Is cloud computing really that new and original

I have been working in IT for more years than I care to remember, but it seems that if you wait around long enough, technologies that I have used before, suddenly become the flavour of the month and re-appear with smart presentations from slick young people in nicely tailored suits to tell us all how different it all is this time.

This happened with virtualization, where if you are brutally honest , the only key difference to what IBM were doing decades ago, was that the technologists got it to run on the Intel architecture, with all it's horribly legacy memory management et al.

So to the cloud, which in essence is the ability to leverage the power and storage of a remote machine to achieve the task's that you were used to doing locally, sound familiar, it certainly does to me. Literally decades ago people used to share resources on an IBM mainframe to run their payroll or business finance systems, which would be physically a long way away - people couldn't afford their own mainframes - and people would attach via modems and dumb terminals.

This is exactly what we are moving towards with the concept of the "Cloud is the machine". The local device can become significantly less powerful as all the real processing of the services is done remotely. This leads to much cheaper consumer devices, whether they be phones, iPads or netbooks. The services that people also want to use today are also becoming more and more central service orientated, things like YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, Blogging, Email, Instant Messaging etc.

I now their are many new technologies like HTML5 and improved Javascript performance that will improve the ability of the clients to do some work locally, but they are not going to be over tasked. The new breed of Intel Atom and ARM processors will be more than powerful enough to cope with the enhanced new GPU's that are appearing almost daily.

There will always be some tasks that are best suited to having a large powerful computer locally as their are many tasks that don't virtualize well, but we are talking about a small percentage for many users who today in 2010 consider the net to be the reason for owning a computer in the first place.

Windows 7 a lot of money for not very much

I keep around an old windows XP virtual machine for things like CV's that agents will only take in word format, and I haven't been bothered to change it over to Google docs yet, but I will. So this VM gets powered up now and again on my Ubuntu Desktop to do this one task, and then it gets put away again.

So I thought I would take the Windows 7 7100 build for a spin and try it in VirtualPC, as I had already built a test VMware one. Well, the install went pretty well and once it had rebooted I was sat with an empty desktop, with no applications again. I fired up IE8 so I could download Mozilla Firefox, and it forced me to go to the Microsoft home page. I then downloaded some anti-virus software - AVG - and installed the Virtual PC drivers, another reboot.

I finally installed all the Microsoft patches and another reboot. It must have taken me about 45mins in total, to end up with a working virtual instance, and all I had installed was a browser and the anti-virus. Now that's OK, as I will put on my copy of Office, and I can continue to edit those CV's, but I then got to thinking about the point of this.

With virtualization and the standard hardware reference model that you get, I don't ever need to upgrade my XP virtual image, and it will continue to work until I can be bothered to move it to Google Apps. I know you won't be able to get security updates etc, but then I don't use it for seriously surfing the web anyway. I can also run it with no network connected if I wanted, and isolate it from the outside world , simply for it's legacy value.

So the question here is, why would I possibly spend £200 on Windows 7, the answer is I won't. When the RC runs out next year, then I will just delete the VM and that might be the driver I need to move over to Google apps completely.

I think a lot of people need to think very hard about upgrading to Windows 7, it might be new and shiny, but what exactly are you getting for you hard earned money. In my opinion not a great deal. Especially when you could go and buy a brand new Acer Netbook for £149 with all the software you could want, and spend the rest on treats for yourself.

Microsofts lie about netbook operating system installations

In a recent blog post by a Microsoft employee, a statement was made that 94% of netbooks came with a version of Windows XP installed. What this person failed to point out was what the people who bought these machines then did with them. Well I can now tell you , that a very large percentage, download a version of Linux, format the harddrive and never touch a version of windows again. How do I know this, well I started a thread on the Eeebuntu.org forums about six months ago to find out what people were doing with their netbooks, and what OS they were originally supplied with.

Well the thread has now shown that 36% of the people who expressed a preference have removed Windows from their netbooks and replaced it with Eeebuntu Linux. This obviously doesn't include those who have put Solaris,OSX, BSD etc etc. Why not tell the truth that they have grabbed a large slice of the market, but were facing significant competition? I'm sure their share holders would prefer that. Also having to bribe the netbooks manufacturers to take their OS, is not good for share holder value.

So, yet again the Redmond FUD masters have been at work spreading lies. I wish they would just spend more effort on their products and less on spreading nonsense. As with all large monopolists, they would rather spend time spreading lies , just like Intel, than actually developing new products that beat their competition on value for money and features.

Look here for the facts.

36% of Windows netbooks have their hard drives wiped and replaced with Linux

A funny thing happened on my way to web

I have been testing Firefox 3.5 and Chromium now for a while, and it dawned on me today that I'm using Chromium more and more, even though it is missing some plugins and options. I started to wonder why this might be, given that even in the developers eyes it is a very early release. The plain truth is the speed. I know some sites just don't render properly, like Vaughan-Nichols Linux blog, but I'm prepared to put up with that, because it just flies along. I use it for Gmail, Google reader , Google analytics , my blog, many forums, the BBC and it just works so much faster that I'm prepared to put up with it's foibles.If I do hit an issue I know I can always fall back to Firefox, which is normally the case when I want to watch something with Adobe Flash. This however will disappear the moment Chromium supports Adobe Flash, and we are not now talking many months away from that happening.

The Mozilla community have plenty of time to face the performance issues of Firefox on Linux before either Chromium or Google Chrome are out of the door, but they really are going to have face that daemon ;-)

The issue you see, is that on small power computers like Netbooks, every CPU cycle counts, even more so when the ARM based babies hit the streets, and Chromium with v8 is cutting the mustard now, and I can see many distros. , including the one I help with , Eeebuntu switching to Chromium simply for speed reasons.

I have every confidence that the Mozilla community will step up to the plate and address the issue, as version 3.5 is a big improvement over 3.0, and I it will be interested to see how 3.6 and eventually 4.0 shape up, but they have some real competition now and the Microsoft type complacency just won't be good enough.

If Google delivers on the rumours of a version of Android for the Intel Atom and the ARM processors, then they are going to be pushing Chromium very hard on all platforms, but especially there own, which is Linux at it's heart. The pressure on features like audio, video, Adobe flash, and ogg will be relentless and they have within this development community the talent to deliver these improvements. The pressure to improve these is only going to increase.

These are very interesting browsing times, and the only people to really benefit are the surfers.

Community Chromium and Google Chrome on Eeebuntu Netbook

As I have mentioned before I'm testing these two browsers alongside each other to check what , if anything will change between them, and there are a few things that have become apparent. The downloads of the Google version are significantly smaller that the community version, almost half the the size. Why? I can only conclude that they must be removing some parts of the code or using a more efficient compression.

The second thing is that the community version is always ahead of the Google verision, and is offering more features more quickly. This is because the Google version is based on the community Chromium version, so not that surprising, but it means the community version is more interesting.

An example of this is in the current releases - Chromium 3.0.190 and Google Chrome 3.0.189 - I can change my default search engine in Chromium but not Google Chrome, which means I'm using Chromium to type this while in France, but with Google Chrome I would have to be doing it in French. For those who don't know, Google detects what country you are in and without asking you , puts all you Google apps in that countries language. Not very useful when you travel around Europe a lot, but need to work in English. I have had the same problem with Firefox, but you can work around this by installing another default search engine from mozilla.org.

I have to say on an Asus 1000 running the latest version of Eeebuntu 3.0, that both versions absolutely fly along. This can not be underestimated as an extremely useful feature on a netbook. They are much quicker than the version of Firefox 3.5 I'm also testing which is itself much quicker that version 3.0. The Chromium interface also suits the netbook genre very well, which is why I have made my installed version of Firefox look very similar.

Unfortunately neither of these versions is feature complete yet, so no flash etc, but they are great for a whole host of other functions, like typing on my blog so I will use both of them alongside each other until Chromium fully comes of age.

Firefox 3.5 releases beta 99

Well they are easing very slowly towards the release candidate, and as a supporter of Debian, I always believe it is best to release it when you have ironed out as many bugs as you can. Well this morning on checking the nightly builds I spotted that we now have a beta99, which is obviously the last build before we get a proper release candidate, or in fact it may well become the release candidate.

At this stage in the development game, there are no major changes or updates, but just the bugs are getting squashed, which is what really matters when you want a stable browser to do your daily work.

This current release works well on my Asus netbook with eeebuntu version 2 and 3, and you really benefit from the improved javascript performance increase and the pre-fetch caching that is going on. The latest builds of Chromium also suite this environment which is great for user choice.

Anyway here is the about page which show the version I'm currently using.

Turning Firefox 3.5 into Chromium on Ubuntu

Well I like the look of Chromium, and while it is making great headway at the moment with it's development, it is not a browser on Linux that you would trust to do your banking. So while I wait for the final release, I have decided to turn my firefox appearance to look like chrome, with one minor twist.

I have added these addon's to the latest daily build of FF3.5beta5

Chromifox Extreme
Chromifox Companion
Firefox showcase - just use f12 to see the thumbnails
Hide menu - which is also great on your netbook for more screen real estate.

All of these can be easily installed from the addons menu.

The minor twist is that I like the little Google search bar at the top of the screen, and I would be lost without it.

Anyway here is a snapshot of what it looks like.

It works really well with the latest release of eeebuntu on my Asus netbook.

Ubuntu 9.04 on a flash disk on my Asus 1000

I have to do a lot of testing on my Asus for the latest releases of Eeebuntu, and at the moment I needed to test the latest netbook specific kernel from array.org, which has been reworked for the netbook format.

One of the nice features of Ubuntu 9.04 is the way you can easily install it onto a flash drive in your netbook, and the ease with which you can create a live USB drive.

Well as normal this was very straight forward, and this post is coming from that installation with the new kernel installed. It offers many advantages, but one of the key ones is improvements in the touchpad.

I have also installed the latest build of the Chromium browser as I feel that once this has been fully developed it will work very well on the netbook format , as it has a real performance advantage.

So if you would like to try ubuntu 9.04 on your netbook, there has never been a better time to try it out, just follow these easy steps:
1) Download the Ubuntu 9.04 iso and burn it onto a USB drive
2) Boot from the the USB Drive
3) Install Ubuntu onto your test flash drive
4) Install Adams kernel Jaunty kernel install

Then once the netbook restarts, just make sure you boot from your flash drive installation.

What a week on the IT merry-go-round. Anyone for an IBMphone?

Being something of an old timer in the world of IT I thought I had seen pretty much all there was to see in the sometimes strange company interplays that are stuff of this industry. However, I was to be proved wrong, and I hadn't seen it all.

At the start of the week we have Oracle buying Sun for a cut down fee, and to put it mildly this opens up a can of worms with a lot of the technology that they have just acquired. Java, Solaris, ZFS, MySQL and of course all that marvellous new ZFS backed open source storage technology. I think this will take several months until anyone can have a clear picture of how all this shakes out, and just how much Larry Ellison has managed to annoy IBM.

Then we have the news today that Microsoft are really beginning to feel the full force of the Open Source revolution and the Netbook generation eating into their once great monopoly. I have posted often on all the causes for this change, which is unstoppable, and while part of their current problems are the disaster that is Vista and the economic downturn, there is way more to this story than that. Why did Redhat Linux and Apple Mac not suffer the same affects, given the exact same economic landscape? Having to bribe people with XP Home on netbooks at minimal mark-up, with zero chance of up-selling them any other products is a disastrous business strategy.

We also have the great news that Ubuntu have launched Jaunty today (version 9.04), and I'm happily upgrading from the Beta version to the full version as I type this post. Try doing that while doing an XP to Windows 7 upgrade ;) The beta has been rock solid and this is yet another fine release. All of my machines now boot/suspend quicker and once I have started to implement EXT4 everywhere, I expect to see even greater performance improvements.

We also had Ubuntu launch their updated operating system for the ARM processor, which is all part of the plan for the next generation of netbooks, which will basically completely exclude Microsoft from the market, as they can't compete on price, and they don't even have a version that will run on this processor.

After all these momentous happenings, lets hope that IBM don't start talking about buying a certain player in the MP3 and mobile phone market, anyone for the IBMphone or the IBMpod , with what has happened this week, anything is possible.

Simply no issues with the latest brew of Ubuntu

As you will have noticed I have been using the alpha releases, and the beta releases of Ubuntu 9.04 since they have become available, mainly for testing for our next release of eeebuntu which will be based on this version.

There are a few issues that will require a new kernel from Adam for the netbooks, but on the mainline desktops and laptops I have been testing it on I have found no major issues at all, which is very impressive for the array of different types of equipment I use. Everything from fussy Sony laptops and tiny netbooks to quad core HP desktop power machines.

I simply could not imagine being able to take another operating system and put it on so many different machines without having to hunt down drivers or fiddle with settings. If I had an IBM z390 mainframe, I could even stick it on their ;-)

To give the machines just that little bit of extra hassle I'm also testing the latest browsers from Mozilla - Firefix 3.5 beta4 pre - and Chromium for Linux pre Alpha, and all of these are proving to work fine in this beta environment.

The boot and suspend/resume times are truly impressive, and amongst all the great application version uplifts, I think most people will be impressed by these speed improvements.

Google Android to exploit exploding netbook market

I'm looking forward to what Google offer in the netbook area. I currently use Linux on every machine I use and it works perfectly, but I'm also open to see what others do with Open Source, and that is the real answer here. I have noticed a lot of hostile posts by people who fear this, I can't fathom why. I use Eeebuntu on my netbook, and it works perfectly, as you will know I work on the team, but maybe in the future we could change our base distro, so that is why I find it so interesting.

It is not just Linux , it is it's Open Source underpinnings that will eventually change the current monopoly situation, not just one distro or one implementation. Microsofts biggest problem is there uni hardware architecture approach, Open Source embraces all architectures, and that is what will change the Status Quo. In large part this is one of the great benefits we are derive from Debians efforts.

I have looked at getting a new Google phone as I like the interface, but I'm waiting to see what other handsets it's going to launched on first, choice is a good thing.

Ubuntu 9.04 Alpha 5 - netbook friendly

As you will be aware I work on the eeebuntu distro which is linked very closely to the Ubuntu distro, as that is what it is built upon.

So part of our work is to look at what is coming down the pipe in their next release to see how we can build on that and make it and even better experience for our users.

Until recently, Ubuntu has not been that friendly out of the iso towards some of the hardware we support, to such an extent we have had to replace the kernel and modify settings etc to make the whole experience more user friendly.

It has been stated that Ubuntu will be making efforts to make the next release more netbook friendly and on first impressions of this release they have certain made steps forward.

I am testing it on an Eeepc 1000, with 2GB of RAM and using a Kingston 2GB USB pen drive to run it from. The performance from the USB drive is very acceptable, and the hardware detection of the important netbook components was perfect. I'm posting this from that environment, so it is proof that the wifi card has been detected. I had problems with the previous version with 1000's mouse pad and two finger scrolling, both of these haave been fixed.

They have also disabled the CTRL-ALT backspace key combination to stop neew users reseting their X sessions by mistake, a good move in my opinion. They have also implemented the new notification system, which looks very impressive ,and hopefully this can be built upon for other uses. The new kernel 2.6.28, has obviously been compiled with many of the netbook requirements built in, so this makes testing it far easier.

I would definitely recommend installing it onto a USB drive and taking it for a spin to see what you think. The more eyes looking at the early builds, the more bugs can be found , and the better the final release will be.

Jaunty 9.04 Alpha

Microsoft's malaise

Unless you have just returned from Mars you will have heard about the massive drop in revenue for the once omnipotent software manufacturer, with the inevitable sacking of 5,000 staff and 15% of it's temporary/contract staff, my heart goes out to those guys.

I have be discussing this with friends for a long while, and this is not remotely surprising to me, just the length of time it has taken for the adjustment. I will caveat everything else I discuss here with the facts that in the last quarter, Microsoft still made 3 billion, so it is not even vaguely likely to be going bust any time soon, but the rate of descent is going to accelerate.

However, it has become apparent for several years that they have stopped innovating and are constantly late to the party with every product. Vista, was five years late, and what a mess, it couldn't have been more out of tune with the hardware paradigm shift that was taking place in 2008.People wanted greener, smaller, compact machines, that did just enough web stuff to make them useful, with excellent battery life. What were the people at Redmond doing to have missed an entire market that last year should millions of units, not very much obviously.

Cloud computing has been around for a while, and to be fair MS had a simply offering in the early days, namely Hotmail, but they just didn't develop it or move it forward at all in any meaningful way, so along comes Google and steals all their clothes. Again they are now trying to play catchup again. Where are all the bolt on apps and services that you now get with Google?

Internet Explorer, through it's monopoly installation on every machine sold, held a 95% market share once, that is now down to under 70% and falling rapidly as Mozilla,Opera,Safari and Google Chrome all take large chunks out of the pie. IE7 was a bad copy of Firefox, and people have just been moving away in their millions. According to spread firefox, today will see 800,000,000 downloads of the Firefox software.

They have released Office 2007 , without really talking to the customers and again there has been a lot of negative feedback about thee new ribbon look. Customers who use 10% of the functionality of this product have started asking why do I need a new version, what is it offering me for all the time and effort required to change. Many have moved to open office, and are now very happy knowing they will never be forced to upgrade.

Recently we have seen yet another round of nasty worms and viruses hit the base operating system, causing businesses lots of expenses on upgrades, checking their defenses etc etc. No operating system is free of problems, but if you use Microsoft products, the problems are relentless and continuous.

When you role all of these issues up, they do start to show the picture of a very large company who is starting to do things by committee, and all of these symptoms reflect that. As IBM before them, I now fully expect them to still be around but slowly move into the technology background. As many people have invested heavily in their technology, you are not about to throw that out, but they have become less and less relevant as a technology innovator.

The future is with the open source, and as more and more companies shift away from the Microsoft proprietary lock in, and the costs savings that spring from that. The cost savings with open source virtualisation being offered by companies like Amazon and Google show us clearly where and how the shift is happening in the cloud. With Netbooks costing £150 , why would you possibly want to spend £350 on Microsoft office? The desktops will go the same way, with massive energy savings and cost savings on applications. With the current economic problems, businesses will take no FUD while their competitors are making use of those massive cost savings.

The IT landscape is definitely changing and the role that Microsoft are going to play in that will change. The role for open source is increasing on a daily basis in every area, and that snowball is only gaining momentum.

Six months with my Eeepc 1000 and still very happy

Yes, it's been that long since I upgraded my netbook, and I can honestly say there has not been one second of regret. Looking at the prices you can get them for today, it might have been worth waiting until after Christmas, but that is always true of all technology , and you would probably end up getting nothing.

In my previous post on this great little machine , I mentioned that I had upgraded from my original 701 model to get a couple of issues sorted, screen size and keyboard size being the main ones. These have proved to be successfully cured and are now a none issue on this netbook. One major added bonus is the increase in battery life , which really does deliver 5.5hrs after every charge.

The operating system that came pre-installed worked effectively enough , Xandros, and had all the applications one could possibly want in a netbook style computer. It would make sense for most people who just want a netbook to get some work done effectively and without much fuss to leave it at that.I however have now switched all my machines over the last twelve months to using Debian derived Ubuntu Linux, and I really wanted to install this on my 1000.

After much searching of the web and playing with various versions, I have now become formally involved with Eeebuntu Linux for the eeepc's and I have to say it really makes this little PC shine. I think one of the unsung heroes of the efforts to successfully using Ubuntu on this platform is Adam, who has put in a considerable amount of effort to make sure as much as possible works out of the iso.

To be fair , the main Ubuntu project has also made our lives over at Eeebuntu HQ much easier with the introduction of the USB key installer with the latest release of Ubuntu, 8.10. This utility makes trying out as many distro's as you like on the Eeepc as simple as possible. I would certainly recommend people to test drive the new environment from a USB stick before installing to make sure they like it.

Have I found any problems with this netbook? Well not with the unit itself, but with the fact that the very latest netbooks now have 3G capabilities built in, rather than having to use a USB modem. The 1000 works perfectly with them, but it does make it so much tidier to have the SIM card internal to the device, but thats being really picky. Apart from that, I can't think there is much I would change. The black case can show your figure marks from time to time, but nothing a cloth can't rectify in moments and I'm really straining here to make that point.

So in conclusion, I'm very glad I bought this unit, use it regularly and will continue to do so until someone comes up with a netbook that has everything this one does , plus some features that make me take notice. That hasn't happened yet, and I suspect it will be a complete technology refresh from the underlying components, like a new more efficient Intel processor that will cause this to happen. It could be a touch screen, although I'm not convinced that would be that useful on these machines, but I would be prepared to take a look.

Happy New Year Tux

I read a blog by a long time Linux supporter , Stephen J Vaughan, and he made a statement that in his opinion the year of the Linux desktop had already come and gone. Well I have been mulling over this thought for a few days and I have to say I agree with him.

I'm currently posting this from my Eeepc running Eeebuntu Linux, and I haven't used anything on my desktop/laptop computer since 1998 that wasn't a version of one kind of Linux or another. As I work in the IT industry and have to communicate with other people who use Microsoft, it is obvious that it is perfectly possible for them to co-exist, as I'm doing it on a daily basis.

I'm also a big user of virtual environments, and I have an XP virtual machine on my works desktop, but I honestly haven't powered that up in long time. I tend to use the virtualisation software, KVM at the moment, for testing new operating systems, like Opensolaris etc.

Yes I do agree with you Stephen,the perennial question no longer needs to be asked, it is as irrelevant as asking if this is going to be the year of the laptop.

I think a far more interesting question, is when will Microsoft deliver a decent and relevant operating system since the release of XP seven years ago? Linux is delivering today on a whole range of products, including multiple processor types. I can get the same command prompt on everything from an IBM z90 mainframe to my Google phone, seemless. Same Bash, same commands, no new interface to learn and assimilate.

I also use firefox, which is a great broswer, but more importantly it also runs on every operating system I need to use, again no need to learn another application, just because I have to work with Solaris today. Can you say the same about IE. Suddenly their technological silo concept looks very dated and very last century.

I think the ball is firmly in Redmonds court to deliver, the view from planet Tux is looking decidedly rosey.

So my new years question has to be , "When are Microsoft going to deliver anything Interesting".

Eeebuntu - latest version has been released

I work with a team of like minded people to deliver a really good looking and useful version of Ubuntu specifically designed for the Asus Eeepc netbook computer.

Well we have just released a new version for your Eeepc, which comes in three flavours:

1) Standard - which comes with a good base of pre-installed applications.
2) Base - which comes with the bare minimum, so you can add the applications you want
3) NBR - which uses the new Ubuntu mini computer interface

Jump over to our web site Eeebuntu web site and download the iso and have a look.

The easiest way to try it first is to install the iso file onto a USB stick. The easiest way to do that is to use another machine with Ubuntu installed as it now comes with a built in USB key creator application. If you don't have that, then use the unetbootin application.

Have fun , and post your comments etc on our forums.

Why do I use Ubuntu?

I just read this meme from Jono Bacon, and he asks all users of this operating system to say why they use it. I thought that was a decent challenge and one worth taking up.

I have been using Linux for over a decade now, thanks to someone called Paul Branston, who I worked with at Freeserve in Leeds. Paul had been using Unix/Linux since birth I think, and a person whose gravitas when he spoke about Operating Systems was definitely important to take notice of. I was working at Freeserve mainly on Firewalls and networking but also did work on the Microsoft clusters they used, really buggy and unreliable things, but thats another tale.

I used Windows as a desktop system, simple because like most other techies it came on the PC I was given. I experienced many problems with it, and it kept crashing , but I hadn't been inclined to look for anything to replace it. Paul recommend I give Linux a go on my laptop and see how it got on. Well it was a Toshiba laptop with Red Hat 5.0, and getting it installed was like wrestling with a snake. Laptop hardware then was not the same as todays.

I have used Sun OS for years, and had learned the command line in University, so I roled up my sleeves and kept at it. I eventually got it all working, even the built in modem, and just stuck with Red Hat , and after Redhat changed, just moved onto Fedora Linux. They offer a great Linux distro, but Fedora does have some drawbacks for new users, mostly media support. So when I had an issue upgrading from Fedora 8 to Fedora 9 I thought I would give Ubuntu a try.

Well I have to say I'm glad I did, as moving to Ubuntu is worth the effort just for the package manager. It is a well rounded Linux distro that currently does everything you need to get up and running quickly and efficiently. I have installed it onto every machine I own, and every friends and family machine that I look after and it has been extremely reliable. I do use an Ubuntu derivative ,Linux Mint , where I feel the user doesn't want to do any work after installing.I have bought several machines from Dell with Ubuntu pre-installed and they have been extremely reliable and useful.

Today I work on an Ubuntu distro, Eeebuntu, release for the Asus Eeepc netbooks, so I've now installed it there as well. It works extremely well on these small footprint machines.

As I sit and type this post today, I think that for an all round desktop Operating System , this sets the bench mark. I still keep an eye on what the others are doing, and Fedora 10 has received good reviews, but I don't feel the need to move back at the moment. I have installed it in a virtual image, and that is were it will stay for now.

So yes I'm glad I moved and I would recommend it to anyone wanting to give Linux a try.

Ubuntu

When is a netbook not a netbook?

Well the rumoured new Dell 12" netbook appears to be on it's way to the UK with a nice new shiny 12" screen and an extremely attractive price. It has everything that the Asus 1000 does, but the CPU speed does look a little odd, but that could well be how the price is being kept down. It's hard to see if this model won't have the function keys like it's smaller brother, but counting the rows of keys on the photo, it would appear not to. The size is obviously increased to house the new screen , and this then raises my question, what are the properties that really define this new genre.

What if Apple launched a 17" version, with the same general internals, a minor tweak here and there, it would appear that it is not the screen size, but the components inside that are defining the standard. Low power usage, battery efficient, enough horsepower to write your blog, this is being done on my 1000, and surf the web, but not enough to play very heavy games , compile new programs or act as a music studio.

It is clearly not the size of the unit that is defining what and where these great little machines will be put to use, but the solid state disk drives and the Intel Atom processors. This is great news for people who have been sitting on the fence waiting to see where this market moves, as I fully suspect we have not seen anywhere near the end of the morphing that can and will occur.

Another positive affect of all these new releases is that the original units prices are only heading in one direction, which makes them more affordable for everyone, and gives Linux even greater exposure. It also raises a nasty spectre for microsoft, as who is going to want pay them £300 for office, when the entire machine only costs £100, their pricing model just doesn't work in this sector.

It also gives Linux one of the best platforms it has ever had, as every netbook sold worldwide now supports Linux guaranteed, no worrying about drivers, they will all just work. This has worked really well for MAC's, and will work just as well for Linux.

The Link to the Tesco Site

Lenovo annoucement is hard to read

Having just read several articles on the fact that Lenovo are changing their strategy towards Linux , the reasons given just don't make any sense to me. The overall argument seems to be that the cost of supporting microsoft on their platforms has been an extremely heavy burden to bare, and they didn't want to duplicate that with another new system. Surely the argument to that is to stop supporting microsoft, and push those support costs back to where they belong, unless there are yet more illegal activities and arm twisting going on than normal. The other glaring hole in this argument is that with Linux you can push the support towards to the community, who will be more than happy to help, or more likely have already fixed any issues that a new user would experience. This appears to me to be very muddled thinking and not much of a strategy at all.

They have though simultaneously announced extra support for Linux across a range of products that will be available to large organisations, plus the launch of their new netbook. This netbook is to go head-to-head with the other Intel Atom suppliers in this ever expanding market, but they are only offering it to certain markets. This is again yet more muddled thinking, from them. Why would you possibly not want to sell units in Europe and North America, surely business is business? With Asus already telling us that they are on course for their 5 million units shipped by the end of the year, and Acer saying their sales are better than expected, it would appear they have got this wrong yet again.

I think the one thing that I can take from this information is that their Linux strategy is in tatters, and they are thrashing around to find a real vision for the future. There are many other companies that have a much better Linux strategy, and they would be the companies that I will be dealing with in the future.

This probably explains why I have never bought anything from this company, and probably never will.

Disappointing launch of new Dell netbook

Like many others with an interest in the mini laptop market, I have followed the rumours and gossip around the new Dell inspiron mini 9 with a watchful eye. So last week is was announced and I nipped over to the Dell web site to order one with Ubuntu pre-installed. I know I have an Eeepc 1000 which I love and am using now to enter this blog. However, I wanted to have a look at this new Dell, and if the rumours were true, then it would only cost me 200 UK pounds.

Well what a disappointment was waiting for me at the Dell site. The only units that were for sale had windows XP home, which is next to useless, even if you love windows. The price was also a real shocker in to the bargain, they wanted 299 UK pounds for this unit, which is only 60 pounds cheaper than my Eeepc. That is a lot of money for a machine that offers nothing over the Asus unit, has a smaller screen, no function keys, a much smaller internal solid state harddisk (16GB as compared to 40GB), and no decent productivity software pre-installed.

I suppose they would argue that they are selling these in competition to the Asus 901, which has a similar specification , but then I found that the argument for the 901 didn't stack up against the 1000 unit either.

I like Dell machines, and bought one of the XPS1330n with Ubuntu as soon as they were released. However I have always believed you should tell it like it is, and I think they have really dropped an opportunity here, and could pay for it. Time as always will be the judge of that one.

If you are looking to get yourself one of these little netbooks definitely do yourself a favour and check out the Asus 1000 if you want the best size screen in the class or the Acer Aspire one if you decide on a 9" screen version. The former offers you a much larger machine for you money and the later offers you much better value for money with the same specifications.