Eeepc addons will spark even better Linux supported hardware

While going through my daily technology feeds, I noticed a news item on the new TV adapter that Asus has launched, it's called the ASUS My Cinema-U3100Mini. Now if you look at the operating systems it supports, it includes Debian Linux, which you might know is the basis for a lot of the modern Linux distributions we all use today. These include Xandros, the operating system that comes standard with the Epc , the ever popular K/X/Ubuntu range of operating systems, Mint Linux, and Mepis. All of these are in the top twenty of Distrowatch, which gives a reasonable idea of what people are using.

Now it becomes obvious, even by Asus's conservative projection of expected shipments of Epc's this year, we are looking at a global market of several million customers for these new addon devices with Epc's alone. If you add in all the additonal customers who already use Debian based distro's, which include now the Dell customer base, there is a real market for hard nosed business people to make some serious money, as Asus is displaying on a daily basis.

It also doesn't take a lot to realise that the open nature of Linux development will enable most if not all of these add-on devices to be ported fairly easily to the non-Debian Linux Distributions like Red Hat, Fedora, Suse, PClinuxos etc.

I think that this technical development has several benefits for two groups of people. The business people looking to supply new markets and make sure their products are in at the forefront of a booming new IT sector. You only have to look at the success of the new Ultra mobile laptops from Asus to see what can be achieved. The second group of people who will directly benefit from this are the users of Linux who will now have access to a wider range of add-ons than were previously available.

As I have both an Epc and a Dell XPS m1330 with Ubuntu, I can't wait to get one of these new little devices to watch TV on the move. Those commute train journeys can be so drab on cold winter mornings, so a little light mindless TV can help make them slightly less boring.

Six months with the Asus Eeepc mini laptop

After getting one of these little devils for use on my weekly flights and many train journeys, I did wonder if the novelty of the small laptop might wear off.

Well, I can tell you that the little laptop is working harder today than when I first got it, and I have found many uses for the device that I didn't think about when I originally bought it. The one big use that has become more useful by the week, is taking the Epc to meetings, where it can happily take notes and you can surf the web for info on the spot. I know you can do this with 15" laptops, but they always seem to dominate the table space in front of you at a meeting, and in some subconscious way extend a barrier to other people at the meeting. The diminutive Epc doesn't have this problem, and several members of the team have actually bought them for exactly the same task. It also always offers a talking point when working with people from other teams or companies, which is a great ice breaker. It has also proved really useful for displaying photos downloaded from my cameras SD card, which again was not something I originally bought it for, but now find very useful.

I have played around with the installed Linux software only slightly, basically to remove the simple interface it comes with, and use a more standard KDE desktop. I have tried other Linux distributions on USB keys to see how they might work as a replacement, but have found nothing that works as seamlessly as the pre-installed software yet.

The Epc does everything it said it would do well, and having used the wireless connectivity extensively, and recently helped a friend set up a wireless broadband modem on his Epc, you really can connect in the UK from virtually anywhere.

The only problem I can see on the horizon, is not that this little unit will not keep doing the job it was bought for, but it's new big brother with an updated Intel Atom processor which is just around the corner, will cause a problem on the purchasing front.

You see I have already bought a new Dell m1330n with Ubuntu Linux for more concentrated work, so what the heck do I use the original Epc for?

I'm sure I will find a solution in the house somewhere.

Ubuntu Dell laptops selling like hotcakes

Laptops I have decided are very strange beasts. No sooner do you buy one, than someone else walks into the office with something just that little bit better. This happened the other day when one of my friends breezed into the office with a new IBM thinkpad X61s, an extemely nice, but expensive laptop. He installed Ubuntu Linux onto the laptop, to rid himself of the annoyance that is Vista.

I recently bought a new Asus eeepc, the diminutive laptop that weighs less than two pounds, comes with Xandros Linux pre-installed, and has all the functionality you could want from a device on the move at airports. train stations etc. The one minor problem that I have found using it over the last month, is that when I'm sitting in my lounge checking the football/rugby scores, is that the size of the screen can become a little annoying. Thus my visit to the Dell website to buy one of the much acclaimed new Ubuntu XPS1330n laptops. This has a bigger screen, is a little heavier but will be a very good comprimise between the eeepc and a larger 15" screen laptop.

I know Asus are bringing out a new unit with a larger screen in the autumn, but that doesn't help me today. So I thought I would look at the new Dell XPS1330n which comes with Ubuntu Linux pre-installed on their UK website. The unit was nowhere to be seen on the site.

I picked up the phone to check that the unit was still for sale and I could order one. The answer was quiet surprising. "Yes you can order one today via the phone sir , as we have a batch that is available to the phone sales team, the reason it is not on the website at the moment is due to the extreme demand for the Linux build of the laptop. Dell will often take a machine off the site when demand can't be met"

Well, I have just had notification that the unit is on its way and will be delivered tomorrow, so we will see if these little laptops are as hot as the sales teams tell me they are. You could argue that this was all a sales pitch to get me to buy one, but what advantage is this to Dell, as I was going to buy one anyway from the website, so I'm inclined to think it was genuine. I was also able to get it with a higher specification, and £100 off a similar unit with windows installed, I checked. So a good transaction so far.

I have already bought one of the older model Dell laptops with Ubuntu on it for my daughter, and that has been a resounding success. No midnight support calls, or wasting my life patching anti-virus software. The unit does what it says on the can, it offers everything a University student needs, without all the rubbish that can drag a machine to a standstill. I can heartily recommend them.

To have a look for yourself visit the Dell website and search on Ubuntu.

Suns Opensolaris who is it for, and does anyone care?

I recently attended a London Opensolaris user group meeting(LOSUG) , at Suns London briefing centre. The meeting was to show the latest release of Opensolaris, and a presentation of the "great" new features for the desktop that this operating system would bring . The presentation was given by Jim Hughes, who is CTO of the Solaris Operating System, and someone who certainly knows Solaris.

I joined this meeting with high expectations, as a long time Unix user, almost exclusively Linux for the last decade, but I have used Sun products for many years and have a great deal of respect for their OS. I have always found that their package and patch management processes to be arcane, but reliable.

I was not to be disappointed, as Ian Murdochs Debian hand could be clearly seen on the revamped package manager, which is a direct copy of the Debian Linux package manager, not a great surprise as Ian had been put in charge of the "Indiana" project. He must have rolled on the floor laughing when he first saw their original setup. Their strategy on software repositories however is muddled and not clear, some being owned and run by Sun, others by the community. This will lead to accusations of not truly being Open at all.

That is just the problem I have with this project, it is playing catchup with Linux/BSD from the early part of this millennium, and is not offering anything new, with the notable exception of ZFS, which Jim did bang on about.

The audience burst into a round of applause when I pointed out that the default shell was now Bash, which is very worrying, and I became aware that a lot of the hardcore Solaris guys in that room are living in another era, which could explain the lack of forward thinking that is going into this product.

Gnome was version 2.18, and there was nothing of any particular note other than ZFS, as impressive a technology as that is. Jim seemed to have a real hatred of Linux, and spent too much time saying how Opensolaris would be just what everyone wanted. I took from this that he was really worried that Sun were doing too little too late, and they were extremely worried that Linux had already eaten the breakfast and lunch of the desktop Unix market, and were now after their evening meal. I think Sun have every reason to be worried as I believe this has already happened, just look at the success of the UMPC's like the ASUS eeepc and the Everex cloudbooketc. You can also now buy pre-installed Linux from all of the tier 1 hardware suppliers with HP's announce at Brainshare last week.

We did see a demo of Opensolaris being installed on an Apple Macbook pro, which worked well, as this to be fair is an early version of the OS. This again though, is nothing earth shattering, as I can install many versions of Linux on a Mac if I so choose, and waste vast sums of money on some over priced technology.

So in answer to my own question, I think the target market will be people who work with Solaris on a regular basis and can't face changing to anything new, not an enormous market. As the project stands, I can't say that what is currently on offer would be useful to me over Fedora Linux which I use on a daily basis. The hardware and software support is just not there, and is unlikely to be there unless a very large community develops around the project.

I also suspect that most if not all Linux users will feel the same, and therefore will not care what Sun are doing. I can see this as becoming just another Sun failure to deliver a decent desktop OS, and they know deep down they should have bought Apple when they could, and then they wouldn't have had to bother.

The likely outcome now is that the MP3 behemoth is likely to buy them to add some serious backend server technology to their product range, we shall see.