Since I picked up the wee netbook a couple of days ago I have been having a lot of fun discovering how far the linux desktop has come in the past few years. I have been running OS/X exclusively for the past, oh, 4 years or so and haven’t really spent a lot of time keeping up with linux on the desktop at all. I have to say I am more then impressed and kind of sad I left for the mac. I missed contributing to some cool stuff. I’m kind of sad too that the mac has let me down but all in all Ubuntu has been a happy reunion so far.
I came back to Ubuntu in a roundabout way. Last year I bought my girl a laptop that came with Vista and she fiddled around on the thing until it got viral and started acting weird. I told her to use Ubuntu but she begged for Vista back. I put it back on and of course it went south again so I just put Ubuntu on the thing and asked her to give it a week. If she hated it then I would put Vista back on and buy a subscription from that snake oil feller, Norton I think he calls hissef. So she ran it for a week and since then she wont let me touch it. Every now and then she is tickin’ away in OpenOffice or the Gimp and sits back, all pensive and deep like and waxes geek poetic, “you know, its like you are walking around with rubber boots on filled with mud and manure your whole life, and then one day someone hands you a pair of sandals and you can still go most everywhere you want to go, but you can get there faster, cooler, better looking, and arrive more alert and with better hair.” I just nod. Yep. It’s just like that. She has a different one every time.
It all started a few days ago when I wanted to toss my macbook into the lake so I picked up this Gateway sub-notebook with a 1.6G Athlon 64bit. It comes with XP and I’m not really down with windows so I reach for Ubuntu and stuff it on a bootable USB stick and plug it in. Out of the gate, the Ubuntu installer divvied up the hardrive, left XP with 50gb and itself with 60gb, threw down grub and when the little beasty rebooted, it all worked. What the..? Everything, even the goofy cheap-ass web cam works. I plug my Nikon camera in and it fires up F-Spot. Music, speakers, microphone. Fantastic!
The first thing I need to get sorted out is email. Everything points at Evolution so I fire that up and configure one account. Seems to work. I remember Evolution from back in the gnome-simian days and I did not like it very much but that was a long time ago so. Still looks the same though.
While I was playing around with Evolution I was installing flash for firefox and I realize that flash+ff is doing a number on my cpu. This netbook aint much really, a bit more then the atom and not by awhole lot. So I grab Opera on a whim and give it a whirl, which leads me to checkin out the Opera mail client as well. To make a long story short, Opera mail (m2 they call it) kicks Evolution’s butt for one main reason, it works and I still can’t get Evolution to send SMTP. Back in the simian days it had the same problem!! Holy crappers. So I’m stickin with Opera mail for now and see if I can really work with it on the day to day. I hope it does work though because it’s cross platform and that is a great thing.
So other then Evolution being a disappointment I only have one other beef with the Gnome HIG. Check out this image of Nautilus file manager thing showing the network…
The mini is running SMB and SSH and it shows both potential connections but neither the icons nor the hover give you any indication of which is which. You have to open the properties, go to the permissions tab to read “smb://… does not have any permissions” or “sftp://… does not have any permissions”. Even tab 1 of the properties simple says “network://”. That’s just bad and considering the polish of most all of the release, kind of amazing no one caught/addressed this.
So two small beefs, Doesn’t even chart. I’m staying and won’t be buying another apple product for sometime I think. I even hooked up with LaunchPad so I can contribute a bit to whatever else I may trip over. Adios Steve-o!
