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[NMLUG] LINUX netbooks
I just got my netbook running, and I thought some of you might be
intereste in a review.
If you know of a popular forum, let me know. I might post there too.
I got the Sylvanis "gOS" netnook.
It has a lower resolution screen (something like 800x400 ish), but
a 30G hard drive. It was a little sluggish in response.
I could never get the wireless to work, and I returned it.
That does not make me dis-recommend it, It could have been a fluke,
although, in general, I do prefer the Asus eee pc that I now have.
The software is definately better than the ASUS eee pc.
It delivered with a working Gnome desktop (my preference is gnome over
KDE), and functioned like a full-fledged computer, not an appliance,
out of the box. I'd have kept it if the wireless worked.
Drawbacks : small screen resolution. HDD.
In review, 30G is no huge drive.
For the same price ($400), you can get an Asus eee pc 900 at
about 16G to 20G SDD. I think this is a better way to go,
hardware wise.
Asus also has a 1024x600 ish screen. higher res.
Unfortunately, the Asus software distro leaves a lot to be desired.
In the default configuration, it has this stripped down appliance-like
desktop based on Xandros. A real pain. Based on a COMMERCIAL distro,
not the core Debian. This appliance interface is (mostly) useless IMOHO.
I had to do some nasty, nasty hacks to get their "full" desktop.
Adding several 3rd party support sites to /etc/apt/sources.list,
and a mess of overriding preferences to not kill the "official"
packages with newer ones from 3rd party distributions.
This was necessary to get even the most basic of software installed.
Also... the ASUS site is broken for their own "full desktop" packages.
I needed to hack an apt index file (following directions from a user
site) to get around a qt3 inconsistency.
The "full desktop" is a KDE variant (not my choice), but I'm afraid to
try to use any packages not tweaked for these underpowered eee netbooks,
so I'm staying with KDE.
One of the big issues is that I do not know how to shift the top of a
window off the top of the desktop in KDE.
The screen is small.
Some dialogs will not fit. I need to be able to shift them partially
off the desktop to find the "OK" buttons. I can't.
So.... no addressbook for thunderbird.
Asus also allows for only one user account, named "user" at uid 1000.
This is very inconvenient for network (NFS) use at my house.
I tried to add another account, but locked myself out, totally
bricked the system. So I won't do that again.
They have hidden any alternate boots, with splash screens that I have
not figured out. So I could not boot to single user.
Even after hacking /boot/grub/menu.lst, I could not get the menu to come
up or the splash screens to go away and show the boot/shutdown progress.
very annoying to me.
I will be surfing the WWW to get around these issues also.SW
Although I do prefer the Asus eee pc hardware, I am shocked at
how bad the software support is.
I can understand wanting to deliver a very simple appliance-like UI
in the base model to avoid support calls.
But why make it so hard to get access to a full software repository,
or even a window manager which will allow you to run apps in anything
but fullscreen mode?
They say that they expect 60% of their customers to buy XP... but I bet
that number would be a lot lower if they just provided a regular LINUX
desktop like Sylvania did with their ubuntu-based "gOS".
Xandros basis, being commercial, is a questionable choice, to me.
Sylvania is better, basing Google OS (gOS) off of Ununtu, but it seems
a bit indirect if you are planning to support a complete distro.
Why not start from the regular Debian basis?
What do they get from Ununtu (Xandros?) that they would not
get in a simpler, cleaner manner direct from Debian?
They are all rolling their own distro to fit their custom hardware
anyway... why add the complexity of a Debian DERIVATIVE as the basis?
aaron
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