firefox 2 running on a fairly decrepit Ubuntu laptop to see if it offers anything for us beardy Linux users left out in the cold.
My first impression is how Mac like it all looks. I find it quite bizzare that BBC Future Media managed to come up with a platform that has the look and feel of an iPhone with an Apple referencing name which was incompatible with the Mac but I digress.
The page opens with suggested highlights you may wish to catch up on and a "Last 7 Days" button which causes a snazzy looking days of the week toolbar to fade into view. From there you can filter the content by network and time of day. The available programmes appear in a grid but unfortunately the interface truncates the title of the programme and doesn't offer the full title in a tooltip when the mouse hovers over the item. The only way to get to the full title of the content or a synopsis of the show is to click on it and open the video. There is no back button so if the content is incorrect you must start the search process again. Strangely if you click the "Last 7 Days" button once you've opened a video it opens behind the video and is effectively no use.
Once you have found your desired episode the interface is essentially a You Tube alike. On the plus side the video is 16x9 and looks relatively free from artefacts and the audio is 128Kbps which is perfectly acceptable for most purposes.
Unfortunately it has a lot to learn from the oft imitated but never bettered You Tube player. The time indication is grey on black and I find it virtually impossible to read. I could put up with the unreadable time code if it wasn't for two painful errors. Firstly the transport controls don't appear to work at all. If you attempt to move the play head it switches to a buffering icon seemingly indefinitely and secondly if you click the full screen icon it claims the feature is unavailable because my Flash player is not up to date when this is not the case. On the two programmes I attempted to watch both played to approximately half way through then faded to black and displayed the not at all helpful message "Something Went Wrong"before refusing to play further.
iPlayer is still listed as being beta software, but with a full launch planned on Christmas Eve it really should be in a better state than this by now.
As it stands the service would appear to be virtually unusable to the Firefox/Ubuntu user though I would be interested to hear what the experience of Windows users has been.
Despite all the problems I can't help thinking that more than just a conciliatory gesture to the Linux/Mac community the streaming player will prove to be the better way of accessing iPlayer content.
Throughout the history of TV the user experience has been that you get your show when you turn on the TV not the next day. If you Bit Torrent a show you have to wait, but at least then you have the option to keep it as long as you want and transfer it to your portable device/burn it to DVD as you require.
The BBC p2p service is rendered obsolete when you can easily download platform agnostic content unburdened with DRM from Pirate Bay. This method has the disadvantage of it dubious legal status, but could you imagine any court in the land punishing a licence payer for getting hold of content they were unable to watch through official channels because the content is crippled with proprietary Digital Restrictions Management.
I look forward to seeing how the service develops and matures over time but for now it simply doesn't function as it should.
Sunday, December 16, 2007
Xubuntu for EEE PC
I run Ubuntu on my laptop and desktop and though the KDE based distro that came with my EEE PC does have some plus points I do miss that buntu goodness.
I haven't had a bash at installing it myself yet as most attempts I have read about seem to have fallen foul of the non standard WiFi and Screen.
Rather conveniently eeeuser have just released eeeXubuntu which includes some custom tweaks to the Xfce based Ubuntu variant to help it run on the EEE.
Xubuntu is a good choice for the EEE as it is considerably less intensive on system resources than GNOME or KDE based distros.
I'm not going to bite the bullet and install it quite yet, but I'll certainly be keeping tabs on progress with it.
I'm hoping Hardy Heron comes with EEE support built in but until then this looks like the best bet for buntu fanboys with an EEE.
EDIT: It would appear that eeeXubuntu is the work of one oasisbob rather than an eeeuser comunity project.
I haven't had a bash at installing it myself yet as most attempts I have read about seem to have fallen foul of the non standard WiFi and Screen.
Rather conveniently eeeuser have just released eeeXubuntu which includes some custom tweaks to the Xfce based Ubuntu variant to help it run on the EEE.
Xubuntu is a good choice for the EEE as it is considerably less intensive on system resources than GNOME or KDE based distros.
I'm not going to bite the bullet and install it quite yet, but I'll certainly be keeping tabs on progress with it.
I'm hoping Hardy Heron comes with EEE support built in but until then this looks like the best bet for buntu fanboys with an EEE.
EDIT: It would appear that eeeXubuntu is the work of one oasisbob rather than an eeeuser comunity project.
Saturday, November 17, 2007
Review - ASUS EEE PC
If you keep up with the tech news websites then you will have probably heard about the EEE PC which was initially called the $199 laptop although rising prices for LCD screens has put paid to that dream it is now out and if you've read my earlier post about trying to buy one on Tottenham Court Road you will know that they are flying off the shelves by all account.
When you review something it is usually taken as a given that you know what it is.
In this case however the answer is not quite so cut and dried. It looks like a laptop, but it's much smaller than even a subnotebook. It almost fits into the category of Ultra Mobile PC (UMPC) which is a type of device that Microsoft and Sony have been investing heavily in but a Sony UMPC runs Windows Vista and costs around £2,000 compared to the £170-£260 that a EEE PC will set you back. Perhaps then it's better thought of as a PDA. It boots into a simple tabbed menu system that allows you to select between web browsing, e-mails, etc, but under the hood it is a real Linux PC and it is quite capable of running XP should you choose to install it.
The fact that it doesn't fit into a niche held by any other device could be a real boon for ASUS. It's what Nintendo called blue water thinking when they came up with the Wii. You leave the sharks to fight in the bloody red water and sneak off to position your product where there aren't any competitors.
I guess I should start by explaining what you get for your money;
A 900Mhz Intel Celeron M processor with 512MB of RAM. 3xUSB, VGA Monitor out, LAN Port, Line In, Headphone Out, 7” LCD screen, full QWERTY keyboard. WiFi, Webcam, 4GB Flash Drive, SD Slot.
What you don't get is a hard drive. The operating system and your data are stored on the internal 4GB flash drive. This keeps the power and size down, but you arent going to be keeping your photo albums or Mp3 collection on here unless you invest in an SD card (it supports cards up to 32GB) or a usb hard drive.
The software is a customized version of Linux made by ASUS and Xandros, but don't let that scare you away. Asus have talked of the EEE PC being an appliance rather than a PC and as such it has been designed with a rather nifty user friendly tabbed interface.
At the top of the screen are a number of tabs labeled internet, work, learn, play, settings and favorites and clicking on these opens a menu with big chunky buttons for each of the functions in that tab.
In the internet tab you have a web browser (Firefox), instant messenger, e-mail, skype
The work tab has the Open office suite of Word, Excel and Power Point alikes (what I am currently writing this article on in fact) along with PDF reader and Mozilla Thunderbird the e-mail app from the Firefox people.
Learn has a few educational apps to help kids with maths and the like.
Play has games (including Linux favs Frozen Bubble and Penguin Racer) and photo, video and music managers.
Favorites and Setting are pretty self explanatory.
Build Quality and Construction
The EEE PC really reminds me of a bigger version of my old Psion 3 from the big oversized hinges with the removable battery slung between them to the style of the icons.
The whole thing has a nice robust feel about it and compares favorably with the frankly rather flimsy Toshiba Portege sub notebook I tried a while back.
The keyboard is very small but it has a positive feel and a decent layout.
The matt finish on the case doesn't pick up finger prints or scratches.
Its about the same size and weight as a large paperback book and though it isn't going to fit in the pocket of your jeans it will go in a large coat pocket or a handbag with ease.
One nice touch is the neoprene slip case that came as a pack in and protects from knocks and dust.
Performance
From switch on to up and running takes a lightning quick 15 seconds. For word processing and web browsing everything opens pretty quickly and there is no appreciable slow down when you are running a few apps at the same time.
Nothing I threw at it seemed to phase it at all and even the 3D penguin racer ran ok although the frame rare was nothing to write home about.
Screen and Graphics
The screen is a 7” back lit LCD with a slightly bizarre resolution of 800 x 480.
The screen is crisp and has a very good viewing angle and the colour representation is very good. There is however no getting away from the fact that the screen really could be rather bigger. The 7” screen leaves quite an expanse of unused space on the top surface and though this is used for a web cam and speakers I would gladly sacrifice them for a bigger screen. ASUS have stated the intent to produce one with a 10” screen and I expect they will be able to package this within the same form factor.
The picture from the built in VGA connector performed admirably and supports a variety of output resolutions though I have to date only tried it with my TV which only supports 1024x768.
One minor gripe is that there are no threads provided for the locking screws of the VGA connector this was only really a problem when I was using the EEE on my lap with the monitor output going to the telly. In a desktop situation with monitor mouse and keys I doubt it would be a problem.
Random Things I Love
There are keyboard function keys for switching back to the tabs and for opening the task manager.
The caps and num lock are shown on nifty little on screen buttons.
The touch pad has a scroll slider on the right hand side which allows you to scroll a web page or doc with a slide of your finger.
The fact that they have thought to put 2 USB ports on one side for keyboard and mouse and one on the other for a USB stick.
The chunky feeling of robustness that the unit has.
The very impresive battery life (ive done Birmingham and back on the train today and it's still on half power on the batteries.)
You can turn it into a full KDE Debian install with a couple of Bash commands.
Gripes
All in all I have been very impressed with the EEE PC in the short time that I have had it, but there are a couple of issues I will bring to the attention of the pedants.
Volume and WiFi are on soft keys which is a concession to space. The keyboard is in the main very well laid out if cramped due to its small size, but the location of the insert key just above the delete key is a total pain and you can easily put your self into the dreaded insert mode.
The machine can go into standby which takes only a couple of seconds, but lacks a hibernate mode, though when you consider that the machine has half a GB of RAM and only 4 GB of disk it is obvious why it doesn't.
The touch pad is small which makes it a bit jittery and a mouse is a must if you are doing a lot of pointer work. I am however an ardent supporter of what I like to call the pointer nipple (becaue I don't know what its propper name is) so you are unlikely to find me singing the praises of any touch pad.
Though it saves the details of your home network you have to explicitly tell it to connect when you boot it up.
Open Office is quite a slow loading app and it would be handy to have a simple text editor like gedit for when you just want to write some notes.
The PC has the all singing all dancing Konqueror file manager but doesn't use it by default.
Techy Stuff
The Linux environment is based on Debian distro with KDE and has all the tools and apps you would expect. The installer for the OS is stored on a hidden partition so you can reinstall if you break it (though I resent the additional disk space that this uses up)
On the more expensive models like the 701 the RAM is socketed and upgradeable however it is soldered in on the cheaper surf models. The guts are accessible though a flap on the bottom of the unit, but rather uncharitably there is a warranty voiding seal which you must break to open it. I am also lead to believe that there is a slot in which an additional 4GB flash card can be inserted to enhance the internal disk and the disk manager application backs this up by displaying a disk 2 not present message (I assume the 8GB model uses this extra slot as standard.)
The machine supports XP and ASUS provide a drivers disk and an app which makes a USB stick into a bootable Windows installer for the device. Pressure from MS has lead to the promise that they will release a version with Windows pre installed for an additional £40 some time next year, though I hope they don't use muscle to make this a replacement for the Linux version.
The machine its self is a pretty standard Intel system on a board set up with integrated graphics acceleration and the ubiquitous Realtek integrated sound also found on my desktop and work laptop PCs. As a result you should have no problem installing another flavor of Linux if you so desire with Xubuntu, Puppy or Damn Small all being good options.
You can also set it to boot up in a normal KDE environment by installing kicker and ksmserver from the command line and from then on you can switch between them freely.
Options
For those of you pondering if you should buy now or hold out you should keep in mind that there will shortly be a number of options added to the list including a 1GB RAM 8 GB disk version, There has been talk of a 2GB, 256MB version but I would steer clear of this as it also has a lower spec battery and the RAM is soldered rather than socketed and therefore non upgradeable.
In the future there is an suggestion from ASUS that they plan to produce versions with a 10”LCD , a 3G wireless data card and perhaps most interestingly upgrade the processor to an Intel Merom based unit which will reduce power consumption by a significant factor.
On a purely aesthetic front the box shows a variety of colours with the green one looking especially fetching..
There is also talk of a desktop model being made available at some point.
This is quite a specialized device and it certainly isn't for everyone although what I will say is that if you want a very portable cheap machine or something that just works out of the box then you really can't go wrong. I also think it could be an option for a very simple desktop machine if you coupled it with a screen and a keyboard and mouse.
While writing this review I have used the machine on the tube and on a London to Birmingham train and compared to the bulky slow booting laptops everyone else was using it has been a breath of fresh air and has had quite a few admiring glances.
When you review something it is usually taken as a given that you know what it is.
In this case however the answer is not quite so cut and dried. It looks like a laptop, but it's much smaller than even a subnotebook. It almost fits into the category of Ultra Mobile PC (UMPC) which is a type of device that Microsoft and Sony have been investing heavily in but a Sony UMPC runs Windows Vista and costs around £2,000 compared to the £170-£260 that a EEE PC will set you back. Perhaps then it's better thought of as a PDA. It boots into a simple tabbed menu system that allows you to select between web browsing, e-mails, etc, but under the hood it is a real Linux PC and it is quite capable of running XP should you choose to install it.
The fact that it doesn't fit into a niche held by any other device could be a real boon for ASUS. It's what Nintendo called blue water thinking when they came up with the Wii. You leave the sharks to fight in the bloody red water and sneak off to position your product where there aren't any competitors.
I guess I should start by explaining what you get for your money;
A 900Mhz Intel Celeron M processor with 512MB of RAM. 3xUSB, VGA Monitor out, LAN Port, Line In, Headphone Out, 7” LCD screen, full QWERTY keyboard. WiFi, Webcam, 4GB Flash Drive, SD Slot.
What you don't get is a hard drive. The operating system and your data are stored on the internal 4GB flash drive. This keeps the power and size down, but you arent going to be keeping your photo albums or Mp3 collection on here unless you invest in an SD card (it supports cards up to 32GB) or a usb hard drive.
The software is a customized version of Linux made by ASUS and Xandros, but don't let that scare you away. Asus have talked of the EEE PC being an appliance rather than a PC and as such it has been designed with a rather nifty user friendly tabbed interface.
At the top of the screen are a number of tabs labeled internet, work, learn, play, settings and favorites and clicking on these opens a menu with big chunky buttons for each of the functions in that tab.
In the internet tab you have a web browser (Firefox), instant messenger, e-mail, skype
The work tab has the Open office suite of Word, Excel and Power Point alikes (what I am currently writing this article on in fact) along with PDF reader and Mozilla Thunderbird the e-mail app from the Firefox people.
Learn has a few educational apps to help kids with maths and the like.
Play has games (including Linux favs Frozen Bubble and Penguin Racer) and photo, video and music managers.
Favorites and Setting are pretty self explanatory.
Build Quality and Construction
The EEE PC really reminds me of a bigger version of my old Psion 3 from the big oversized hinges with the removable battery slung between them to the style of the icons.
The whole thing has a nice robust feel about it and compares favorably with the frankly rather flimsy Toshiba Portege sub notebook I tried a while back.
The keyboard is very small but it has a positive feel and a decent layout.
The matt finish on the case doesn't pick up finger prints or scratches.
Its about the same size and weight as a large paperback book and though it isn't going to fit in the pocket of your jeans it will go in a large coat pocket or a handbag with ease.
One nice touch is the neoprene slip case that came as a pack in and protects from knocks and dust.
Performance
From switch on to up and running takes a lightning quick 15 seconds. For word processing and web browsing everything opens pretty quickly and there is no appreciable slow down when you are running a few apps at the same time.
Nothing I threw at it seemed to phase it at all and even the 3D penguin racer ran ok although the frame rare was nothing to write home about.
Screen and Graphics
The screen is a 7” back lit LCD with a slightly bizarre resolution of 800 x 480.
The screen is crisp and has a very good viewing angle and the colour representation is very good. There is however no getting away from the fact that the screen really could be rather bigger. The 7” screen leaves quite an expanse of unused space on the top surface and though this is used for a web cam and speakers I would gladly sacrifice them for a bigger screen. ASUS have stated the intent to produce one with a 10” screen and I expect they will be able to package this within the same form factor.
The picture from the built in VGA connector performed admirably and supports a variety of output resolutions though I have to date only tried it with my TV which only supports 1024x768.
One minor gripe is that there are no threads provided for the locking screws of the VGA connector this was only really a problem when I was using the EEE on my lap with the monitor output going to the telly. In a desktop situation with monitor mouse and keys I doubt it would be a problem.
Random Things I Love
There are keyboard function keys for switching back to the tabs and for opening the task manager.
The caps and num lock are shown on nifty little on screen buttons.
The touch pad has a scroll slider on the right hand side which allows you to scroll a web page or doc with a slide of your finger.
The fact that they have thought to put 2 USB ports on one side for keyboard and mouse and one on the other for a USB stick.
The chunky feeling of robustness that the unit has.
The very impresive battery life (ive done Birmingham and back on the train today and it's still on half power on the batteries.)
You can turn it into a full KDE Debian install with a couple of Bash commands.
Gripes
All in all I have been very impressed with the EEE PC in the short time that I have had it, but there are a couple of issues I will bring to the attention of the pedants.
Volume and WiFi are on soft keys which is a concession to space. The keyboard is in the main very well laid out if cramped due to its small size, but the location of the insert key just above the delete key is a total pain and you can easily put your self into the dreaded insert mode.
The machine can go into standby which takes only a couple of seconds, but lacks a hibernate mode, though when you consider that the machine has half a GB of RAM and only 4 GB of disk it is obvious why it doesn't.
The touch pad is small which makes it a bit jittery and a mouse is a must if you are doing a lot of pointer work. I am however an ardent supporter of what I like to call the pointer nipple (becaue I don't know what its propper name is) so you are unlikely to find me singing the praises of any touch pad.
Though it saves the details of your home network you have to explicitly tell it to connect when you boot it up.
Open Office is quite a slow loading app and it would be handy to have a simple text editor like gedit for when you just want to write some notes.
The PC has the all singing all dancing Konqueror file manager but doesn't use it by default.
Techy Stuff
The Linux environment is based on Debian distro with KDE and has all the tools and apps you would expect. The installer for the OS is stored on a hidden partition so you can reinstall if you break it (though I resent the additional disk space that this uses up)
On the more expensive models like the 701 the RAM is socketed and upgradeable however it is soldered in on the cheaper surf models. The guts are accessible though a flap on the bottom of the unit, but rather uncharitably there is a warranty voiding seal which you must break to open it. I am also lead to believe that there is a slot in which an additional 4GB flash card can be inserted to enhance the internal disk and the disk manager application backs this up by displaying a disk 2 not present message (I assume the 8GB model uses this extra slot as standard.)
The machine supports XP and ASUS provide a drivers disk and an app which makes a USB stick into a bootable Windows installer for the device. Pressure from MS has lead to the promise that they will release a version with Windows pre installed for an additional £40 some time next year, though I hope they don't use muscle to make this a replacement for the Linux version.
The machine its self is a pretty standard Intel system on a board set up with integrated graphics acceleration and the ubiquitous Realtek integrated sound also found on my desktop and work laptop PCs. As a result you should have no problem installing another flavor of Linux if you so desire with Xubuntu, Puppy or Damn Small all being good options.
You can also set it to boot up in a normal KDE environment by installing kicker and ksmserver from the command line and from then on you can switch between them freely.
Options
For those of you pondering if you should buy now or hold out you should keep in mind that there will shortly be a number of options added to the list including a 1GB RAM 8 GB disk version, There has been talk of a 2GB, 256MB version but I would steer clear of this as it also has a lower spec battery and the RAM is soldered rather than socketed and therefore non upgradeable.
In the future there is an suggestion from ASUS that they plan to produce versions with a 10”LCD , a 3G wireless data card and perhaps most interestingly upgrade the processor to an Intel Merom based unit which will reduce power consumption by a significant factor.
On a purely aesthetic front the box shows a variety of colours with the green one looking especially fetching..
There is also talk of a desktop model being made available at some point.
This is quite a specialized device and it certainly isn't for everyone although what I will say is that if you want a very portable cheap machine or something that just works out of the box then you really can't go wrong. I also think it could be an option for a very simple desktop machine if you coupled it with a screen and a keyboard and mouse.
While writing this review I have used the machine on the tube and on a London to Birmingham train and compared to the bulky slow booting laptops everyone else was using it has been a breath of fresh air and has had quite a few admiring glances.
Wednesday, November 14, 2007
I got me an EEE PC
Woo I've got one!
I am writing this post from my brand new ASUS EEE PC 701 (512MB, 4GB, £219) and dang was it some kind of freaky time getting one.
I saw posters up in one of the shops on Tottenham Court Road (For those of you not familiar with London this is the electrical goods district) while I was in town which reminded me that today was UK release day.
The first shop I visited (at about 1pm) had said they had just got them in but had already sold out of all of the White ones and only had three Black ones left. I really wanted to see a white one before i made a choice so I set off down the road.
I did a quick whistle stop tour of the 15 or so PC shops. 10 had got shipments that morning and of those only three had any left in stock and none of them had any white ones. In just about every shop someone was ordering one, or playing with a demo model. Having played with a White demo unit and deciding that the black one was just dandy
I quickly went back to the first shop (bear in mind only about 15 minutes had elapsed). When I got there I found that he had now sold the remaining three units in stock, but he told me that he also owned the other shop that had them in stock over the road. He phoned and confirmed that they had one left so I paid while he nipped over and got it. While I was paying he rang the shop assistant and told her that in the time it took him to cross the road they had sold it and the didn't have any more, by this time I had already paid so he gave me one that was being held for another customer as I was quite understandably miffed.
While he was bringing it in a woman came in and said she wanted to buy it but he told her he had just sold it to me and it was the last one.
The shop assistant seemed completely confused and said it was only normally like this the week before Christmas.
First impressions are that the build quality and interface are good and it boots very fast. I also can't get over just how small it is (not much bigger than my old Psion 3) but I will do a detailed review ASAP.
Also just because Engadget do it here is some unboxing pr0n:
Nice Box!
Behold Babylon
No I'm not a giant, it really is that small.
I am writing this post from my brand new ASUS EEE PC 701 (512MB, 4GB, £219) and dang was it some kind of freaky time getting one.
I saw posters up in one of the shops on Tottenham Court Road (For those of you not familiar with London this is the electrical goods district) while I was in town which reminded me that today was UK release day.
The first shop I visited (at about 1pm) had said they had just got them in but had already sold out of all of the White ones and only had three Black ones left. I really wanted to see a white one before i made a choice so I set off down the road.
I did a quick whistle stop tour of the 15 or so PC shops. 10 had got shipments that morning and of those only three had any left in stock and none of them had any white ones. In just about every shop someone was ordering one, or playing with a demo model. Having played with a White demo unit and deciding that the black one was just dandy
I quickly went back to the first shop (bear in mind only about 15 minutes had elapsed). When I got there I found that he had now sold the remaining three units in stock, but he told me that he also owned the other shop that had them in stock over the road. He phoned and confirmed that they had one left so I paid while he nipped over and got it. While I was paying he rang the shop assistant and told her that in the time it took him to cross the road they had sold it and the didn't have any more, by this time I had already paid so he gave me one that was being held for another customer as I was quite understandably miffed.
While he was bringing it in a woman came in and said she wanted to buy it but he told her he had just sold it to me and it was the last one.
The shop assistant seemed completely confused and said it was only normally like this the week before Christmas.
First impressions are that the build quality and interface are good and it boots very fast. I also can't get over just how small it is (not much bigger than my old Psion 3) but I will do a detailed review ASAP.
Also just because Engadget do it here is some unboxing pr0n:
Nice Box!
Behold Babylon
No I'm not a giant, it really is that small.
Thursday, November 08, 2007
Ubuntu Vs XP Pt1
I was planning to do this part of the story of my switch over to Ubuntu eventually, but hearing that fellow TDDOer Malcolm has had a less than fun time trying to use Ubuntu and had to give up on it I thought I would crack on with it and let you know how it stacks up with Windows. Unfortunately I don't have a copy of Leopard or Vista to hand, but I've spent some time with a decently speced Vista laptop and a fair bit of time on a Final Cut Pro machine which I believe was Panther on a Power PC based G5 Mac Pro so though I don't feel well informed enough to do a comprehensive comparison I will chip in with points where I can. I will focus the first part of the article on core OS features and will talk about applications in the next part.
At the time of installing both of my machines the current version of Ubuntu was 7.04 Edgy and so I haven't had any experience of the new versions installer, but I must say it was an absolute breeze. The PC booted into the Live CD and then during the installation all I had to do was set the time zone and type in my name and that was it.
I must note that two people I know have had problems installing Ubuntu one with a very old machine and the other with a non standard screen in this case there is a text mode installer which is just as easy to use but doesn't look as pretty it's annoying that you have to download this separately and it doesn't detect the problem and switch into text mode.
For more advanced users Ubuntu comes with superb features for making a PC duel boot and repartitioning the disk. While installing my desktop PC I repartitioned my fragmented XP system partition and it worked like a charm without any scares.
XP
XP is the easiest Microsoft OS I have installed, but I have had a few problems with it. The first one is the classic have a cup of tea and leave it going problem. You set it up and leave it to do its thing for half an hour and then come back to find a dialogue box popped up seconds after you left and its done naff all in the time you were away.
I've had XP hang on installation more than once and had to reformat and go back to the beginning and I've also had Windows become confused on a rebuild and recreate all the user folders a second time prefixed by the computer name and a dot.
XP is also blighted by the fact that many vendors don't provide a proper Windows disk and some don't even provide a recovery disk.
Verdict
Had two of my friends not had a bad installation experience I would have given it to Ubuntu as it is I'm calling it evens.
No registration is required unless you take out a support contract woo hoo! Windows
Initial registration is not hugely arduous and easily circumvented if you are so inclined however I must mention the blight that is Windows Genuine Advantage. This is a special application the job of which is to check you aren't doing anything you shouldn't be with Windows. Having bought my desktop PC and reveling in my first paid for legal Microsoft product since the Postman Pat game I had for my Amstrad in 1985 I allowed the Genuine Advantage app to install its self as an automatic update. My PC then promptly spent the next month flashing up messages that it was pirated and refused to update. I later discovered that Norton Firewall was blocking the connection to the authentication servers online so it had decided to call me a thief rather than give me the benefit of the doubt. What depressed me about this episode is that if I had cracked Windows none of this would have happened so I was effectively being punished for being honest.
Verdict
Genuine Advantage is one of the things that made me loose faith in XP so it's an Ubuntu win hands down.
Some of you may not know what I am talking about when I say Crapware, but believe me when I say that this is one of the most significant problems facing the Windows platform today. Crapware is catch all term for the software that you didn't ask for which came preinstalled on your machine usually with some kind of limited trial or some kind of advertising revenue attached. The most common forms of this are Norton Antivirus, pre installed ISP services and the Yahoo toolbar. With my current PC Windows was so broken by this software it would not uninstall correctly that I had to rebuild it.
My mums PC has the same problem, but because it doesn't have a proper rebuild disk and has some proprietary media centre hardware built into the mobo I can't even do a restore!
The fault of this does not lie with Mictrosoft who I understand are very unhappy with the situation, but with the manufacturers. Dell have speculated about having a no Crapware option in there options list, but estimate the PC could cost as much as £50 more as a result.
Ubuntu and Most forms of Linux
Thankfully free from this abomination.
Mac
Apple have sensibly avoided this problem and well done to them for not taking the quick dollar at the expense of the user.
Verdict
Windows in last place all the others are tied.
XP is the current market leader and it's been around for a while so it's fair to say that if you want to make hardware that people will buy then you make it XP compatible. XP will also run on a few processor types though the Intel x86 is the most common.
Vista
This is one area where Ubuntu absolutely shines. You add and remove software from the Package Manager much like Windows, but where it comes into its own is that you can search or browse any of the software that is available for Ubuntu from the package manager, click install and you are all done.
XP
Compared to installing directly from within the package manager having to download zip files, unpack, and then go though an install shield seems positively archaic in comparison.
Verdict
Ubuntu wins hands down
Ubuntu is in the UNIX family so it has an excellent security pedigree. Ubuntu comes with a capable Firewall, Antivirus is available, but not really needed. Another excellent security feature is Sudo. In Ubuntu you are never really logged in as administrator (or Root in Linux terminology) instead when you need to do something that only admins should do you do a "super do" or sudo which asks you to put in your password to check that you really mean it. This is brilliant because it means that even if malicious code gets onto your machine it can't do anything naughty without your express permission and even then only for that session.
XP
XP gets a bad rap but most of the security problems it has are due to the fact that it's the biggest target, but with a bit of tweaking it is fine. It comes with an adequate firewall which is switched on by default, but doesn't come with antivirus which is a must.
On the downside logging in as an administrator leaves you vulnerable and switching between user and admin accounts, or using run as is a pain in the arse.
Vista
Vista has much improved security over previous Windows products, but the obsessive paranoia gets in the way of the user and it seems that their need to prove themselves as super secure has been at the expense of usability.
OSX
Mac users are famous for their arrogance about security and that worries me a lot. OSX is also built on UNIX so theoretically it is very secure but there have been a couple of things recently that have worried me. One is that Panther comes with the Firewall switched off by default and is of a poor quality, but the main thing is that Apple's ascendancy is making them a much bigger target and the first commercial hacks are starting to appear.
Verdict
Ubuntu in first place, despite my worries OSX goes in second place followed by Vista and XP
This one is a bit of a tricksy one. XP gets to the log in screen slightly quicker than Ubuntu, but it's still working furiously behind the scenes. Once you log in it takes quite a while before the PC becomes responsive.
Ubuntu
It takes a little longer to get to the log in prompt, but one thing that's really nice is that once you log in and the Window manager starts up you can start working really very quickly.
Verdict
From switch on to log in XP is a little faster. From switch on to starting to do things Ubuntu wins.
As standard Ubuntu will check for updates once per day. Like XP it checks for updates to the operating system, but the superb thing is that it will also update all of the applications that you install with the package manager. So your automatic updates also make sure you have all the latest versions of, Firefox, Java, etc. Updates are notified with a balloon which pops up to tell you that you have updates and you simply click on it to install them. Reboots are seldom required after updates.
XP
XP also features automatic updates, but unfortunately they are one of the most broken features of XP. A problem I had recently illustrates the point
I logged into my Windows PC a couple of days back for the first time in a while and as well as a balloon popping up to tell me that I needed to update Windows I had balloons from my Java notifier telling me Java was out of date and also one from HP telling me that my printer drivers needed to be updated and another that Avast was out of date. In comparison to the slickness of Ubuntu this looked positively backward.
I was in a hurry and needed to set my PC ripping a DVD then transcoding it into a format for my portable. This is a time consuming process so having set everything up as a batch of rips and codes I left my PC for a couple of hours and came back to find that shortly after I had left to room Windows had decided that it needed to apply a critical security patch and so without consulting me it had installed the patch then rebooted the machine all without any user intervention. Though applying updates as the rule rather than the exception is a good thing this kind of big brother behavior is what has increasingly put me off spending any time using Windows.
Verdict
Networking in XP is pretty good. Though settings and preferences are set out in a slightly esoteric manner I have found wireless configuration to be very easy and something that works most of the time.
Ubuntu
Apparently wireless networking in Ubuntu used to be a nightmare but since the previous version it is really quite easy. The menus are laid out rather more logically than XP, but the experience is not quite as seamless as Windows. I have had a few minor problems with Wireless my desktop with a USB wireless antenna works like a charm, but my 5 year old laptop would not auto detect the name of my wireless LAN though it connected fine when I typed the name in by hand. I have also had a couple of problems one where Firefox would not recognise that the network had come back for a few minutes if it had been disconnected and another time when after coming out of Hibernate the machine would not connect wirelessly until I did a reboot. One advantage Ubuntu does have is a nice network tools GUI that lets you do ping, netstat, whois, finger lookup. trace root and lots of other handy tools from one interface without having to negotiate the terminal.
Verdict
I have had less problems with XP networking than with Ubuntu so XP is the winner here
I haven't upgraded a PC from XP to Vista but I have done so from 2000 to XP and though there are some useful tools for maintaining some settings and backing up data it has never worked very well for me and I've always found it easier to just format the disk and start again.
Ubuntu
This is another of the areas where Ubuntu works far better than anything else I've ever used. When Gutsy Gibbon the most recent version of Ubuntu came out last month a little icon appeared on my update manager saying upgrade to Gutsy and when I clicked it the machine downloaded all the packages taking about an hour and then installed the updated operating system taking about another hour. Once it had completed everything continued to work seamlessly and all the settings and data was preserved. A new version of Ubuntu is released about every 6 months so you are able to benefit from a continuous stream of updates rather than having to worry about the more substantial shift involved in the 5 years or so it takes MS to get a new version of Windows out.
Verdict
Ubuntu is far more impressive.
XP will run on most PCs that aren't ancient. It used to run ok on my 900mhz laptop, but the 256MB of ram made it painfully slow to load applications. On my 3.8Ghz 1GB P4 desktop it ran nice and fast.
Ubuntu
Makes my laptop runs significantly quicker though there is still the issue that Firefox is a memory hog (no more than on any other platform mind you). If you have an even more ancient machine than me then you can use Xubuntu which uses a different Windowing manager and runs even faster.
Vista
This is one of the area where Vista has been a rod for Microsoft's back. In it's full glory with the Aero Glass interface Vista really needs a modern multicore processor and high spec graphics card to get the best out of it. If you aren't buying a new PC then it probably won't run Vista all that well and even new laptops can struggle if you buy a cheaper one.
Verdict
Ubuntu is noticeably faster than XP. Vista is so resource hungry it is a serious problem.
That concludes my discussion of the core parts of the operating system.
Next time I want to cover software and who I would recommend to try Ubuntu.
Installation
UbuntuAt the time of installing both of my machines the current version of Ubuntu was 7.04 Edgy and so I haven't had any experience of the new versions installer, but I must say it was an absolute breeze. The PC booted into the Live CD and then during the installation all I had to do was set the time zone and type in my name and that was it.
I must note that two people I know have had problems installing Ubuntu one with a very old machine and the other with a non standard screen in this case there is a text mode installer which is just as easy to use but doesn't look as pretty it's annoying that you have to download this separately and it doesn't detect the problem and switch into text mode.
For more advanced users Ubuntu comes with superb features for making a PC duel boot and repartitioning the disk. While installing my desktop PC I repartitioned my fragmented XP system partition and it worked like a charm without any scares.
XP
XP is the easiest Microsoft OS I have installed, but I have had a few problems with it. The first one is the classic have a cup of tea and leave it going problem. You set it up and leave it to do its thing for half an hour and then come back to find a dialogue box popped up seconds after you left and its done naff all in the time you were away.
I've had XP hang on installation more than once and had to reformat and go back to the beginning and I've also had Windows become confused on a rebuild and recreate all the user folders a second time prefixed by the computer name and a dot.
XP is also blighted by the fact that many vendors don't provide a proper Windows disk and some don't even provide a recovery disk.
Verdict
Had two of my friends not had a bad installation experience I would have given it to Ubuntu as it is I'm calling it evens.
Registration
UbuntuNo registration is required unless you take out a support contract woo hoo! Windows
Initial registration is not hugely arduous and easily circumvented if you are so inclined however I must mention the blight that is Windows Genuine Advantage. This is a special application the job of which is to check you aren't doing anything you shouldn't be with Windows. Having bought my desktop PC and reveling in my first paid for legal Microsoft product since the Postman Pat game I had for my Amstrad in 1985 I allowed the Genuine Advantage app to install its self as an automatic update. My PC then promptly spent the next month flashing up messages that it was pirated and refused to update. I later discovered that Norton Firewall was blocking the connection to the authentication servers online so it had decided to call me a thief rather than give me the benefit of the doubt. What depressed me about this episode is that if I had cracked Windows none of this would have happened so I was effectively being punished for being honest.
Verdict
Genuine Advantage is one of the things that made me loose faith in XP so it's an Ubuntu win hands down.
Crapware
Windows XP and VistaSome of you may not know what I am talking about when I say Crapware, but believe me when I say that this is one of the most significant problems facing the Windows platform today. Crapware is catch all term for the software that you didn't ask for which came preinstalled on your machine usually with some kind of limited trial or some kind of advertising revenue attached. The most common forms of this are Norton Antivirus, pre installed ISP services and the Yahoo toolbar. With my current PC Windows was so broken by this software it would not uninstall correctly that I had to rebuild it.
My mums PC has the same problem, but because it doesn't have a proper rebuild disk and has some proprietary media centre hardware built into the mobo I can't even do a restore!
The fault of this does not lie with Mictrosoft who I understand are very unhappy with the situation, but with the manufacturers. Dell have speculated about having a no Crapware option in there options list, but estimate the PC could cost as much as £50 more as a result.
Ubuntu and Most forms of Linux
Thankfully free from this abomination.
Mac
Apple have sensibly avoided this problem and well done to them for not taking the quick dollar at the expense of the user.
Verdict
Windows in last place all the others are tied.
Hardware Compatibility
XPXP is the current market leader and it's been around for a while so it's fair to say that if you want to make hardware that people will buy then you make it XP compatible. XP will also run on a few processor types though the Intel x86 is the most common.
Vista
A disappointingly large number of companies haven't written any Vista drivers so it is still very likely that an upgrade will stop some hardware working. Companies like Creative make it a deliberate ploy not to write soundcard drivers for subsequent OS because they think you will shell out for new stuff. This will of course change
Ubuntu and Linux in General
Though a lot better than in days gone by you are still likely to find problems with esoteric or very new hardware in Linux however this is getting better all the time and the only bits of kit I have that don't work are the memory card slot in my laptop (the one in my desktop is fine) and some of the 3D acceleration features aren't supported on the esoteric graphics card on my desktop.
The hardware situation gets better all the time. Only a year or two ago Printers, Bluetooth, Multi Monitor set ups and USB WiFi adapters were all known to be problematic, but are now working out of the box.
Anecdotal evidence suggests that Skype headsets and Touchscreen support is still pretty poor.
Ununtu gets support for the longest list of platforms supported with: x86, Power PC, SPARC, PS3 and Itanium all being supported.
Mac OSX
As Mac increases it's market share more people consider it a must to write Mac drivers. The real bummer is that Apple won't let you put their lovely operating systems on your own PC which is a shame as there boxes are super expensive and the reasoning is purely to maximise profits and keep them exclusive rather than any technical reason. I understand the commercial sense of this decision, but I don't have to like it.
Verdict
Installing Software
UbuntuThis is one area where Ubuntu absolutely shines. You add and remove software from the Package Manager much like Windows, but where it comes into its own is that you can search or browse any of the software that is available for Ubuntu from the package manager, click install and you are all done.
XP
Compared to installing directly from within the package manager having to download zip files, unpack, and then go though an install shield seems positively archaic in comparison.
Verdict
Ubuntu wins hands down
Security
UbuntuUbuntu is in the UNIX family so it has an excellent security pedigree. Ubuntu comes with a capable Firewall, Antivirus is available, but not really needed. Another excellent security feature is Sudo. In Ubuntu you are never really logged in as administrator (or Root in Linux terminology) instead when you need to do something that only admins should do you do a "super do" or sudo which asks you to put in your password to check that you really mean it. This is brilliant because it means that even if malicious code gets onto your machine it can't do anything naughty without your express permission and even then only for that session.
XP
XP gets a bad rap but most of the security problems it has are due to the fact that it's the biggest target, but with a bit of tweaking it is fine. It comes with an adequate firewall which is switched on by default, but doesn't come with antivirus which is a must.
On the downside logging in as an administrator leaves you vulnerable and switching between user and admin accounts, or using run as is a pain in the arse.
Vista
Vista has much improved security over previous Windows products, but the obsessive paranoia gets in the way of the user and it seems that their need to prove themselves as super secure has been at the expense of usability.
OSX
Mac users are famous for their arrogance about security and that worries me a lot. OSX is also built on UNIX so theoretically it is very secure but there have been a couple of things recently that have worried me. One is that Panther comes with the Firewall switched off by default and is of a poor quality, but the main thing is that Apple's ascendancy is making them a much bigger target and the first commercial hacks are starting to appear.
Verdict
Ubuntu in first place, despite my worries OSX goes in second place followed by Vista and XP
Boot Time
XPThis one is a bit of a tricksy one. XP gets to the log in screen slightly quicker than Ubuntu, but it's still working furiously behind the scenes. Once you log in it takes quite a while before the PC becomes responsive.
Ubuntu
It takes a little longer to get to the log in prompt, but one thing that's really nice is that once you log in and the Window manager starts up you can start working really very quickly.
Verdict
From switch on to log in XP is a little faster. From switch on to starting to do things Ubuntu wins.
Updates
UbuntuAs standard Ubuntu will check for updates once per day. Like XP it checks for updates to the operating system, but the superb thing is that it will also update all of the applications that you install with the package manager. So your automatic updates also make sure you have all the latest versions of, Firefox, Java, etc. Updates are notified with a balloon which pops up to tell you that you have updates and you simply click on it to install them. Reboots are seldom required after updates.
XP
XP also features automatic updates, but unfortunately they are one of the most broken features of XP. A problem I had recently illustrates the point
I logged into my Windows PC a couple of days back for the first time in a while and as well as a balloon popping up to tell me that I needed to update Windows I had balloons from my Java notifier telling me Java was out of date and also one from HP telling me that my printer drivers needed to be updated and another that Avast was out of date. In comparison to the slickness of Ubuntu this looked positively backward.
I was in a hurry and needed to set my PC ripping a DVD then transcoding it into a format for my portable. This is a time consuming process so having set everything up as a batch of rips and codes I left my PC for a couple of hours and came back to find that shortly after I had left to room Windows had decided that it needed to apply a critical security patch and so without consulting me it had installed the patch then rebooted the machine all without any user intervention. Though applying updates as the rule rather than the exception is a good thing this kind of big brother behavior is what has increasingly put me off spending any time using Windows.
Verdict
Ubuntu by a country mile.
Networking
XPNetworking in XP is pretty good. Though settings and preferences are set out in a slightly esoteric manner I have found wireless configuration to be very easy and something that works most of the time.
Ubuntu
Apparently wireless networking in Ubuntu used to be a nightmare but since the previous version it is really quite easy. The menus are laid out rather more logically than XP, but the experience is not quite as seamless as Windows. I have had a few minor problems with Wireless my desktop with a USB wireless antenna works like a charm, but my 5 year old laptop would not auto detect the name of my wireless LAN though it connected fine when I typed the name in by hand. I have also had a couple of problems one where Firefox would not recognise that the network had come back for a few minutes if it had been disconnected and another time when after coming out of Hibernate the machine would not connect wirelessly until I did a reboot. One advantage Ubuntu does have is a nice network tools GUI that lets you do ping, netstat, whois, finger lookup. trace root and lots of other handy tools from one interface without having to negotiate the terminal.
Verdict
I have had less problems with XP networking than with Ubuntu so XP is the winner here
Upgrading
XPI haven't upgraded a PC from XP to Vista but I have done so from 2000 to XP and though there are some useful tools for maintaining some settings and backing up data it has never worked very well for me and I've always found it easier to just format the disk and start again.
Ubuntu
This is another of the areas where Ubuntu works far better than anything else I've ever used. When Gutsy Gibbon the most recent version of Ubuntu came out last month a little icon appeared on my update manager saying upgrade to Gutsy and when I clicked it the machine downloaded all the packages taking about an hour and then installed the updated operating system taking about another hour. Once it had completed everything continued to work seamlessly and all the settings and data was preserved. A new version of Ubuntu is released about every 6 months so you are able to benefit from a continuous stream of updates rather than having to worry about the more substantial shift involved in the 5 years or so it takes MS to get a new version of Windows out.
Verdict
Ubuntu is far more impressive.
Performance and System Requirements
XPXP will run on most PCs that aren't ancient. It used to run ok on my 900mhz laptop, but the 256MB of ram made it painfully slow to load applications. On my 3.8Ghz 1GB P4 desktop it ran nice and fast.
Ubuntu
Makes my laptop runs significantly quicker though there is still the issue that Firefox is a memory hog (no more than on any other platform mind you). If you have an even more ancient machine than me then you can use Xubuntu which uses a different Windowing manager and runs even faster.
Vista
This is one of the area where Vista has been a rod for Microsoft's back. In it's full glory with the Aero Glass interface Vista really needs a modern multicore processor and high spec graphics card to get the best out of it. If you aren't buying a new PC then it probably won't run Vista all that well and even new laptops can struggle if you buy a cheaper one.
Verdict
Ubuntu is noticeably faster than XP. Vista is so resource hungry it is a serious problem.
That concludes my discussion of the core parts of the operating system.
Next time I want to cover software and who I would recommend to try Ubuntu.
Wednesday, November 07, 2007
Ars Review Ubuntu
The first part of my comprehensive round up of Ubuntu Vs XP will be posted up shortly, but in the meantime here is the Ars Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon review.
http://arstechnica.com/reviews/os/ubuntu-gutsy-gibbon-review.ars/1
All in all it seems fairly positive and I would agree with everything that was said.
http://arstechnica.com/reviews/os/ubuntu-gutsy-gibbon-review.ars/1
All in all it seems fairly positive and I would agree with everything that was said.
Wednesday, October 31, 2007
The Big Ubuntu Switchover
There seems to be some kind of law that if you stop using Windows and you have a blog that you must at some point write a post about your experiences and who am I to buck that trend.
I recently moved over from using Windows XP to Ubuntu on my home machines and I thought it might be helpful for those considering the switch to read about my experiences. Since the most recent version of Ubuntu called Gutsy Gibbon (no seriously) came out there has been a lot of buzz about how it is great for every day PC users rather than just beardy computer science types so I have decided to write it with a non technical audience in mind.
I suppose that the first question to answer is what on earth is Ubuntu, and why do I use it instead of Windows?
Ubuntu is a type of Linux which is an operating system like Microsoft Windows or Apple OS X. Where Linux differs from the Apple and Microsoft products however is that it is free in two important ways: Free like free beer and Free like speech. Linux is free like beer because there is no charge for using it on your computer and it is free like speech because anyone can look at the program and change or improve it if they like (something Microsoft or Apple would never let you do however much money you had!). As a result lots of people both volunteers and people in industry continuously improve Linux allowing it to keep up with the huge investment made by its commercial rivals. Though you may not have Linux at home you will almost certainly use it every day as it is the most popular way of hosting web pages and powers such Internet legends as Google, Amazon and Ebay and quite a lot of phones and set top boxes also run it.
Lots of people bundle up Linux with a collection of useful bits and bobs in what is called a distribution or a distro. Ubuntu is a Linux distro put together by a company called Canonical who make their money by selling help and support for Linux users. The motto of Ubuntu is "Linux for Humans" and their philosophy is often compared with the Apple Mac mantra "It just works".
Ubuntu is designed to be as easy and friendly to install and use as possible and as a result it is fast becoming the most popular type of Linux with home users.
Now we know what Ubuntu is the next question is: Why did I abandon Windows and start using it? Well to tell you that I suppose I should tell you a little bit about myself.
I am what you might call a techy or a geek. I have a degree in a computing discipline and I work as a technology expert for a living however I would like you to trust me when I tell you that I am in no way a fan of technology for technology's sake. My mobile phone is second hand and exists only to make phone calls and I see gizmos as being only worth bothering with when they make our lives simpler and easier.
Whilst at university I was encouraged to install Redhat Linux on my PC by the department, but having sampled it in the lab I decided that though it had a lot of good things going for it, it was still too arcane at that point and didn't really offer me anything that I couldn't do in Windows 2000.
So what changed my mind?
As a younger person I like many people was not adverse to using software without playing for it, but as I got older I started to feel that if I got use from some software I should pay for it (I'm not judging anyone who feels differently). At the moment I own two computers. One of them is a fairly modern desktop PC which came with a legitimate copy of Windows XP and the other is a rather decrepit by modern standards laptop for which I did not own a legitimate Windows licence. Unfortunately the hard disk in the laptop had to be replaced and this presented me with a problem. The laptop had never run XP very well in the first place as it was rather too old and buying an XP licence when it had already been superseded by the underwhelming Vista was a rather unappealing prospect.
As an avid reader of the excellent Lifehacker (A website dedicated to making life easier and more productive) I kept hearing a lot about a newish and popular flavour of Linux by the name of Ubuntu. This surprised me somewhat as Lifehacker being productivity themed is typically more likely to sing the praises of Macs with their elegant interfaces and well thought out design.
So I had in my possession an old laptop, a virgin hard disk and a free operating system. What did I have to loose except a Sunday afternoon.
Having gone through an old fashioned Linux install as part of an engineering course some years back (Apparently during which if you set the scan rate wrongly it could make smoke come out of your monitor!) I was surprised at how easy it was to install (more detail of how it stacks up against XP in a later post). All you have to do is stick the CD in the drive and turn the machine on and it boots straight into Ubuntu from the CD and lets you poke around and check that you like it. Everything seemed to work and so I clicked the big install button and then other that asking me my name, time zone and the password for my wireless network everything just happened.
Not only did the machine work like a charm without me configuring anything (I've lever had to use a terminal for anything unless I wanted to) but I actually found my laptop now ran pretty fast and was very easy to use. soon I pretty much stopped using my well speced XP desktop except when I absolutely had to.
The two things that turned me from a dabbler to an advocate came when my other half who is as non techy as can be and had previously only really used XP asked if she could borrow the Ubuntu laptop I was using rather than use the XP machine because she found it easier to use and another occasion when I was showing a Youtube vid to a friend and he asked if my machine was Vista because it looked much nicer than his XP machine at home.
After this I soon changed the XP machine into a duel boot Windows/Ubuntu machine (I had paid for the XP licence so it seemed silly to delete it) and I have never looked back.
Next time I hope to do a feature comparison between the two so you can make your own mind up if you are considering making the switch.
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