In Thursday morning's Wall Street Journal, Walt Mossberg did a review of the Asus Eee PC. The article, Asus Offers Travelers Small, Mobile Eee PC, but It’s Too Cramped, can be found in his column archive (a Wordpress site). I had been waiting for someone of his stature do a review on this product, but I was a little disappointed to see yet another review of a non-Apple device (this one is Linux based) be so negative.
A few weeks ago, I seriously thought about buying either Apple's latest MacBook or a Windows laptop where I could dual boot between the laptops native operating systems and Linux. In the end, I chose to install Linux on a three year old laptop. This old laptop isn't just any laptop but one of the first sub-$1000 laptops that hit the United States market. The laptop is the Averatec 3220 and over time I've found it just too sluggish for running Windows XP.
This old Averatec 3220 had a lot of negatives going its way for installing Linux. The laptop is from a company that almost no one knows so support was limited. Even Google had a tough time helping me find "best practices" for installing Linux on this particular laptop model. This particular laptop includes an AMD Athlon XP-M 2000+ processor, 512 MB RAM (upgraded from the original 256 MB), a 12.1 inch screen, and both Ethernet and wireless networking capabilities. The laptop could barely be considered "up to date" with regards to hardware, although its exterior is designed well and doesn't look dated like other laptops of the same age.
Before I discuss my troubles with installing Linux on this laptop, let me first talk about the positives. During the past two weeks, using Linux on this laptop has been pure joy.
Rich Hoeg, eContent, purchased himself the Nokia N800. The N800 is a linux based handheld Internet tablet with functions similar to those of Apple's iTouch. I'm not sure either device is for me, but I've been in a little bit of an anti-Apple and anti-Windows funk lately...that I felt it worth mentioning here. Rich Hoeg has this to say about the N800:
I've created a short screencast
which demonstrates many of the features found upon the Nokia N800. However, here are a few of the reasons I chose the Nokia over the iPod Touch:
The latest review I've read on the KDE desktop is from Ars Technica, A first look at KDE 4.0 release candidate 2. While the author notes that a lot of improvements still need to be made to KDE 4.0, overall it should be an impressive desktop. I'm contemplating that my next laptop will be fully Linux and hoping KDE 4.0 will bring enough Wow to impress others on why I didn't choose to go the Windows or Mac route.
As a teenager in the 1980's, I mowed lawns for three reasons. I mowed lawns to save money for college. I mowed lawns for spending money on the weekends. Finally, I mowed lawns to buy the Commodore Vic-20 and eventually I purchased the Commodore 64. I was neither envious of the school's Apple II's nor my neighbor's TI-99/4A. I had a Commodore 64 and I was cool even before geeks were cool.
Last week, I mentioned that Mozilla is planning to give the Firefox browser a makeover. Alex Faaborg had mentioned that they plan to integrate the look of Firefox with Microsoft's Windows Vista and Apple's Mac OS X. The problem was Alex had failed to mention anything about the Linux operating system. Linux users, of course, then replied by comment that they were unhappy that there was no mention of Linux in the post.
"The Internet wasn't designed for people to watch television, I know because I designed it."
- Larry Roberts, ARPANet and Telnet founder, quoted in "Its Creators Call Internet Outdated, Offer Remedies", Wall Street Journal, Oct 2, 2007
Interesting observation by Karl Rove as well as good commentary by Charles Cooper.
In an illuminating interview published in the June 4 issue of The New Yorker, White House political aide Karl Rove suggested that a nexus exists between the spread of technology and a centrist-conservative outlook on the world."There are two or three societal trends that are driving us in an increasingly deep center-right posture," Rove told the magazine. "One of them is the power of the computer chip. Do you know how many people's principal source of income is eBay? Seven hundred thousand."
Those that have followed my writings (even from the WebCMSForum days) know I've spent about the past year or two dealing with an aging PC. Even the wife, who doesn't always appreciate the geek part of her husband, says it is time for a computer upgrade. When she says it's time, you know the deadline is near to order up a new computer.
For the past several years I've configured my home PCs with a dual-boot of Windows/Linux. While there are some things I don't like about Apple's propriety hardware for it's OS, the need for something different has me considering purchasing a Mac. However, as I posted at the Open Source Community, I've started to wonder if over time the desktops for Linux and the Mac won't be that much different from one another.
KDE 4.0: Why I likely won't get a Mac -Desktop Linux has an article and shapshots out on the first alpha version of KDE 4.0. The article is titled, KDE 4.0 alpha arrives!.
Features in this alpha version of KDE include:
- A new visual appearance through Oxygen (think Aqua)
I usually spend my weekends writing a few drafts for articles that I'm going to post for CMS Report. The idea is that I'm not competing with the hectic pace I usually find myself in during the weekdays. Well, I found myself distracted from the usual writing endeavor for two reasons: 1) Microsoft's Virtual PC 2007 and 2) the snow finally melting leaving a nice warm weekend to be outside. Needless to say, not much time was spent with the computer. However, let's talk about Microsoft and something they finally did right.
A focus lately has been on the fact that you can run Windows inside of an Apple Mac through virtualization. What the commercials don't talk about is that you can also run the same type of software, such as Parallels, to also run the Linux OS inside your Mac. Since Microsoft Windows and Linux are the primary operating systems I use at work, the ability to run the two operating systems together is of interest to me. In fact that interest is so great that for the first time in a decade I've been considering to buy a Mac at home.
During the past five years I've been dual-booting between Windows and Linux on my PCs both at home and work. However, there are inconveniences with dual-booting due to the the constant need to reboot your machine to get to the other operating system. This better method is virtualization and something Apple has been promoting the past year or so to lure in Windows users to their computers. Now Microsoft's free Virtual PC has arrived and I think it is about to change my world.