Breaking the Windows.
It’s been said by many people, including Microsoft themselves – Vista is a dog when it comes to low-powered UMPCs or NetBooks or whatever it is you want to call them. In fact it flat out can’t be run on a lot of them. Windows XP, the obvious Windows alternative, is being wound back (although a stay of execution for low-powered devices has recently been allowed.) But here’s the thing – even XP runs quite clunkily on quite a lot of mobile devices. My mother has a low-spec HP laptop that creaks under the weight of XP. Shocking. And when XP does finally phase out, where does that leave one, if one wants to run a UMPC? Between a rock and a hard place?
Reason for this blab is, I waaant a UMPC (probably the EeePC 900, out soon) but I don’t want XP (expensive, clunky, superseded) and I don’t want the kiddified Xandros OS that Eee ships with either. So what about a normal distro of Linux? It’s been probably five years since I last tried Linux. Last time was most uninspiring. The kernel kept panicking and everything looked very foreign.
But times change. I’m trialling Xubuntu using Parallels at the minute. It’s a version of Ubuntu, a popular Linux distro, the X standing for Xfce, I think, which is a desktop module that apparently is very lightweight, making it easy for low-powered devices to crunch. Xubuntu took 5 rather disheartening tries to install (something to do with how Parallels treats Xubuntu, worked it out in the end using this Feisty Fawn on Parallels instruction) but now it’s there, it seems to work quite well.
Some frustrations – it won’t shut down properly (again, Parallels?) and it doesn’t recognise the full screen size of my Mac. It has an eccentric top-bar AND bottom-bar – cluttering the already mean screen real-estate. I’m going to try and work through all these things.
Good things – much of the software I already use (Firefox, OpenOffice, Picasa) plays very happily in Linux, meaning I don’t have to learn new programs, or use substandard programs! Be interesting to see what the FTP and Japanese dictionary/flashcard programs will look like. In fact, not even sure I have Japanese support yet!
Will update in a couple of weeks once I’ve had a good poke around at its capabilities.
