The Economist Suggests Linux For Netbooks 445
Trepidity writes "In its roundup of how to choose a netbook, The Economist suggests that users 'avoid the temptation' to go for a Windows-based netbook, and in particular to treat them as mini laptops on which you'll install a range of apps. In their view, by the time you add the specs needed to run Windows and Windows apps effectively, you might as well have just bought a smallish laptop. Instead, they suggest the sweet spot is ultra-lite, Linux-based netbooks, with a focus on pre-installed software that caters to common tasks. They particularly like OpenOffice, which they rate as easier to use than MS Word and having 'no compatibility problems,' as well as various photo-management software." Besides which, does Windows offer spinning cubes for coffee-shop demos?
Re:I'm guessing that wasn't on their radar screen (Score:5, Informative)
If editing formulas was really a big concern for you you would be using LaTeX like all the cool kids.
Re:No compatibility problems? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:No compatibility problems? (Score:4, Informative)
It's a wash (Score:5, Informative)
gOS Linux at $300
7" screen, VIA CPU, 512 MB RAM, 30 GB HDD
Windows XP at $350
8.9" screen, Atom CPU, 1 GB RAM, 120 GB HDD.
SUSE Linux at $400
9" Screen, VIA CPU, 512 MB RAM, 4 GB Flash, and a webcam. Not sold in stores.
Windows XP at $400
9" Screen, 1 GB RAM, 160 GB HDD and a webcam. In some stores. Mini-Laptops [walmart.com]
The Economist ~ understates ~ the advantages of being able to run your Windows apps on your netbook - and there is really nothing in F/OSS of interest to the general consumer market that isn't available for Windows.
Re:No compatibility problems? (Score:5, Informative)
openoffice.org-dmaths
Formula editor improvements for OpenOffice.org
This is a package you can install on ubuntu to add additional support to openoffice concerning formulas. Have you tried this?
Re:No compatibility problems? (Score:3, Informative)
I don't know abut Ubuntu, but on many distros, you can turn off or suspend real-time indexing. Otherwise, you're indexing the file system, any web pages you crawl, etc. That takes a lot of juice.
In ubuntu it is too hard to turn off indexing. It always DOSs the machine for me and the speed control seems to have no effect.
IMHO it should be off by default.
Re:It's right for you. Will you be allowed to buy (Score:4, Informative)
So buy it with Windows and get [networkworld.com] your [linuxjournal.com] refund [linux.com].
Consider the refund as a payment by Microsoft for you installing Linux.
Re:No compatibility problems? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:No compatibility problems? (Score:5, Informative)
Too hard?
-System->Preferences->Search and Indexing
-Uncheck "Enable Indexing"
And lastly in 8.10 it is off by default.
Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)
Re:No compatibility problems? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:No compatibility problems? (Score:3, Informative)
Beagle is a huge problem on single-core machines. At least on dual-core, you still have enough spare cycles so you can turn do a "ps ax | grep beagled" and then "kill -9" it.
The manufacturers should be careful (Score:5, Informative)
Re:I'm guessing that wasn't on their radar screen (Score:4, Informative)
eXpensive Piece of Shit?
Heh, not quite. Xml Paper Standard.
Essentially, a slimmed down PDF-like format, but designed exclusively for digital representation of print media (so no embedded forms, audio, video, etc). It also uses a zipped XML format, and can be digitally signed. I believe the idea is this will be a native printer language like Postscript (not entirely sure why it's better - maybe just more descriptive?), and MS is incorporating this standard throughout the Windows printing pipeline, which is supposed to make WSIWYG printing easier / more reliable for Windows programmers. Apparently, printer manufacturers are signing on, so it may gain enough traction to stick around for a while.
I happened to learn about this format because I needed to create a utility to export scripts (as in, the kind actors read) from our text database for voice-recording studios, which has standardized and very specific formatting requirements. Because we use .NET and WPF for our tools, it was fairly simple to output to .XPS format. RTF didn't have quite enough formatting support, and .doc files - pfft, yeah, right.
So far, so good. The California studios seem to be able to open and print them, which is all I needed.
Re:It's right for you. Will you be allowed to buy (Score:5, Informative)
The advertisements all over the Economist page (top and bottom banners and embedded in the article itself) are for the Asus N series [asus.com] notebooks. Which make a point of promoting the Express Gate [wikipedia.org] instant-on linux environment built into the motherboard.
So even if they buy one with Windows XP or Vista installed, the first thing to run when they switch it on will be Linux with FireFox.
Re:No compatibility problems? (Score:4, Informative)
>Not earlier. Unless my memory is failing me, .sxw was the default file type until not long ago.
Two major versions and 3 years ago
From an Economist reader (Score:5, Informative)
The blurb may be a little misleading, since it seems to suggest that this is some kind of recommendation from the Economist, which doesn't do product reviews in general.
This is part of a (very interesting) collection of "end of year technology roundup" type articles (see for instance my favorite article [economist.com] on quieter tank treads). All the writer really says is "if you buy one of these the point is low cost and simplicity -- so don't be tempted to spend extra on Windows, or you might as well buy a laptop".
The author is actually kind of against the choice of Linux in a way, as he makes it sound like adding extra software is a royal pain: "Admittedly, installing third-party software can be a bit of a fiddle, and some of the advice available online threatens to lure users into the tangled depths of the Linux undergrowth, where few people will want to venture"...
JF
Re:Hardware compatibility, or keyboard compatibili (Score:5, Informative)
If you're planning to use Ubuntu, the best approach is to scope out the laptop on the Ubuntu Wiki [ubuntu.com] first. It isn't absolutely comprehensive, but it does cover the majority of popular laptops. I assume that other major distros have their own compatibility lists, and if your distro of choice doesn't, well, use the Ubuntu list, and at least you know that someone somewhere got your laptop working under Linux.
Re:Linux is for servers - not laptops (Score:5, Informative)
You probably installed Linux on your laptops yourself though, right? And it was distributions that hadn't been designed with your hardware in mind specifically, right?
If you buy a netbook and the OEM Linux distro, customized by the manufacturer, doesn't run the hardware properly, please let us know.
Re:SSD (Score:3, Informative)
Yes it is difficult but lots of people are doing it:
Acer uses a custom Fedora: http://www.linpus.com/ [linpus.com]
Dell and others use a custom Ubuntu http://www.canonical.com/netbooks [canonical.com]
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.
Re:The manufacturers should be careful (Score:3, Informative)
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.
Re:Bought the EEE, Switched to XP (Score:3, Informative)
vim [sourceforge.net] works perfectly well under Windows.
If you can't find a replacement for the others, look at cygwin [cygwin.com] to run many more *nix programs and utilities... including a real shell ("cli").
You can work around many Windows shortcomings and end up with something that works for you.
Re:I'm guessing that wasn't on their radar screen (Score:4, Informative)
That wouldn't be allowed at work, on the grounds that nobody could take over and edit the equations if I went under a bus.
There are things like the OOolatex plugin [sourceforge.net] that provide a managed method for such image insertion, allowing you to simply select and equation, call up a dialog box with the TeX, re-edit, and re-insert the new rendering conveniently and easily. It's a very basic plugin for OpenOffice.org. I am pretty sure very similar things exist for Microsoft Word. At that point the only difficulty in someone else editing the equations is their inability to read and write LaTeX; and if they have any business writing and editing any number of equations they should know LaTeX.
Where do all you folks work, that you can choose the tools you work with? And how do they manage business continuity?
Any sane person who writes a lot of equations for a living will happily grab LaTeX, even if it is in the form of a plugin for standard word processors described above. Once you have an entire department/work group saying that this small free piece of software is going to have a very significant boost to their productivity very few companies say no. I doubt these people are getting to pick and choose thier softare completely, but they can request software that is going to have a large positive impact on their productivity, and they will often get it.
Re:It's right for you. Will you be allowed to buy (Score:5, Informative)
Look around at prices online. If that's really the case then why is it I can get a Win XP Acer Aspire One 8.9-Inch Netbook (e.g. @ Amazon.com) with 1 GB RAM, 120 GB Hard Drive, and 3 Cell Battery for $350, but the Linpus Linux Lite one only has 512 MB RAM, 8 GB Solid State Drive instead of a HD, and a standard battery, and that's about $300.
The hardware differences alone should be more than a $50 drop in price. It's like you're getting a discount for adding Win XP to the device.
If you start with the $350 XP model and deduct the cost of the hardware differences, and deduct the cost of XP, the Linux one by comparison should probably be more like $200.
Well.. for a start, you are buying in America, so the models offered may be different. And you are compairing two different modles, so the pricing will also not be as simple as guessing a price for the storage.
The Asus Eee 901 had varying prices all over the world. Just about every permutation of hardware and price was available. It depends on the importer. And perhaps you are in a less Linux friendly market. The UK pricing for the 901 was identical for both Windows and Linux, but the Linux one had a bigger SSD.
If you go to the Amazon.co.uk website and look at the Acer Aspire One, model A150, the Linpus Linux version is £215.30, and the Windows version is £283.37. So the Linux one is £68.07 cheaper for identical hardware (about the full retail price of an OEM copy of XP home). Pricing varies according to market assumptions made by the manufacturer and the importer.
As to the difference in price with the two models you are looking at, Perhaps the SSD is more expensive than a 2.5 inch hard drive, so the retail price would also be different. Dissimilar models make it much harder to assess.
Re:latex (Score:5, Informative)
Can Word and Oo.org embed LaTeX type inline?
OOoLatex is a set of macros designed to bring the power of LaTeX into OpenOffice. [sourceforge.net]
Re:Linux is for servers - not laptops (Score:3, Informative)
If you buy a netbook and the OEM Linux distro, customized by the manufacturer, doesn't run the hardware properly, please let us know.
Okay. I bought a HP2133 (model FU337EA#AK8) as a Christmas present for my sister. It came with Novell SLED 10. The out-of-the-box-installation was completely unusable. Besides choosing a distro that's a real PITA to get forum support [hp2133guide.com] about (and in cases like these, it's pretty much the only support you'll get), the hardware they included had linux support ranging from poor to horrible.
Here's a list of the worst problems:
-Graphics drivers. The laptop uses a VIA graphics card, and out of the box, it only runs in an awful looking 640x480-stretched-to-fit-the-screen-VESA-mode. There are some pre-compiled 3D VIA binaries for a few kernels of some distros. There's also some source code for 2D drivers that I couldn't get to compile. (Fortunately some kind soul [docnielsen.dk] did get them to compile, and was kind enough to make the binaries publicly available.) Of course getting it working it wasn't that easy. You see HP offers 2 different screen sizes on this laptop, and this model naturally carried the less common one. It took me three days and several forum posts to find the obscure lines [mininoteuser.com] to edit in xorg.conf (And I do mean obscure, not just tweaking the resolution or modlines.) Option "PanelID" "17" in combination with a few other tweaks, I believe was the key to success.
-Audio drivers. Well, they'll work out of the box it would seem, as long as you don't want to use the headphone jacks or a microphone. HP appears to be using a not-quite-supported ADI SoundMax AD1984A soundcard. If you want to use, say Skype, you need to download the latest nightly ALSA build and compile that. Then you'll get the mic and jacks working as well. The only problem remaining is that every once in a while artsd thinks that hogging all the CPU cycles is a really good idea, and the ordinary Skype package won't work. You'll want the one labelled static-oss.
-Wireless. So far I believe the community has identified 5 different WLAN-cards used in these laptops. All from Broadcom. If you follow the instructions in the wikis [ubuntu.com] really, really carefully, you'll probably have it working in an hour or two. :-P
So to sum it up: The SLED system that came with the netbook was an unusable mess. I switched to Kubuntu that I somehow managed to get working through a lot of effort, patience, and community support. The HP netbooks look very nice, and have better keyboards that most comparable systems, but given the level of half-assedness to the default install it's hard to recommend them to anyone. (The other alternative is Vista which is much more expensive, and even harder to recommend.) It would seem that HP just assumes that people buying these things are just going to pirate XP anyway, so why bother with quality control?
Oh, and I've got an Asus EEE myself. No problems whatsoever, with that one. Didn't quite like the default install, so I installed Mandriva instead. Still no problems.
Re:Hardware compatibility, or keyboard compatibili (Score:5, Informative)
At that point, you can test most (if not all) of the peripherals to see if they work nicely.
Re:No compatibility problems? (Score:1, Informative)
I've just installed 8.10 at my brand new eee 901. Beagle was dropped some versions of Ubuntu in favor of tracker. Nevertheless, tracker is disabled by default. You can easily setup on/off tracker with system->preferences->Search_abd_indexing.
Re:No compatibility problems? (Score:3, Informative)
Sun make a plugin for word to support opendocument files, microsoft also make such a plugin but it doesnt work anywhere near as well, and finally microsoft are supposedly going to implement opendocument support some time next year in a service pack.
Re:latex (Score:4, Informative)
The software is technically named "OpenOffice.org", not "Open Office". Thus the small o is for ".org". I don't particularly like that naming, but that's how they did it. I, like you, think just plain old "Open Office" would have made more sense. There may have been some concern of trademark issues with Microsoft's "Office" product had they not added the ".org" to the end.
Re:latex (Score:4, Informative)
Wikipedia: "The project and software are informally referred to as OpenOffice, but this term is a trademark held by a company in the Netherlands co-founded by Wouter Hanegraaff and is also in use by Orange UK. [2], requiring the project to adopt OpenOffice.org as its formal name."
Re:No compatibility problems? (Score:3, Informative)
You have a fundamental misunderstanding of how word processing works.
Word processors are designed to be WYSIWYG with the "Get" being the printed page and the "See" being the displayed page, and therefore they format the page based on the printer definitions. You move the file from one computer to another and they have different printers, then the page is reformatted to fit that printer.
Most people don't understand this, and expect the document to look the same. It won't. That's why Adobe created Acrobat, to provide a "It always looks the same" format.
There are ways to minimize the effects of printers, but again most people don't know how to do that.
Re:Hardware compatibility, or keyboard compatibili (Score:3, Informative)
No, but you can use an external USB one.
That's a definite "yes", not a "maybe". You just use something like unetbootin [sourceforge.net] to copy the live CD to a USB stick, then boot from that. It's all GUI-driven, so it's pretty straightforward.
Re:Hardware compatibility, or keyboard compatibili (Score:2, Informative)
while that is a good resource, i always recommend people check out linux on laptops [linux-on-laptops.com] first, and if they can't find their laptop model and/or linux flavor, to then move onto another list like the ubuntu wiki.
Re:No compatibility problems? (Score:2, Informative)
I use OOo and trade documents with my Fortune 10 corporation clients using MSOffice all the time.
I've seen more MSOffice document changes from pc to pc all using MSOffice depending on the fonts installed than I've seen with OOo to MSOffice issues.
Are there still some advanced things (outlining, macros, etc) that may work differently? Sure. But you're getting 98% of the way there and most users will never have an issue (especially if all they've used is the standard pre-installed load of non-MSOffice MS software on their pc).
Once people start to see that a PDF writer is in OOo (and you can get a PDF editor with plugins), and all the other functionality of OOo then they are hooked.
Firefox and Open Office were the software that convinced me to switch to Linux five years ago.
Re:I'm guessing that wasn't on their radar screen (Score:3, Informative)
Do they really want word, or just something they can read on their machine? I've heard that LaTeX to PDF conversion tools are pretty cool :P
Re:No compatibility problems? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:The manufacturers should be careful (Score:3, Informative)
BTW, Ubuntu's "Netbook Remix [launchpad.net]" desktop is absolutely brilliant on tiny netbooks like the 701. It's as easy to use as the Xandros desktop, but fully functional and customizable.
Re:Don't tell this to Dell (Score:3, Informative)
Dell internally treats enterprise/government and small business/home as two separate companies. For example they use different advertising agencies, different help desks, different software to price out their systems. The only thing they share is they both draw on Dell's manufacturing capacity in a sort of client / vendor way.
The corporate side may not yet understand what their customers want in a netbook so they want to sell a basic configuration. Because once they start supporting a LInux they are going to need to be able to address issues corporate & governement concerns on Linux / Netbooks and they don't know what those are.
I can think of lots of reasons they are interested in having an experimental project in a school. Support in incredibly expensive, lets assume on the mini 9, $20 a call. These netbooks have light margins particularly if they do some sort of educator/large business discount (since after all you could have just ordered from the home store) lets say $35 or less.
1) They are likely to get call from the girls as things go wrong (they are kids)
2) Returns are likely to be high as these things get broken.
3) They are going to support educational packages and different use cases for the corporate market.
How do they not get 2 calls / unit with those sorts of numbers?
Dell internally essentially exists as a home and small business corporation, an enterprise corporation and a service corporation.