Internetling

Who could have, just a year ago, predicted the dramatic changes in the netbook operating system world? The release of Windows 7 and cheaper hardware launched an exciting race for users between Linux and Windows, forcing both to take it up a notch, especially in the aesthetics department. This year might be the year of cloud operating systems, but at the same time more powerful netbooks will enable us to use more advanced features. There are a few distributions you might remember from last year’s article. However, even the ones that stayed in the top 5 have gone through some heavy face-lifting. Hardware support is unfortunately still a major problem in the Linux world, that is why it played a major role in the ranking. My testing machine was an Asus Eee PC 1101 HA, which comes with a surprisingly problematic piece of hardware, the Intel Poulsbo GMA 500 graphics chip, that makes using advanced graphics effects a challenge, if you aren’t using Windows.

So, without further ado, here are the top 5 netbook Linux distributions for 2010!

Ubuntu Netbook Remix – UNR

We can now confidently say Ubuntu is the de-facto Linux distribution and even the netbook respin of the 9.10 “Karmic Koala” release is no exception. The loading and login screens are simply gorgeous. The Maximus window manager  works pretty well on small monitors and neatly organizes your workspace. Despite the optimizations you should not expect stellar performance, though. My personal recommendation is to remove the default window manager:

$sudo apt-get remove ubuntu-netbook-remix ubuntu-netbook-remix-default-settings maximus

and switch back to GNOME, or install something faster like Xfce. On my machine I still had to setup the Poulsbo chip using a script and the wireless card worked much batter after using a windows driver through ndiswrapper. Not much to add, really. Otherwise, what you are getting is a heavily optimized version of Karmic Koala. And since we’re talking about the most successful Linux distro, there is a high chance that you will like it.

Jolicloud

By now you have probably gotten used to the new developer trends and are not afraid of trying out a product still in beta. Heck, I ran it when it was still an invite-only alpha. Jolicloud is web-centric and divided into three parts: the Linux kernel, the wonderful Jolicloud desktop and the web service, My Jolicloud. Installing applications is very easy and Jolicloud provides an aesthetically pleasing and well-integrated way of using online services just like normal desktop apps. This is not an operating system for people who like to dive into the details, but for those who are interested in stying connected, sharing and doing some basic work on the internet. You can add friends to your Jolicloud network, share and recommend applications. Your desktop experience will seamlessly switch from the cloud to your local environment. Another good thing about Jolicloud is the excellent out-of-the-box hardware support. If you use a netbook for relatively simple tasks, but are tired of waiting for Windows 7 to load or are having problems with a traditional Linux distributions, you should definitely give Jolicloud a try.

Mandriva 2010 (GNOME)

Even though Mandriva has been losing market share every year, it remains one of the best netbook distributions out there. The developers keep updating every release with all the drivers needed for a great out-of-the-box experience. This is one of the only distributions that will work without any tweaks needed. My only reason for not using Mandriva is that I am an avid APT user. All in all, Mandriva 2010 is extremely polished and gives you a choice between 4 well-integrated desktop environments, the major two being Gnome and KDE. To my surprise, the Gnome version looks really, really good. Albeit Mandriva’s userbase is not as large as Ubuntu’s, the documentation is well-written and it is really easy to install the distribution on your new system. Choose Mandriva if you need a full-blown Linux distribution, do not have time to tweak your system and can tolerate RPM

xPUD

Penk’s Underbred Linux distribution has been making waves since about a year now. And rightfully so: 10-second boot time is a killer feature for busy people. The xPUD desktop is mind-bogglingly simple and based on Mozilla’s XUL interface. A dumbed-down version of Maximus, if you like. Yes, this is both crazy and awesome. The basic idea of xPUD is that you boot straight into the browser. No real desktop environment, just the browser and you. The distribution is at version 0.9.2  at the time of writing, a Chromium-based version is also in the works, promising more speed (remember, due to Gecko and XUL, you get slower overall performance despite the fast boot; using WebKit could speed things up a bit).

Easy Peasy

Formerly Ubuntu Eee (fixed, thanks Scott!), EasyPeasy is Ubuntu respin tailored for Asus Eee PCs. But since it didn’t work on my EeePC, I’ll have to give it last place. The desktop environment is taken from UNR – the only difference is that the Easy-Peasy version isn’t ugly (where ugly means brown). You could call it the Linux Mint of the netbook operating system world, because the default install includes some proprietary software such as Skype, Adobe Flash and some common codecs to make your life less painful. The project documentation is not very professional. On the other hand, the guides are simple and very useful. I liek the fact that they chose Banshee to be the default music player. Those of you who do not like ext4 should skip this distro, though: as of v1.5, EasyPeasy uses ext4 by default. Due to the fact that the distro is basically Ubuntu, you can solve all your problems using Ubuntu documentation. Yet, aside from the nice theme and some very sound software choices there is no real reason to choose Easy Peasy instead of UNR. Try both and decide by yourself.

(Totally starting a flame-war) Distros I Do NOT recommend:

- Moblin: it is now essentially a dead project because of MeeGo. If you really like Moblin, get Mandriva 2010 and choose the Moblin interface.

- Puppy Linux or TeenPup: You are root by default. Thumbs down.

- Chrome (Chromium) OS: not reliable enough; do not forget it’s a developers’ preview.

I know this will piss of some readers since I haven’t had the time to update the blog with any useful content recently (a very nice article is in the works, though), but I wanted to write this little post to direct your attention to the Amazon Kindle link in the page header. Through the 2 years that I’ve been running the Internetling, I’ve been trying to keep ads to a minimum, that is why, except for the title text links, you only see ads in the “second layer” of the page, i.e. the full feed, by landing here through a US search engine, and occasionally by using the article search form. Yes it seems like a lot. However, not many people see them, most Internetling readers are, after all, tech-savvy users.

I believe donations would be too much to ask since I don’t offer any service in exchange (the content will always be free and under a CC license), so I decided to publish a Kindle-optimized Internetling at Amazon.com – if I’m not mistaken, the subscription will cost you $1 a month (after a 14-day free trial).

So if you are Kindle owner, not interested in ads, or use AdBlock (not a problem, it is a great plugin, I use it myself), but were wanting to give something back, you can consider getting a subscription. Most of the money I earn goes to hosting costs and I am trying to get enough money to possibly hire a co-writer (or proof-reader, god knows I need one). Even if you do not want to subscribe, you can go for the 2-week trial: since I’m not a Kindle owner, I’d be really interested in your thoughts on the optimized edition, e.g. how it looks etc.

And I promise you, this is the first and last ad-related post you will ever see on this blog. Thanks for reading, see you in the comments

Note: I refuse to call the reviewed product the KDE Software Compilation. Sorry, I just feel it’s an ugly name for such a beautiful piece of software.

21,000 closed bugs later, the KDE team has announced the new KDE 4.4 and I simply had to take a look. After all, the last time I took KDE 4 Series for a spin was back when I still thought open source was one word. To think I actually praised this thing:

Most of you will remember the flak KDE got for releasing an immature desktop environment experiment as “gold”, and rightfully so: even though many Linux distributions almost immediately included it, nobody could really fit the unstable KDE 4.0 into their workflow.

But since then a lot of time has passed and I have to admit this is the first release in a long time that tempted me to switch. I downloaded a Fedora-KDE nightly build and tested it in a virtual machine.  Before you bury me in angry comments, please keep in mind this is my first KDE experience since 4.1 so I might mention some things which are already known to you.

What a sight! Let us begin with the aesthetics – the window manager theme, with its round, grey buttons, reminds me a bit of Mac OS X, which is not necessarily a bad thing. I probably don’t have to tell you about how gorgeous the new icon theme is – this is the first time I enjoyed waiting for Konqueror to load (a small version of the program icon jumps alongside your mouse while the application is staring up). Speaking of loading, the wait is worth it because of the absolutely delicious progress bars. Ironically, the default theme is so good that it doesn’t encourage you at all to make modifications, an ability KDE excels in. I don’t remember where exactly, but I’m sure I’ve already mentioned in some article how I enjoy the KDE Desktop concept: your desktop is not just a folder with a pretty background, it works more like a workspace, you can actually do things from your desktop.

Widgets, or Plasmoids, are a big feature of the 4 Series and while they don’t enable you to electrocute or incinerate your arch enemies, they offer a convenient way to insult them via their Facebook wall, directly from your desktop. The included widgets are standard, like a battery monitor, by pressing “Get new widgets” you can access the online library. There is a very nice Dropbox plasmoid, however the Gmail plasmoid is down right hideous. New in v4.4 is the Social Desktop and the widgets around it: this way you can interact with the KDE community directly from the desktop environment. The tightly-integrated compositing engine KWin got some improvements, too. You can now group windows together to get a tabbed interface, and is it just me or are the widget animations much better now?

The flexible Plasma framework, on top of which the desktop environment is built, made it possible for KDE to get a netbook mode, and now it is an official feature. Unfortunately I couldn’t try Plasma Netbook on my machine, but for those of you who find netbook interfaces useful, or necessary, can read Ars Technica’s lengthy article on the topic.
To my surprise, I’ve noticed that the Kickoff menu hasn’t changed a bit – if I were not familiar with the way KDE 4.1 did things, I’d have trouble navigating back and forward through the context menus. Luckily, the search dialog works a bit faster now. Konqueror is not an integral part of the KDE experience anymore, although Fedora’s community still includes it in their builds. Dolphin (now with Nepomuk integration) is a very mature project and can fully replace Konqueror’s awesome file-browsing capabilities. All in all, it would be nice to see a light file explorer option as well. Lots of new improvements have also been made under the hood, e.g. Akonadi is a new cache that manages data in your address book and similar applications.
This review of course depended greatly on the quality of the KDE 4.4 integration in Fedora 13, so take it with a pinch of salt, though I’m confident you will get pretty much the same experience on production releases. I recommend you try KDE 4.4 only if you have a decently powerful machine, I wouldn’t run it on a netbook, to be honest, it consumes more resources than other lighter desktop environments. The KDE guys are doing an excellent job and they deserve more users, so give v4.4 a try, it might just be a keeper!

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• KDE 4.4 Brings Social Media Improvements and Netbook Interface (ostatic.com)

First, I’d like to wish a Happy New Year to everyone! 2009 has been a very interesting year (at least as far as tech goes) and I’m sure we will see some amazing stuff this year, that is why I would like to make a few brave predictions. I am very excited about 2010, we have now got some great technology that I cannot wait to get my hands on, such as Android-tablet “appliance” computers, more web multimedia services following the examples of Hulu and Pandora, lightning-fast instant-on operating systems like Jolicloud, color E-Ink screens and of course, robot maids (finally fulfilling my dream of becoming the ultimate lazy student).

2010 will also be the year when Google becomes a major player in the physical world. Think augmented reality, real Google hardware and cloud services. In just a few days the Nexus One will be released and we are just 6 or 7 months away from the first all-Google cellphone. Whatever happens, this will definitely be the year of the Goog.

Google Chrome will match Firefox’s browser market share

Google, who is by the way Firefox’s biggest revenue source, is pushing Chrome to users by all possible means. Now that the snappy browser supports extensions, it would almost not be an exaggeration to say Firefox’s days are numbered. If Firefox does not step up its game (I certainly hope it does, being a Firefox user), especially in the speed department, we might see a very different browser market share chart next year. Except the sheer number of addons, there are now almost no advantages to running Firefox.

Android will overtake the iPhone

Apple might own most of the phone market at the moment, but there are millions of people out there who still have not upgraded. The trick to reach many people is to match their needs perfectly, giving them a reason to switch: Android is not tied to the same company – we have juggernauts like HTC, Motorola and Samsung working on numerous new models, all somehow different. Apple will surely present a new iPhone this January. However, they will never be able to reach every consumer with their small and expensive lineup.

Chrome OS will be a huge flop (initially)

You might think I am contradicting myself due to mentioning “light” operating systems as exciting technologies. But, like most of you guys, I am not an average consumer. I will probably install Chrome OS ot of sheer curiosity, then delete it because I know many other competitive operating systems that offer much more. I am betting on people’s distrust to the cloud. We have Linux distributions that do much more and can even run Chrome, plus in a few months they will boot just as fast. Why use a handicapped OS? The hardware for both reliable local and remote storage and applications is already almost cheap enough. My guess is that Google will be disappointed by the slow adoption and Chrome OS will become more and more similar to standard operating system, driving adoption in the following years through the Google brand name.

Ubuntu 10.04 will not start up in ten seconds

I think there is no way they will make it. Be sure to check out the Internetling around the release date, when I will see if the new version will boot in under half a minute on a minimal spec machine. Because now it takes a lot more to boot on 2 gigs of RAM. I believe Canonical has a very capable developer team, but this is a bit too optimistic, even for Linux.

Overall, more ARM and MIPS-based “smartbooks” will be sold than x86-powered machines UMPCs

I am willing to bet the so-called “smartbook” market is just short of exploding. With chips like the Longsoon and distros like xPUD, there is no way people will be able to resist under-$100 smartbooks. This will be achieved in 2010, it is the next big thing, not tablets. I am aware of the broken promises by vendors in the recent years. Now it will be different, prices have been driven very low, we just need to wait for someone with a vision (no, not Negroponte).

So, let’s talk about 2010 in the comments! What are you excited about, what do you think will happen?

I also want to thank everyone for reading the Internetling in 2009! It has been a very stressful year for me, but I am determined to keep writing. Thanks a million for your support!

While articles about awesome new browser features and WebKit are mushrooming around the Intertubes, mobile browsers for lower-end phones are ignored a lot in the media nowadays. With Android and the iPhone OS as the main players in today’s industry, devices featuring mainly touch input, lots of software for i.e. Symbian and less popular platforms is overlooked.

And today I want to talk about Opera Mobile 10 beta, because even though they are not very well accepted by the open source community, I cannot help but to think they have a team of experts from another planet, because what they just did with my 2008 Symbian S60 Nokia phone is just incredible. They literally modernised my phone.

Opera mobile 10 features a complete overhaul of the interface and a ton of new features, providing Symbian users with a very smooth ride (Animations), TABS, Bookmark Sync and one of the best mobile rendering engines I’ve ever seen, rivalling even the other WebKit-powered browsers on more powerful devices and it is not even the final version.

These are real screenshots from my Nokia E71.

I am not kidding, you have to test this browser yourself. The UI is just incredible. And I’ll be damned if it’s not one of the best pieces of programming Symbian has ever seen.