Where are all the good laptops?

I've just bought a new laptop. To date, I'd been using an IBM T43 with Kubuntu 7.10. This has served me well over the last couple of years with my current employer. However, I'm branching out on my own as a software contractor, specialising in eCommerce development. That left me looking for a new laptop. I had a few requirements for this new machine:

1. It had to have a decent spec. Dual core processor, 200Gb+ Hard Disk, 2Gb+ Memory
2. It had to be able to run either Linux or OS X
3. At least a 15" screen
   
4. It had to look good. I'll be taking this machine to many client sites over the next few years and using it heavily for personal use, so I want something that performs well and is decent to look at.

At this point, you've probably guessed I ended up buying a MacBook Pro. What's surprising, at least to me, was the complete lack of decent alternatives. Some machines fulfilled two or three of the requirements but none, other than the MacBooks, met all four. For example, the Dell/Ubuntu machines sort of met 1, 2 and 3 but I spent so much time trying to find one that I decided I wouldn't buy a machine from Dell. There's probably another blog post in this but suffice to say their customer service totally sucked. I looked at other machines from companies like ZaReason but just couldn't find anything I liked.

I had no such trouble at Apple. Yes the machines are a bit more expensive but you do get a machine that's desiged with quality in mind. It's all the small details that make the difference, like:

1. A back-lit keyboard
2. The feel of the keys and the machine itself. Everything just feels solid.
3. Gestures on the trackpad
4. Even the magnetic power connector just snaps magically into place.

I can't figure out why companies like Dell don't just copy the MacBook design and stick a nicely themed version of Ubuntu on it. Market it heavily and sell if for considerably less than a MacBook. Maybe it's just not what they do.

Apple's lastest earning resport would suggest consumers are screaming out for alternatives to Vista. Even Dell plans to continue selling XP after MS stop supporting it.

Anyway, it's Dell's loss. I'm really happy with the MacBook Pro. It's an excellent machine. Now I just need KDE 4.1 to be released so I can use Amarok, and all my other favourite KDE apps on OS X.

Leopard Cannot Change It's Spots

WARNING: Apple fanboys, look away now.

What is it with OS upgrades recently? Vista. Don't make me laugh! Ubuntu Gusty seemed to cause me more problems than it solved. And to make matters worse, I upgraded my Intel Mac Mini from OS X Tiger to Leopard a couple of weeks ago.

That's the first and only time I'll pay for an Apple OS "upgrade". There is simply nothing in Leopard worth having. Here's a quick look at some of the features that would have been useful, had Apple taken time to design and implement them properly:

1. Spaces. Aka, virtual desktops. These are an absolutely must for me. They're just something that you get used to and then wonder how you ever did without. For example, I might have a browser full screen on desktop 1, email full screen on desktop 2, Eclipse ful screen on desktop 3, etc. Linux desktops have had these available for years, yet Leopard still manage to produce a half baked version. In Leopard, I either have to click a toobar icon and select a workspace number or launch spaces from a dock icon and select one. Both of those require at least two actions on my part. Compare this to KDE (or GNOME) where one click takes me to exactly the application and/or desktop I want. In Linux, I can right-click any window or toolbar icon and move the application to another desktop. The point here is that Spaces are just not very usable in Leopard, compared to their Linux counterparts.
   
2. Stacks. What a mess in Leopard! These are supposed to make navigating folders easier. What is the point in having the dock icon change, depending on the first item in the folder? That just serves to confuse the user. Again, KDE has had this idea implemented for years and they did it much better. If you're going to copy existing ideas, at least improve upon them.
   
3. 3D Dock. How anyone at Apple thought this was an improvement on the previous version, I'll never know. It's just too difficult to see the icon that shows whether an application is running or not. I ended up moving the dock to the left hand side of the desktop, just to make it usable.

I could go on and on. Some people have noticed significant performance improvements, I haven't. The "upgrade" lost my printer details and I had to reconfigure it again. The xserver still has the yellow cursor bug. However, applying that fix to Leopard totally hoses the xserver. I had to revert to the xserver that was shipped with Tiger to solve it. My keyboard has never been detected correctly by any version of OS X, ad infinitum.

All in all, Leopard has been one big disappointment and I didn't even suffer any of the more troublesome upgrade woes. I find it ironic that Steve Jobs has spent the last few years slagging off Vista, yet it took Apple two years to come up with Leopard.

Having Linux Wireless Troubles? Try WPA!

A few weeks ago, my father bought himself a brand new laptop. It was an Advent 7113 and he got a pretty good deal. Of course, it had Vista installed. He already knows about Linux because I've had him use it in the past. This time however, he wanted to stick with Vista to try it out. So I set up ZoneAlarm, ClamWin, connected to his wireless network and left him to it. Everything seemed to be going well.

And then it happened!

The inevitable "Can you come over and have a look at this laptop" phone call. I've had plenty of these calls in the past, so I wasn't too surprised when I received this one. What did surprise me though, was when the laptop started it booted straight into Ubuntu Feisty. Interesting!

It turns out my parents got tired of Vista after a couple of weeks because they were constantly being bombarded with pop-ups. They instructed my brother to wipe Vista and put Linux on it. He obliged by installing Ubuntu Feisty. I was called when they couldn't get connected to the wireless network. Nice!

Running lsusb revealed the laptop uses an inbuilt MSI 6877 WLAN usb card. The Network Manager application in Feisty could see the network but couldn't connect. It just sat there trying to connect for ever after accepting the WEP key. I had a bad feeling about this and posts like this one on the Ubuntu forums didn't help.

I spent many hours trying various drivers, downloading them and building them. I tried every combination of iwconfig I could think of. Nothing worked! As a last resort, I was thinking of using ndiswrapper but Vista had been wiped from the machine and they didn't get an install CD. So, I couldn't find the Windows drivers for the wireless card. I was aware that the Vista drivers probably wouldn't work with ndiswrapper anyway. It would likely have to be the XP ones. Where would I get those? I really didn't want to use ndiswrapper if I could help it.

The fact that Feisty could see the network continued to niggle me. Why couldn't it connect? Why would someone write a driver that could see the network but couldn't connect? It made no sense. Perhaps it was just a very early version of the driver? It's doubtful that such a driver would make it into the kernel and end up in Feisty though! I downloaded the latest live CD of Gusty, just in case the driver had been updated. Still the same issue. I was getting tired of this! WHY WON'T THE DRIVER CONNECT?

OK, let's see what happens if I turn off all security on the router. BINGO! CONNECTED! A router without any security is not the answer but at least this is progress. So, I have one other option. Try WPA instead of WEP encryption on the router. Fingers, toes and everything else crossed while I enter the WPA passphrase and wait for the laptop to connect to the network. And it does! Wireless is working perfectly.

I've no idea why WPA worked over WEP and frankly I don't care! My parents have a fully functional laptop with the latest version of Gusty and I haven't had any calls since.

I'm off to update that post on the Ubuntu forums.

Linux in the Workplace: What the Users Think

When I wrote my first "Linux in the Workplace" post, Vista had just been launched. There were lots of articles popping up stating that Linux was not ready for the desktop (coincidence?). Having used Linux at home and in work I knew this wasn't true. So, I wrote an article to try and show that any modern distro is perfectly suitable for most people.

In the follow up, I discussed some ideas on how to help colleagues make the switch to Linux. I received an interesting response to that second article from Warner, which was the inspiration for this post.

Several colleagues of mine now also use Linux as their primary work desktop. In fact, we now have about a 50/50 split between (K)Ubuntu and XP users in our office. I wanted to get their views on why they use Linux and if they are happy with it. Hopefully the answers will be useful to others considering Linux. I asked everyone the same set of questions. So without further ado, here are their thoughts:

Q. What motivated you to try Linux?

Michael: The amount of time (that was) wasted developing and building my applications on a windows box.

Jeff: (I) had a problem with Wireless on Windows XP. Basically after new drivers were installed the machine was extremely slow and took 10 minutes to boot and get logged in.

Peter: Unreliability of Windows, desire to know more about using Linux and desire to support the open source software movement - In that order.

Sean: I have a mac and really like how reliable it is and I had the idea of trying to get a hacked version of osx onto my PC. When I saw how well linux (Ubuntu) worked I knew this would be a good alternative.

Paul: I initially tried Linux on the recommendation of others on the basis that it would be a more effective development environment. Additionally, the idea of trying something new which may eliminate some frustrations with Windows appealed to me.

Q. What did you think of Linux before switching?

Michael: I'd heard good things from a number of sources. Mainly from those with a development background. Faster development time, more "free" tools to help development. I'd heard a lot of cool apps that I'd like to take for a test drive.

Jeff: My first experience of Linux was at university around the mid 1990's. At that stage it seemed a lot more involved than windows was and it seemed as if you needed a lot more technical knowledge to be able to run it. I also remember thinking that it was all command line based whereas windows had a nice GUI.

More recently I had bought an old laptop and put SUSE 9.1 Linux on it and was very impressed with it. It was fairly straightforward to get it up and running and had a nice UI. I actually gave the laptop to my parents who have no computing experience other than surfing the web, email and some word processing and they have never had any problem with it. The switch for them from Windows was seamless.

Peter: I had the impression that it was not very user friendly and that it had hardly any support for MS file formats (both wrong). I was aware that it is vastly superior in performance and security.

Sean: I thought it was good, but I was wary of it because I thought there would be compatibility issues etc with software that I like and some hardware.

Paul: My impressions of Linux prior to switching over were that it would be more difficult to use and that only 'expert' users would be able to use it effectively.

Q. What concerns did you have about switching to Linux?

Michael: I feared that actually setting up a Linux box would require a lot of effort. I needn't have worried too much. I did have some problems which actually ended up requiring a new hard drive in my box. Once I had that it was plain sailing.

Also, I worried about integration with my existing windows apps. I've used a Windows box for developing on for over 10 years. I'm just used to all it's little quirks and what to do to get things done quickly.

Jeff: My only concerns really were that my wireless networking at home and in the office would work and that the software I use regularly would work or there would be a suitable alternative. I was concerned that there wouldn't be drivers for my wireless card etc.

Peter: That I wouldn't be able to interoperate with the Windows office environment. That it would be difficult to find support for issues I had.

Sean: It might not have the software packages in place for the things I need to do

Paul: My main concern when switching was that I would struggle to find a set of applications to replace the ones I was using on Windows. I thought applications would be hard to find, possibly 'buggy', and generally not as good.

Also, I thought any issues I would come across would be difficult to deal with, and answers would be harder to come by compared to any issues faced on Windows.

Q. What were the major issues you faced in Windows?

Michael: Just the 3 things, slowness, slowness and slowness. Recycling my build environment was just painful. Additional windows would decided to hang for some reason when opening Windows Explorer or going to save a file.

Jeff: The obvious ones were, viruses, spyware and the feeling that while I was online I could be open to attack. Also always having to keep up to date with the regular Windows Updates and keeping my virus checker and spyware software up to date. Plus the problem with the machine running slowly after the wireless drivers being updated.

Peter: Unreliability - Security updates killing my computer and applications causing the machine to hang. Also long startup times (bad for a laptop).

Sean: Security, pop-ups, slow when it gets fragmented, the list could go on.

Paul: On Windows, I had problems with the performance of the OS ie Windows XP. After having it installed for a while, even with anti-virus and anti-spyware software running, the OS became unbearably slow. Having to run anti-virus and anti-spyware software in the first place is a nuisance, and presumably contributed to the performance issues. Turning these off is obviously not an option as the machine would quickly become riddled with virus'! When running Windows I would generally re-install every 6 months or so to avoid these problems... which I don't really want to have to do.

Q. What are the major issues you have with Linux?

Michael: I rely heavily on Microsoft Outlook for email and calendar. It's very integrated with the Company's Exchange server. I still use my windows laptop for all non-coding tasks.

Jeff: I have had a few minor issues, but no major ones. Any minor issues have been very easily resolved with a quick look on the internet.

Peter: Integration with windows networks - especially domain credentials.

Sean: None as yet, a few applications that I would like to see available for linux would be the adobe/macromedia software suite. I would also like an iPhoto type application for linux.

Paul: The only real issues I've found with linux is the problems with drivers. It can be hard to find drivers for some hardware, and even when you do find them they can be a headache to install.

Recently I installed drivers for a USB ADSL modem. This involved about 10 minutes of editing files and running commands in the terminal... even now I still have to reboot the machine to reconnect when the connection drops... pain in the ****!

Not to mention ATI graphics cards...

However, I recognise that these problems are to do with the hardware companies not making Linux drivers.

Q. What do you miss most about Windows?

Michael: I live happily in the 2 worlds.

Jeff: I don't miss anything. Sometimes for work I need to test code using IE but using it is a necessity not a desire of my own.

Peter: Oddly, being able to cut/copy text from a Terminal Services window onto my local machine and being able to share local disk drives over a TS connection.

Sean: There is no denying that there is a huge wealth of apps available for the platform.

Paul: I'm surprised that I don't miss very much about Windows at all. The only thing that comes to mind is the installation of software. In Windows double clicking an .exe to run an installer is clearly easier than building from source, which seems unavoidable sometimes.

Q. What do you like most about Linux?

Michael: Speed

Jeff: That it just works and is so customisable. The amount of utilities that are available is awesome and it's so easy to install them. I was amazed by the "apt-get" and "dpkg" utilities and how they just worked. Plus I can have multiple desktops and use a separate desktop for each application.

Peter: The peace of mind that comes with Linux Security.
- Using Synaptic.
- Powerful Linux tools like grep.
- Useful tools like Parted, the disk usage analyser, CD juicer and creator.
- The ability to mount an NTFS partition to get access to windows files.
- Generally less of my application windows hanging.

Sean: Clean uncluttered OS, none of the annoying stuff that windows plagued me with.

Paul: There are several things that come to mind:
- No anti-virus/firewall/spy-ware.
- Greater confidence in the software I install.
- Greater control of the OS.
- It's free, and the software for it is generally free too!
- Community. There seems to be a greater community aspect when you are
looking for help on forums etc.
- It's not Windows.
- I'm not contributing to Microsoft.

Q. Any other info you would like to share?

Jeff: On one or two occasions I have found that I needed to perform tasks that seemed quite daunting, one example would be compiling the kernel in order to install a VPN client. However there is a wealth of information and HowTo's out on the net that it makes operations like this seem a little easier.

Sean: I think if Linux was used more in schools at a young age, we would see it really gather speed in development terms as the popularity would increase exponentially. Also, I know a few people that play PC games and this is their reason for using windows. Games on Linux is a long way off.

Paul: I now use Linux 100% both at home, and at work.

So there you have it! Those are the views of some Linux users in our office. I think it's fair to say they are pretty happy at the moment and have no intention of returning to a Windows desktop.

I'd like to thank all the people who took time to answer the above questions. I'm sure the information they provided will be useful to many.

My own views are pretty simple. An Operating System is just a tool to let me get things done. I use Linux because it's the best tool for the job. I make no pretense that the Linux desktop is perfect. It's not. However, it is damned good and much better than the alternatives i.e XP or Vista. (Macs are not an option in our office, yet)

Oh, and as for all those "Linux is not ready ..." articles, perhaps they should be renamed "Vista is not ready ...".

Unstoppable!

So much has happened in Linux land since I briefly discussed Vista that it's difficult to keep track of everything that's going on. The trends are clear though. We all know that Linux has basically won the battle of the server room. I'd like to hear one good reason for installing a new Windows server versus having it run some flavour of Linux. What must be even more worrying for Microsoft though are the clear signs that the Desktop may be next. Let's look a little closer at recent events:

Dell sells pre-loaded Ubuntu machines
This appears to be the first serious attempt by a major PC vendor to sell Linux desktops. I must admit I was a little sceptical at first, so I tried out their website earlier today. I knew Dell were only offering three models (two desktops and one laptop) to start with. I wanted to see what specs they had on offer for the Linux machines, the price and how easy it would be to purchase one. I was impressed on all accounts. Check out the Linux offerings for yourself .

Dell are certainly making all the right noises. I particularly like this quote from their article announcing the Ubuntu desktops:

"We will continue to work with vendors to improve the stability of the associated Linux drivers moving forward. That’s part of our longer-term goal to increase the number of drivers that work at the kernel level—something Direct2Dell readers made very clear. We’ll get there, it just takes time.
Dell certainly has enough clout to get other hardware manufacturers create Linux drivers. This can only be good for everyone. Now, if only they'd start selling these machines in the UK I'd buy one. My next home computer will definitely be a Dell/Ubuntu laptop.

Kubuntu 7.04 is released
I updated my home laptop from Edgy to Fiesty. It's worth the update just to get KNetworkManager. Fiesty is an incremental update to Edgy so don't expect too many changes. Most of the effort in the KDE project is going into KDE4 and rightly so. I can't wait to get my hands on the first release of Kubuntu with KDE4.

Microsoft issues patent threats
Steve Balmer has been telling people that Linux/OpenOffice violates MS patents but he can't tell us which ones, presumably because MS are too busy. Hmmn. Haven't I heard all this before (hint: think SCO)? Thankfully, most people have seen this for exactly what it is: FUD. Jim Zemlin shares his thoughts:

"If you earned $34 million a day from Windows and Office, you too would try to spook the market with patent threats"

Tux at the Indy 500
Finally, I'd like to congratulate the guys running the Tux500 project. It's a fantastic effort to market Linux and I'm sure everyone involved has done a lot of work. Check out the blog over at Lobby4Linux for more details.

So, there has never been a better time to be a Linux user and it's only going to get better. As Stephen Vaughan-Nicols points out, we are all Linux users now.

Sport: Boxing must clean up its act.

I love watching boxing and have done so for as long as I can remember. I've grown up watching the golden era of Hagler, Leonard, Hearns, Duran. I had the privilege of watching a young Tyson absolutely terrorize the heavyweight division. And of course, I'm a massive fan of the truly great Muhammad Ali.

Today I watched a brilliant fight between Marco Antonio Barrera and Juan Manuel Marquez in the 130-pound division. These are two of the finest boxers in the world at the moment, at any weight. They put on a superb display of skill, speed, stamina, courage, determination and will to win. The fight was so close that the decision could have gone either way. The commentators at ringside were split as to who they thought won. The great trainer Emanuel Stweard had Barrera narrowly winning. In the end, the judges gave it to Marquez.

I have no problem with the decision. However, I have a massive problem with the way the judges scored the contest. One judge decided that Barrera won only two rounds of the twelve. TWO ROUNDS? What were they looking at? It certainly wasn't the same fight as the rest of us. All of which leads me to the point of this rant: Who are these boxing judges? How are they qualified to judge some of the richest sporting events in history?

I'd really like to see only ex-boxers judge fights. They are the true experts. The sport needs to rid itself of the sort of farcical scoring this fight was subject to. Barrera, Marquez and every other fighter deserves nothing less.

Vista: Who wants it?

I don't think I've ever read so much negative press about a previous Microsoft operating system release as I have about Vista. I was going to write a rant summarizing some of the issues but Andrew Grygus beat me to it. Check out his article on Vista. It's pretty short but is a good read.