Netbooks

I love netbooks. You can carry them everywhere, have your documents with you all the time and go on-line from almost any place. However they should take better advantage of newer technologies, even at a bit of a higher cost.

For example, why not integrate WiMax and 3G in netbooks as standard. WiFi is ok, and usb 3G works fine, but... intergration and portability together with small form factor and low value should be the netbook goals. How much would this cost? An extra 60-70$US? Instead of a 350$US netbook we would have a 420$US netbook. Not much for what you would get. This would also give an added incentive to Communication companies to provide WiMax and 3G connectivity.

Also... no Windows as default in netbooks please!!! Too heavy and too difficult to navigate using a small keyboard, a tiny mousepad and a tiny screen. Perhaps after Windows 7 is out. And even then, I don't know... unless we can have a cheap 100gb SSD just for the bloated Win32 programs.

Vista... the new Windows Millennium.

Lets face it. Vista was and is a flop. It is a complete and utter failure. It is Windows Millennium once again. Bloated, incoherent and incompatible. Microsoft should just put it in maintenance mode right after SP2 and roll out Windows 7, so older systems can upgrade to a usable OS.

Linux Examined... yeah right!!!

I was reading an article today on the Australian PC World magazine site and came on a phrase that made me wonder how people write articles. This is the phrase: "Given that Red Hat bases its Fedora distribution on OpenSUSE, and that Fedora and OpenSUSE are both distributions with advanced features intended for power users, why would you pick one over the other?"

Ok... I mean, he could have said anything else and get away with it. But... GIVEN? Who told him that?

Anyways. In his comment on ComputerWorld regarding the same article the writer says it was "a misfact introduced during the editing process". My take on this is that people who write on influantial online media should be carefull about getting their facts straight first.

OpenSUSE: Simply the best.

I have been using Linux for my home desktop exclusively now for 2 years. I have always had a version of Linux on my system since the days of 0.92 kernel (remember Slackware in the red multi-cd box?) , but I always felt it was not mature enough until 2 years ago.

My distribution of choice has always been Suse. I have tried several others but as I have discovered they all have minor problems that were show stoppers.

Last week I went out and bought a top of the line PC, my first "high-end" ever. I always stayed a generation or two back, to be on the safe side. This time however I wanted something big, fast and with lots of goodies. So I bought an Intel Core Duo 2 at 45nm running at 3.16Ghz, the fastest CPU by Intel bellow their Extreme series,a fairly good ASUS motherboard with 4gb of Ram (2x2gb) and an NVidia GeForce 8800GT video card.

I had also decided to try a different distribution and see if there has been much improvement, and since the day I bought the new PC, Fedora 9 came out, I downloaded it and tested it.

It booted in the installer, checked the media, I chose a volume setup I liked and I told it to install everything. 20 minutes into the installation it failed and all I could do was stop the installation or report a bug and stop the installation!

Ok... Second try.

This time install only the basic system. Install finished in under 10 minutes and I rebooted. Entered a root password and created a user account and then I got to a black screen and the system stopped responding!

I tried several BIOS settings, since it seemed to be a hardware problem, some twicking of the xorg.conf file to use a failsafe video mode (using the cd to boot to repair mode) but to no avail. It didn't work.

Ok... I remembered I had an Ubuntu 8.04 live CD somewhere. Found it and booted. It worked fine. The installer worked and everything seemed fine.

So it was time to install the NVidia drivers. It seems though that the hardware configuration was too much for Ubuntu. Although the driver installed fine, XServer refused to use it and always used the open source non-accelerated driver. Twicking the gdm didn't work. Also I discovered that some standard runlevel commands like init don't work in Ubuntu.

Finally I decided to use OpenSUSE, which has worked great in the past for me on all my systems. OpenSUSE 10.3 is the latest stable version and it is older than both Ubuntu 8.04 and Fedora 9 so I had little hope it would work. However it worked great. Installed without a hitch. Updated with no problems, recognized all my hardware and finally the NVidia driver installed correctly and 3d acceleration was tested with Quake Wars Enemy Territory .

Don't get me wrong. I have seen Fedora 9 work great, I just have never been able to install it on any of my systems that usually have weird or exotic hardware. Ubuntu? I use it on my media pc, a pc made from a barebone system, that sits under my 32" Samsung TV. However it seems non of the are good enough for my new system.

No I am sure I can make them both work fine with a lot more twicking, but lets be honest. If we want linux on the Desktop, twicking should be about getting more out of the system, not getting it to work!

So... OpenSUSE? Simply the best.

Insulting the ambassador of FYROM

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Pseudomacedonia...

If he wants more he knows where to find me...