Linux Falters in NetBooks

The faithful told us that small, inexpensive, low powered Netbooks were to be the breakthrough product that Linux had always needed. They were perfectly tailored to suit Linux’s strengths (price, configurability, ease of localization).

When the Asus Eee 700/701 were released with a custom Xandros Linux distro, it seemed that the Linux faithful were exactly right and the open source OS had finally found a consumer market champion…but that didn’t last long. Soon, consumers were demanding the option to install XP instead of Linux. Then dedicated XP versions were being released by Asus to satisfy the market and they soon outsold the Linux versions despite the higher price tags . This then in turn ushered in the phenomenal initial growth of Netbooks. Now, Linux versions of Netbooks are really released only for hobbyists. The mainstream bread and butter is made with XP version sales.

Netbooks, which were hoped to finally establish a foothold in the consumer market for Linux, seem to have had the exact opposite effect. They have put paid once and for all to the belief that Linux will have a serious presence on the desktop any time soon, or be viable as a mainstream consumer OS. In the server room, sure Linux has a place, in fact I think over time Linux will come to utterly dominate the server market. However, will Joe and Judy Laptop ever embrace Linux on their home or work PCs?

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Linux, kill it or save it.

It’s more profitable to kill Linux than to save it. And I’m going to prove you that. I posted two news about Linux at todoUMPC. The first one was quoting my friend Daniel’s article "Why Mobile Linux is Doomed" and another one about Ubuntu Mobile published at Linux Planet. This last one was asking for help to make Ubuntu fully work in a Q1 Celeron UMPC. Guess what happened, the negative article about Linux is breaking traffic records while the positive one asking to work for a full version of Linux has been completely ignored.

We, bloggers, are some sort of entertainers,  we need traffic in our sites. What is the fun of having a blog if nobody reads it? Did you get my point? So, now do you understand why I said that is more profitable to kill Linux than to save it.

And that’s part of the problem with Linux. There is a lot of people defending it but just a few working on it.

ThoughtFix: Why Mobile Linux is Doomed

Our friend Daniel from ThoughtFix has published a very good article about Linux and why he think that it’s doomed. And that made me remember and old Greek saying "Split and you will win". Too many flavors that the only thing they do is to get newbies confused.

It’s a shame. I will miss the excitement of mobile Linux systems. I hope some company is strong (or wealthy) enough to provide developers with the tools, distribution channels, and incentives to provide a rich application directory for their devices. Failing that, mobile Linux is doomed.

Second Time Around

I took delivery of my second Asus Eee 701 today in Galaxy Black with RAM upgraded to 1G, identical to my first one in every way. This had to be done as my first one was stolen (sigh), but through my upset I have managed to glimpse a silver lining to the situation.

In short, I now have a chance to do things better.

With my first Eee, I swore to myself before getting it that  I would stick with the initial Xandros Linux OS for at least a couple weeks, then try a few of the other Eee optimized Linux distros out of curiosity as I had never really tried to use Linux. Frustration and confusion however caused me to flee back to a nice, safe XP install after only two days. I know, not pretty, and I ain’t proud of it, but Linux ungeeked me. The difficulty of adapting Xandros to my needs, the seemingly unending amount of code I needed to enter with little or no documentation and the nightmare of installing applications from the repositories made me no better then a common citizen, running back to the shelter of what I knew. I intend to try a little harder this time to explore Linux, and have made the following goals for my second Eee based on my experiences with the first.

1) Experiment. I learned that it is dead simple and painless to install complete Operating Systems as it took a couple cracks with nLite to get the XP networking set up. Towards that end, I already have install CDs ready for the three Linux distros that most interest me (Mandriva, EeeDora and EeeXubuntu) and may also install Linpus. I will swap those around for the first few days to get a good feeling for the strengths and weaknesses of each. I will still probably end up with XP, but I want to make full use of this chance to be able to comment more intelligently on all major Linux options.

2) Discern. I found that in the few weeks I had the first Eee, the main thing I did with it was read, both books and comics and play Diablo II on the bus. Therefore, first things first I will install software for e-books, JPG comics and other similar media (and Diablo II). I may not need Word or OpenOffice at all, getting by with a WordPad type program. Either way, I want to be more careful with what applications I install this time around.

3) Optimize, optimize, optimize. In the end, I was just so happy to get an OS up and running well on my first Eee that I just installed all the off the shelf drivers Asus provided, whacked a bunch of standard software on and then stuck with it as I didn’t want to risk having to reformat again. Dumb. This time, I will make use of the plethora of streamlined drivers and utilities available out there to make the Eee run as fast and smooth as possible…and if it should get a bit hinky on me, just reformat it and start again. I am willing to spend a couple weeks tinkering before I let the device settle into a final form this time, since now I know how durable it is.

Sometimes, to really get the most out of a device, you need a second chance at it. This oughtta be fun.

Ubuntu in a HTC Shift

Well, there is not too much info that I can say about it but what you can see in this video. Apparently this person installed Ubuntu got everything working on his HTC Shift.

And… He is even having a good time on it…

TabletKiosk is experimenting with Linux

Here is a video of a TabletKiosk i440D running openSuse 10.3 Linux.

I was surprised to see how well the on screen keyboard works and the presence of Xournal a replacement for Journal an application to takes notes in "Ink" that comes with TabletPC 2005 Edition OS. Even the screen rotation and the fingerprint reader work perfectly.

Are we going to see Linux as an option for this machine? That’s the question I’m leaving in the air to TabletKiosk. I hope so, even when I’m happy with Microsoft OS, competition is what’s needed to see improvements in any OS.