Thanks Jono…

Unfortunately I am snowed under with uni work at the moment so I will have to wait until the easter break before I can risk breaking anything! It will be great to have full support of the wireless and microphone without the backports and I think the choice of desktop interface on the logon menu is a neat idea – if it is a shared computer than advanced users can opt for a full desktop whilst basic users can have an easy to use launcher interface.

Look forward to trying it out – does it feel any snappier than Karmic (which is already damn fast!)

I think that within a year or two you might be able to move across to Linux entirely though… I guess we just have to wait and see how things pan out.

Out of the box:
– Wifi seems to working as it does with the karmic backports
– Mic appears to be working
– There is now a choice between regular gnome and netbook interface on the login screen And another option that’s called netbook 2d, but I haven’t tried that yet.

So looks like lucid might be a winner for the eeepc!

Unfortunately for me, I use bleeding edge technology in my systems and constantly upgrade to the newest hardware as soon as it is available. This is where my Linux problems have surfaced.

I tried Ubuntu on my desktop and had issues with motherboard, CPU, Video drivers. Yes they worked but I lost many of the features that made me purchase this high end hardware.

I just put Windows 7 (free Upgrade) on that machine and achieved full functionality on all hardware with native drivers.

Someon made a comment on wifi speed about buying another wifi device to get Linux compatibility. Please do not take me wrong but I should not have to purchase hardware just to get Linux to work. My card works perfectly with 150 MBs connection speed in Windows.

I am not a windows lover and I would much rather run linux. I am just a demanding user who expexts my OS to work with my machine no matter how new it is.

The netbook range between dell usa, and dell australia is very different!

The few that do (eg. hp mini) have their own custom distro which everybody that I know who has one, has replaced with ubuntu.

Anyway, that’s my whine of the day

From a more general perspective, as soon as not providing Linux specific drivers puts hardware manufacturers at a strategical disadvantage compared with their competitors, to the extent where they may lose money or see their market share decrease, I think they will get their act together and we will start to see lots more hardware being supported from square one. Unfortunately the problem at the moment is that not enough new computers come with Linux pre-installed on them, which means that we are always playing a game of catchup, adding support for new hardware a few months down the line from release…

Each version of Ubuntu is just getting better. Windows annoys the crap out of me these days. I tried to install XP on a friends laptop the other day, and it took me hours to find all of the right drivers… actually, I couldn’t even find the correct video driver! Ubuntu worked 100% though

The only reason that windows has a step ahead of linux with drivers and stuff, is that the stupid manufactors often only write drivers for windows. So it sometimes takes time for new h/w to fully work under linux.

If wireless-n speeds are the only reason you need to use windows, I would recommend jumping on ebay, buying a linux compatible -n card and swapping it for the one that comes with your computer… probably cost you less that $20, which is cheaper than a windows licence

It is interesting that your Linux experience varies so much from my own. I run Ubuntu Linux on a laptop and a netbook and have very few problems with hardware compatibility. Through running Linux, the system literally flies and doesn’t suffer from the usual slowdowns that encumber windows systems after a few months of general use. In fact, I find that Linux has a lot of functionality built in that windows is not able to offer me – such as window tiling, multiple workspace and handy window switching functionality similar to that on Macs.

Yes OpenOffice is still inferior in some ways to Microsoft Office. Yes there are some windows programs that don’t run on Linux. But I would say that finally – the same is beginning to be true in the other direction. There are now some brilliant programs for the linux platform that simply have no equivalents on Windows. In the end, making a few compromises is worth the effort considering how much Linux allows me to improve my productivity in general – especially when I spend as much time in front of the computer as I do.

As for beating a dead horse – I think that such a phrase may be somewhat excessive. If you consider how much Linux has moved on in the last couple of years then I don’t think such a phrase does the developers justice. When I first started using Linux five years ago, I had to compile and install my own wireless drivers just to get an internet connection and almost everything had to be done via the command line. Now, that has changed completely. Ubuntu works straight off the CD on the majority of modern PC hardware these days and packages can be installed and removed effortlessly. I think that within another year or two, Linux is going to be a serious competitor and a viable alternative for those people who don’t want to fork out cash for inferior and dirty microsoft products.

Finally, I would disagree that Linux is hard to use for new users. I recently setup ubuntu on my friend’s laptop and he is now a complete convert. Whilst he probably wouldn’t have been able to set things up without my help, I would argue that once everything is in place, it’s actually easier to use a linux operating system than a windows one – automatic software and security updates for all programs, good protection against malicious software, amazing stability, no blue screen of death and rare freezes. And in the end, I don’t think that setting up a windows system would have been any easier. In fact, it would be harder. You would have to manually search for and install relevant drivers after installing the operating system and spend an entire afternoon simply downloading some basic software packages to have a basically functional system…

I think there is much to be optimistic about and I would be very surprised if Linux doesn’t take off within a year or two – especially with the new market that netbooks have brought along and with backing from companies such as Google, Dell and IBM…

Would you not agree?