As installations go, it was relatively painless – certainly better than reinstalling Windows. Don’t get me wrong, Dell is better than most in this respect as they gave us OEM install discs for Windows Vista, bundled software and the drivers.  As strait forward as this is with Dell’s resource CD (it mostly tells you what you need), it doesn’t know any more than what model you own. This is problematic with the wireless card for example as there are two revision states and the drivers are incompatible with each other – one crashes Windows.

Ubuntu 10.04 runs fine with one exception, its Broadcom wireless card – I found that enabling the restricted driver on installation caused a crash and that I had to remove linux-backports-modules-wireless-lucid-* before I could re-enable it on the installed system. I must confess, I didn’t bother to snag a bug report as it was probably me being impatient and trying to do too much at once.

Lisa knows her way around the Gnome desktop, we have used it on several machines and several distributions (she used to prefer KDE in it’s 1.x incarnations). Predominantly, this laptop is used online – we use Firefox on Windows so there’s no issues there.

The next day I realised I had made the cardinal error of switching someone to OSS – I hadn’t really considered her needs. I forgot about that shiny new piece of Apple hardware that she carries everywhere – an iPhone. I don’t have an iPhone and have never really taken more than a passing interest in the latest Apple hardware so I had no idea that you needed to use iTunes to do everything – including syncing. I checked the net and found that the general consensus was not to bother with it in Linux. I saw several howtos , all discussing changing iPhone firmware. With a year left on the contract, the thought of my wife’s reaction, Apple’s somewhat draconian lock-in and the potential to brick her phone I preferred not to take that course.

Even if I did, I think she might be reluctant to use it. Apple seem to achieved marketing zenith – when people refer to a brand name rather than what it is (Playstation, iPod, Coke, etc.), perhaps not with iPhone but certainly iTunes. Lisa is not the only person I have heard mention iTunes – so I had a good look over it. I see the positives – I organises music, applications, videos and applications well, structuring them on the device and the laptop; there is only one way to do everything, so it’s simple and memorable; purchasing is easy (I suppose it was bound to be) and seems trustworthy. It’s good old encapsulation – the mechanics of syncing, purchasing, organising, backing up, charging and updating are obscured and centralised. There are negatives but I have to say they’re not obvious to the average user – I don’t care for the way it overrides other software for example but in truth most Windows software does that too.

As I said earlier, Lisa is familiar with Ubuntu’s desktop and applications. She knows that it is maintained mostly by volunteers (better than most – she’s seen me doing it for many years). She even acknowledges advantages – faster booting, better stability and security – in particular viruses, which seem to be on every geek stick she receives (cloud computing hasn’t caught on amongst the charity she works with). She is annoyed that Apple haven’t made iTunes available for Ubuntu too but it doesn’t change anything. As we speed evermore to living online, the platform supporting those applications becomes less relevant. While this means we can happily forgo Window’s failings, it unfortunately works both ways – if the hardware we use doesn’t work with our chosen platform then we can switch.

If there’s anything I can take away from this its that Linux is a tool, one which I might be blinded to it’s negatives because of my involvement. Sometimes it isn’t the best solution for everyone so recommending it when its not appropriate might be detrimental. In this case, she thinks Apple are to blame but she could have assumed it was our fault as a distribution. If someone has never tried Ubuntu, then the worst the can really say when someone asks is that they don’t know – if their only experience is negative then there is a risk their assessment will follow suit. Perhaps, in some circumstances the best advocacy is not to advocate.

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2. Samsung NC10 – a pleasant Ubuntu experience
3. Huawei E1550 on Ubuntu

• Very good battery life
• No solid state disk (SSD) – they’re too small and were a bottleneck on the Aspire One
• Under £300
• Must have a microphone, web-cam and reasonable speakers – Skype is an essential

Restricted to what PC World stocks, it came down to three choices – Acer 531, Samsung NC10 or Toshiba NB200. The NB200 dropped of their stock list sometime between Christmas and New Year and they only had the NC10 in stock when I got to the store so I guess that narrowed it down.

It’s a Windows XP home system although Windows 7 Starter is available if you pay more. With 1 Gb of RAM, Intel Atom processor and 160 Gb hard disk, it has a  1.3 mega pixel web-cam and a comfortable keyboard and touch pad, the latter resplendent with buttons beneath the pad. They quote a nine hour battery life and all for £249.99 (although, with discount this was a ridiculous £212.49).

Battery life is excellent. I couldn’t expect more. There are three modes of operation, cycled through with a Fn+F8 key combination – silent, normal and speed. I’m in normal now and have been since I started typing this post, the fully charged battery is now showing 8:28 remaining. This is fairly stable too, and the system is perfectly responsive for writing, surfing and so on. Without doing tests, this is subjective but I had the system on normal earlier with my Blackberry, MP3 player and and external Western Digital hard disk connected to USB and got four and a half hours from the system. It’s a relief to see that Samsung didn’t opt to use a shiny screen – these drive me crazy, especially when the back-light is low. I’ve a lamp behind me at the moment and there’s no bright reflection.

Generally, I find Windows systems come with so much cruft preinstalled that a clean install is needed. I also tend to lean towards Dell hardware as they provide installation disks rather than restore disks and I’m glad to say I can add Samsung to this list. The restore disk is slip-streamed Windows XP Home SP3, although it’s a shame that there isn’t a utility provided to push this on to a USB disk.

Preinstalled software consists of Samsung’s software and a trial McAfee license. I removed the preinstalled McAfee as I have a licenced copy through my ISP. Samsung software is OK, focusing on improving XP’s failings – such as managing display, audio and WiFi, managing backup and updating drivers.

Anyway, how does it fair with Ubuntu?

I used an Ubuntu 9.10 live USB session to see what was working. I was pleased to discover that it appears to be everything. Wireless, bluetooth, correct resolution, touch pad and keyboard. Battery life is not noticeably different to Windows either. The only minor criticism is that although the screen is rotated, the mouse is not but I’m sure that’s something that can be addressed with some poking around.

It is refreshing to see hardware working out of the box and is becoming common. This might be down to Samsung’s choice of hardware but probably not as their website mentions only Windows 7. Checking the community documentation, it would appear that some configuration was needed with 8.10 but there is nothing entered for 9.10. So I think its not an unrealistic conclusion to say that work done on the kernel in the last year is responsible. The ath5k kernel module has been significantly improved since kernel 2.6.27 – this is the same chip set that the Aspire One A110 had.

I’m relieved to see such improvement in such a relatively short space of time. We can have all the bells and whistles but its the out of box experience that most new users will judge us on, right or wrong. I know it’s unfair that a clean Windows install supports far less hardware but many of our users are unaware that they have a restore CD. With Vista being a farce and Windows 7 starter being an uncertainty, I hope we have a chance to let Ubuntu shine through on these devices.

As an aside I had a curious conversation with someone about Windows. He suggested that Windows 7 was unnecessary on a netbook, as XP was less resource hungry and you only need video playback, VOIP, web browser and word processor. Logical enough I suppose, however I suggested that the same was true of Ubuntu, only to be told that it’s too different and that it doesn’t run games (despite this not being a requirement). Maybe we can’t win but for those who venture in, if everything works then its one less thing for naysayers to argue.

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3. Huawei E1550 on Ubuntu

I don’t advocate copyright infringement but I do fair use.  I am regularly away from home and take a hard drive with me on which I want to have copies of DVD, rather than carry around lots of DVD.  I would have thought that a fairly simple interface was required for this.

Fortunately, Lifehacker pointed the right direction with bitRipper.

bitRipper's main interface

See, there’s nothing too complicated here – pick the track (which granted can be an art form on some DVD), choose output and start ripping.  Of course, the options are there and it uses any available codecs.

Ripping

See now that’s better.  I have used Handbrake but with mixed results and it seems top easy to click the wrong box and after sitting for an hour find that the file is, for example, soundless.  VLC can stream output which does work but tends to lose the first few seconds in a garbled mess.  Both of these have the advantage of being cross platform however.  So if you know of a Linux alternative then feel free to let me know about it.

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Well being the kind of person I am I thought I’d do a little investigation. Now after disabling the cycles from Ubuntu, I let the system run for fifteen minutes and noted that there was no increase where previously there had been.

Now I rebooted in Windows Vista Home Premium, let the system run for fifteen minutes and rebooted into Ubuntu. After taking measurements again, surprisingly there was a ten cycle increase.

So the only conclusion I can draw here is that Windows Vista does not alter settings provided from BIOS/microcode either.

Now as to whether or not increased time in the landing zone is detremental to hard disk lifespan is still very much open to interpretation, one thing is true though – the argument that Ubuntu is not doing something that Windows is doing is incorrect.

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