Not too long ago, I was commenting on the fact that MSI has had a lot more netbooks returned with Linux installed, than Windows. What is interesting is that there is a recent report that Asus has found no skew in the number of returns in either way. Very interesting indeed - so what does this say?

Having used the pre-installed Linux on an MSI Wind, I can understand why people might want Windows instead. I don’t like using Suse. But with the EeePC, I would feel the other way round, happily chipping away on its modified Xandros OS. I wonder if the reason for Linux returns on the MSI Wind, is not because they were expecting Windows and it fell short - but that they were expecting the same Linux OS that they have seen on the EeePC? If you ask a lot of consumers what Linux is - they will describe the EeePC operating system, not the fully fledged systems like Ubuntu or Suse.

When shopping around for computers, Windows = Windows && Linux != Linux. As Stephen Fry has made a point of mentioning recently, Linux is merely the kernel. GNU/Linux comes in so many varieties and configurations that it is confusing the consumer. They consider Linux in the same way as they consider Windows and expect to buy any machine with Linux on and get the same experience on all of them, as you can with Windows. Linux has been “tick boxed”, just like Bluetooth support on a mobile phone, and manufacturers are sticking any old distribution on because they don’t know the difference. They think that Linux = Linux. They are wrong! The EeePC OS is one of the reasons I still recommend it over other devices, because it’s exactly what a netbook needs.

The diversity in Linux distributions is as much its strength as its weakness. In many respects this is why an Ubuntu monopoly would be a good thing (cue Fedora fanboy hate mail…) - they have the marketing and the consumer angle after all. Let the general public consider Ubuntu to be the only Linux, as it is after all, a pretty good representation, and then let anyone who wants to know more, discover the rest of the distributions available by themselves…

I found myself in a rather swanky hotel the other day being shown the latest in Eye Wear from Vuzix. At a consumer level, Vuzix make wearable displays - a pair of goggles, if you will, that through the use of tiny OLED displays can give you the equivalent of watching a 62″ TV, in your pocket.

I’ve got the budget model in at the moment for review, and so far I’ve been pretty impressed. I am although, a little undecided if I consider it a gimmick, or actually something I would use on a day to day basis. The top-end model with higher resolution and accelerometer ready to work with WoW certainly impressed me more, but I’ll have to take a look at those later.

One of the guys at the meeting, Ken Blakeslee, who was in fact an investor in the technology rather than internal to the company, made some interesting points when it came to portable projectors, which are the obvious comparison to such products. Let’s assume, and I don’t think I’m far off here, that portable projectors become small enough that you can integrate one into a mobile phone. Or, if they were just small and cheap enough to carry around alongside it. When would you use it? To get a decent size, it’s got to be 2 to 3 feet away from a surface. So that’s hardly ideal when you’re sitting on a train, with the back of another chair inches away from you. You could mount it on your shoulder, but you’d need some sort of autofocus to take care of movement. Obviously in this scenario, a pair of glasses that you could pull out of your pocket would be perfect. and immersive.

David Lock, Director of European Operations pulled out a suitcase which he wasn’t intending on doing, to give us a glimpse of what was to come. These units looked identical to a pair of rather stylish sunglasses, with wireless transmission and high resolution OLED displays. These were designed with sight augmentation in mind rather than just video playback. He envisioned overlays that gave you extra information as you were walking along, even perhaps a virtual avatar for people you are passing. Any Sci-Fi fans, or in fact anyone with a decent imagination can imagine how awesome something like this would be.

But a pair of glasses are quite personal - I’ve already tried handing my sample to other people and they first have to spend a few minutes adjusting the focus to suit their eyes - so it’s hardly ideal for mass sharing. This is where Ken felt a portable projector would come in handy. Want to show off a hilarious YouTube clip? You turn to the nearest wall/white t-shirt and blast away to your entire group of friends. It’s a very different market.

At £129.99 for entry level glasses and around £300 for a portable projector, these are both now in the price brackets that I expect to see them on Christmas gift lists this year. I feel Ken is probably right - they aren’t fighting for the same market space at all and they both have the potential to be very popular in the next few years.

Creative has been promising drivers for quite some time now, and I’ve got an X-Fi still sitting in its box after discovering its lack of support in Linux. My rather expensive Shure SM7A setup feels rather pointless when using on board sound for recording in Audacity. So after years of wait and appalling closed-source binaries released, Creative has decided to release the code to the Open Source community, which can only mean good news for the rest of us.

There is enough of a community out there, that if you simply document your product and release the specifications - the drivers will get written. Of course, they don’t have to start from scratch either, as they can use other drivers as a basis and assimilate the X-Fi into the collective. This is seen a lot with network drivers. Frankly, developing a closed source driver was a big waste of resources when they could have simply chucked some code and documentation together and then let the OS community fill in the gaps.

One of the issues here, is that what makes Creative’s products unique is not just the hardware, but the software itself. You buy the card for both. I’m fairly sure I remember reading about people buying the cheaper Creative cards and using hacked drivers to enable the extra functions - so they are obviously trying to protect such things by keeping their drivers closed source. Are we now going to see Creative produced software technology being applicable to on-board sound devices, perhaps off-loaded to the CPU instead of the dedicated sound chip (that’s what all those cores are for - right?).

The market for sound cards has become very niche over the last few years - with most people quite happy to use on board sound instead. If Creative had to survive by sound card sales alone, they would been long gone. Does this release show a sign of giving up, perhaps a feeble gesture disguised as an embrace of the community? A quick Google turns up that “Creative Labs will be dismissing the majority of its employees across Europe”. Now join the dots and we see this is a great way of cutting budget. Still, at very least - this will make for an excellent case study that may well encourage other manufacturers to open up their drivers too. I’ll let the chaps at Phoronix fiddle a little first before I pull out my card - but it should be interesting.

Google has found itself in the news a little with mention of several Android bugs found - and patched I might add. The root access issue is frankly alarming that something so major could get through, but then we are reminded that the passcode on the iPhone does sweet FA. Anyone who codes will tell you how easily bugs happen, even in the simplest of systems - so let’s not start judging just yet. With today’s fast product turn around, it’s no wonder more are slipping through the net.

I’ve still been too busy to try Ubuntu 8.10 in any detail - partly because I’m running Mint Linux, which hasn’t been upgraded from 8.04 yet. It’s very tempting to switch back, but this machine is running so nicely! Anyone who is using Ubuntu might find these 50 top tips quite useful. I’m certainly going to have to try the “profile” Kernel option - it’s news to me!

Unlike most normal people - I spent my Saturday at the Linux Live Expo, held at London’s Olympia. Generally speaking - I was a little disappointed with the event, and if wasn’t for meeting up with members from the Kent Linux User Group, I would have gone home disappointed. There was a single hall, which was also shared with the Mac Expo, with a very small portion devoted to Linux. Most of the stalls had nothing on show and people there weren’t overly enthused about the companies they were there to represent. Maybe it’s because it was Saturday - the last day of the show.

Transtec had a pretty good booth and I was suitably impressed by their Mac-Mini competitor. Almost completely silent, Core 2 Duo and supporting multiple monitors by use of a break out cable. Would certainly fit the bill in my office.

Stalls aside - there were also some talks going on at the show. I happened to see two enthusiastic talks by Canoncial staff and caught the tail end of someone from IBM. Unfortunately, even these were aimed at people who had never heard of Linux - yet I knew full well that 90% of the audience already use Linux. Preaching to the converted? Quite possibly. A Linux expo isn’t exactly something you find yourself wondering into wondering what it is all about. Anyone from the Mac Expo? Well nothing that’s free can be good, can it?

The two chaps from Canonical - Christopher Kenyon and Malcom Yates had obvious enthusiasm for Ubuntu and I certainly felt we shared a lot of common attitudes, which is one of the reasons I moved from Fedora to Ubuntu - impressive forward thinking attitude. Both chaps were excited about the Netbook Remix of Ubuntu, and the MID (Mobile Internet Device) Remix too. Until I see boot-up times that compare with the OS on the EeePC, I won’t be switching anytime soon, but they are certainly thinking outside the box. My EeePC is a glorified type writer - all I ever really do is write articles. I’m more likely to browse the web on my phone. I still have these high capacity SD cards kicking around in my office, so I will give the NBR a go at some point soon.

From what I can gather, although 8.10 is going to have a whole host of improvements - the real killer improvement, in my eyes, is that of better 3G dongle support. One of the problems at the moment is that a lot of dongles are split-mode USB devices. When you first plug them in, they are a flash memory device. In Windows, you would then install the drivers and it would change the mode of the USB device from flash to a modem. In Linux, you currently need to do some manual mode switching. I’m looking forward to seeing how this has been dealt with. Mobile broadband is a huge growth area right now, and lack of Linux support is a big killer in the netbook arena.

Part of the IBM talk, which if I remember rightly was to do with Ubuntu use at IBM, the chap said “Nobody at IBM is using Vista”. I obviously felt this was both important and quote-worthy. A quick Google however and it appears to be old news that has simply slipped me by. But if a company like IBM can survive without Vista, that says a lot. Christopher Kenton did mention how in many countries, specifically Brazil, there had been a huge uptake of Open Source inside schools and finds it frustrating that there is so little interest in the UK - an opinion I share. Universities aren’t that much better either - where I was forced to code in .NET because none of the lecturers could mark PHP. No wonder I left.

When I was at school, my Dad was the IT teacher and I remember the frustration on his face when told he was not allowed to build his own machines for the IT department and they could only be purchased from a select few manufacturers - RM being one of them, which were charging insane rates for sub-standard machines. The sheer percentage of schools budgets that are being raped for IT use is sickening and something that really needs to be addressed.

Some of you may have noticed in the news this week, that Google has released the Android source code to the public. Already it has been ported to a few devices and that’s within only a matter of days. The general consensus from anyone (including myself) who has had any time with the G1 was that the hardware was nothing special and it was the operating system was what was most interesting.

I see a lot of mobile phones and on the surface some of them look great, and on a tick list, they even fit the bill nicely. What they lack in is the overall software experience - partly due to budget. There is only so much time you can spend getting the software right. Google Android would allow manufacturers to concentrate on getting the hardware right, then just put Android on and keep prices low. There are obvious monopolistic issues with this approach - but when something is open source, I question if it is a monopoly at all. There is also the issue that this could stifle innovation, but once again, you are free to modify the code in any way you like, or write your own extensions. I don’t think there is anything that suggests that extensions have to be released as open source - so there is still room for manufacturers to innovate and differentiate without fear of giving the competition a helping hand. Exciting times in the mobile industry.

I often see great technology and the conclusion I come to is that it will only be good if everyone is using it. In many respects, Monopolies really do help and who could argue against Open Source being a monopoly? The operating system is starting to become less and less important and at some point we’ll have to just settle on a standard and move on to the next issue.

This week has also seen the release of Google Gadgets for Linux. Still no Chrome for Linux (sigh) but this is still an important release as it marks complete cross platform compatibility. For those that haven’t seen Google Gadgets, it’s very similar to the Vista dock, with a host of pretty handy plugins such as Google Calendar and an RSS reader.

Part of me loves Flash and part of me hates it. I’ve seen some great examples of its application, such as the Sarah Palin website but prior to YouTube, 99% of its use was unnecessary and annoying. Let’s not forget from an SEO point of view that Google only recently started indexing flash files. Until recently, I even had a blanket rule against Javascript too, with a server side only approach. But this is not the reason I bring up Flash…

Flash 10 was launched today and unlike say, Google Chrome, it was released for Windows, Linux and Mac simultaneously. This is quite a big thing for the Linux community as it puts Linux in the same category as the big two in terms of importance. Love it or hate it, Flash is a necessity nowadays if you want to take advantage of the now media rich Internet, so to see it available on all platforms is a great thing one of many reasons why I hope Silverlight will be laughed off the stage.

I’ve had terrible trouble with Flash on Ubuntu Hardy. It regularly decides to just stop working and leaves me with a grey box - I can’t even find a single cause for why this happens. The only solution is to close FireFox and reload. Not a problem you say - it stores all your open tabs! But not if you have more than one FireFox window open. I often have two or three windows open with multiple tabs in each. So I’m forced to either amalgamate all the tabs onto one window, or simply close down and start again. Let’s hope that Flash 10 solves this issue - for my sanity at least.

Ubuntu Intrepid will be released later this month, which I know a lot of people are excited about. I am going to be attending the London launch on the 30th. This is open to all - so anyone else who is excited should come along for the festivities.

While doing my normal 2 hours worth of news reading this morning (I’m a Journalist - I can get away with it…), I found a few interesting pieces - one of which struck a chord because I had been talking about the issue recently. Gizmodo has a piece suggesting the return rate of MSI Netbooks is 4x greater that of XP equivalents. To quite the article, which in turn quotes “Laptop”:

We have done a lot of studies on the return rates and haven’t really talked about it much until now. Our internal research has shown that the return of netbooks is higher than regular notebooks, but the main cause of that is Linux. People would love to pay $299 or $399 but they don’t know what they get until they open the box. They start playing around with Linux and start realizing that it’s not what they are used to. They don’t want to spend time to learn it so they bring it back to the store. The return rate is at least four times higher for Linux netbooks than Windows XP netbooks.

Asus has been making it an incentive to use its Linux OS over Windows, by offering greater storage capacity for less money. Dell on the other hand is doing the exact opposite - and even MSI cripplied its Linux Wind by removing Bluetooth.

In MSI’s particular case, they have used a full blown Suse installation, which even I found a little tricky to get my head around - maybe because I’m used to where things are in Ubuntu/Fedora - but it just didn’t feel intuitive. But what is interesting is if you try and the draw the same parallel with mobile phones (something I’m going to be covering more in the near future) - people aren’t as fussy. They are used to changing phones every year or so and learning a new interface. So why is there this stigma when it comes to changing OS on your computer?

Quite a few Linux distros (the EeePC included) come with a Windows-esque skin. I can see the argument that you want to make things familiar - but I feel in many respects it’s also quite damaging. It lulls people into the idea that things are the same as they are on their Windows machine - when that isn’t the case, it is different. It also doesn’t do Linux’s reputation any good, as it tries to suggest that Linux is nothing more than a free alternative clone of Windows (as this article also tries to suggest) which is far from the truth. I use Ubuntu because I consider it to be a better operating system for my needs, not because it’s free. When people visit my house and see my dual display, flashy compiz setup they say “what is this? - it’s not Mac, it’s not Windows - but I want it!”

Sandisk was nice enough to send down some high capacity SD cards for me, so I can have an experiment with some different Linux distros on my EeePC - to see if anything beats that standard Xandros based setup. Confusingly, there is EeeBuntu, an unofficial project and also Ubuntu EEE which appears to be official. I shall be giving them both a shot as I’ve been wanting to have a play with the Ubuntu Netbook Remix for a while. I imagine the developers will need to give this article a read.

Well, my week could be easily summarised as “hardware hell”. After giving my office a complete overhaul and throwing out 50% of my personal belongings in an effort to down-size and declutter, I decided It was about time I put my new machine together. I ended up with a messy office and three computers in pieces on the floor. Anyone who wants to know the gory details can read about it on my personal blog. Finally, I got the hardware working, but the hard drive I pulled from my old machine had decided it wasn’t compatible with my new machine. So I did a fresh install of Mint Linux on a new hard drive and then copied the /home/spode folder from my old machine to the new one. I installed a few packages that I wanted (VirtualBox, Skype, Putty, Amarok, LastFM) and after a reboot everything was as I had it before. It was a remarkably easy transition, marred only by a few issues getting the Nvidia drivers working. Purging the drivers and reinstalling was the cure to this minor woe.

At the same time, I was reinstalling Vista on an HP laptop that needed recovery. I’ve been making a little more effort recently to play with Vista as I don’t want to lose touch with my audiences - and there were some things I liked and some things I thought were crazy. My initial gripe with Vista having put everything in different places is not as much of an issue as I thought originally, as I just pop up to the search box that appears in the control panel and just type in what I’m looking for - it was very reliable about giving me the bits I needed. I also liked the way it gave me links to where I could download patches and drivers to solve reported issues with my hardware.

So I’ve got this blank install of Vista on this laptop and the wired network, wireless network, sound and video are not supported at all without a driver download. This is where I usually pull a trick out of my sleeve - a USB Ethernet device I have that is natively supported in XP without drivers. This has saved me so much time before - but alas, is not supported in Vista, and never will be (as a Vista report told me later when I eventually got on the web). So I was forced to hunt around the HP website for the right drivers I needed - what I would have killed for Synaptic. After some hefty downloads, I had a flash drive filled with the drivers I needed and I was well on my way. In contrast, on this exact notebook, I boot up an Ubuntu CD and everything (including wireless) is supported out of the box - and people worry about compatibility issues…

I’m sure some of you read my rant (and it was a rant) about the BBC technology coverage, and I had some good feedback - but a few key points stuck with me. Firstly, why didn’t he installed EeeBuntu - the Ubuntu derivative designed for the EeePC? But more importantly, I’d have loved to see him try to install Windows on his EeePC, as I imagine he would have had just as much, if not even more trouble getting things working.

Anyways, there are few things I saw this week that I thought I should link to. Firstly, someone has made a rather comprehensive list of modifications you can make to the Acer Aspire One - the rather nifty £200 EeePC Competitor. I also saw EeePC.net reporting on a 10400mAh replacement battery for the EeePC 7/9 laptop. At an amazing $50 including shipping, I figured I’d give this a go as my 7″ could certainly do with a juice boost (ooh err).

Finally, apparantly the latest alpha of Ubuntu Intrepid Ibex has a bug whereas it kills the NVRAM on certain Intel network cards on certain notebooks. Not the end of the world - but the article suggests that the bug won’t be fixed because it will delay the launch of Ubuntu 8.10 too much. Reading this, I was reminded of the last Ubuntu UK Pod Cast where they were suggesting that not enough people are taking part of the alpha testing and this is why the initial releases end up with bugs still in place.

I can’t help but wonder if a deadline is an awful motive for releasing a new revision of a distribution and against the “just works” philosophy. I certainly felt that Hardy Heron was immature when released - so much so we had a second revision released not too long after. But surely they should be focusing on releasing polished, stable products - rather than releasing in a timely manner? If I wanted something bleeding edge, I’d move back to Fedora. However, as Intrepid is not an LTS release, it can be forgiven - but I’ve certainly learned my lesson this time - I’m not upgrading my install until the problems come out of the wood work. I can always rely on Phoronix to tell us how it is!

With my parents living in Italy, my phone bill is often a little on the scary side when I see it each month. That was until recently, when my parents’ tiny village in the middle of the mountains where they run a bed and breakfast finally got broadband. Using Skype has been great - free phone calls for hours on end and with much higher quality than you get over a phone. A few weeks back I thought I’d give the video aspect of Skype a go, so pulled out a Creative NX Pro webcam and put it in place. I already had Skype open, plugged in this USB camera and didn’t have to do any setup at all - I opened the options panel and it was already selected as the default webcam device. It “just worked”, as Ubuntu would make us believe is the case for everything.

My Dad on the other hand wasn’t so lucky on his Windows XP machine. He had lost the installation CD, so had to hunt around the web to get the right drivers and of course, post-installation was told he should restart his machine. A lot of this contrast is due to one man writing pretty much every webcam driver in the world for Linux. As much as I’d love to leverage on this - installing drivers for something in Linux when it’s not supported out of the box, is a mess that needs working on - usually as it requires compiling stuff yourself, which in todays age, we shouldn’t have to do. But an alarming amount of stuff is supported on Ubuntu without any work from us.

With the high audio quality of Skype and now moving Video to go with it, it completes the illusion well, and I feel closer to my parents than I have in a long time. There’s one thing sending them a picture of my cat, but there’s another thing being able to pick it up and hold it to the camera and watch my face being scratched live, accompanied with my high pitch squeal.

What hasn’t “just worked” is the sound with Skype. I’ve had terrible trouble with Skype either stealing the sound all together (meaning I get no sound when watching flash videos in FireFox), or the other way around. I’m unsure if this is Skype’s fault (I know ALSA support is fairly recent), or the use of Pulse Audio in Hardy Heron (8.04). It’s certainly frustrating! There also seems to be a bug with the sound mixer that it doesn’t properly select my microphone as the current line in. I have to load the console based “alsamixer”, deselect my microphone as the capture and then reselect it. Quite odd.

An interesting read on works with u about another man’s struggle with getting his wife to use Ubuntu. Worth a glance if you’re on your lunch break

What a great way to start my week, but with a rant about a BBC article on Linux. I will be the first to admit that Linux isn’t quite ready for consumer consumption - but it’s certainly very close. If Mr Parkinson wanted to actually give Linux a go, he should have researched a little more - like I don’t know, asking any of the thousands of Linux users out there who would have given him some wonderful advice and probably filled the holes in his article. The first thing they wouldn’t have recommended is to try replacing the stock distribution on an EeePC.

Trying GNU/Linux is made very hard because it is such an organic product - not only are there thousands of distributions, but there are new releases of each every 6 months or so. Trying Windows is easy, you can move from machine to machine and find everything exactly the same, and there are only a finite number of versions available. So when people keep harping on about the EeePC running Linux, they assume that just like Windows, everyone that uses Linux uses what the EeePC uses. “What? So our server admin uses THIS? Hmm - I thought Mac’s were simple.”

As far as I’m concerned - the EeePC doesn’t run Linux. It certainly doesn’t run Xandros as the article suggest. It may have been based on Xandros, but it is not a complete operating system - it is stripped down and designed specifically for the EeePC with its own interface, just like the operating system on your phone is designed for your phone. It is not designed to be expanded, except by the Asus specific update tool. Complaining that you had to open a terminal to do something the device is not designed for is misleading to the public. For the majority of situations now, you do not need to open a terminal in a complete Linux OS.

The article continues, with his biggest complaint that he can’t synchronise with his iPod. Ok - so that much is true, it doesn’t. But this is the fault of Apple, who feel they have to control everything with their DRM and force people to use their music software. Why do you think very few Linux users have an iPod? There is no freedom with your music if you own an Apple music device. That’s why I still buy CDs and rip them myself, so I’m in control. The writer then suggests that we never see iTunes on Linux because Apple don’t follow the same “hippy mentality” of open source. Software does not have to be open source to be available on Linux - it can be a closed binary, just like the nVidia graphics card drivers. Apple just don’t want to. Of all people to understand what it is like to have a small control of the OS market - it’s Apple. And considering the Unix origins of Mac OS, would it really be that hard to port it?

His piece reads like he’s giving Linux a thorough test. If this was his intention, then using the EeePC was a big mistake. However, the fact the WiFi didn’t work in Ubuntu? Very valid and annoying, which is why I still recommend looking up Linux compatibility before making the jump. I guess if this chap had written this anywhere else, I could forgive elements of it. But having pride of place on the BBC website, it is very damaging to Linux’s reputation and misleading to the public. It’s not a review, or look at Linux - it’s a blog of one man’s struggle to make a device (yes, the EeePC is a device) do something it shouldn’t. I’m sure if they had enabled comments on the piece - there would be some angry comments there at the moment. Sigh.