Posts by Greg Eden 25 publicly visible posts • joined 31 Oct 2008
The best part of Google+ is that it is not Facebook. You can even follow The Register on Google+. Google+ is far from dead and a great place for the technically inclined. Not a great place for mindless cat videos and the latest paleo diet and that is a very good thing.
Just for info I set mine up using Ubuntu Gnome 13.04 - 64bit. The install wizard is a universal Linux binary that should work with any distro. Just open the web page as per the instruction sheet, plug the indoor module into a Linux PC with the USB and follow instructions. The only "trick" is the downloaded wizard needs to have it's permissions set as executable before running as superuser.
So far works as advertised.
Ha, Ubuntu Cult? Me? I am not an Ubuntu user myself. I have tried it a few times but always end up back in Debian. But as you asked for numbers .....
I am realist enough to know that Ubuntu users outnumber the rest of us many times over. Just look at the forums. Some say that the forums are so big because they are all learners, but that is just living in denial. And most of them use Unity.
There are surveys (Lifehacker) that put Ubuntu at over 50% of Linux users. If Linux makes up 1 - 1.5% of all computer users in the world, then do a quick guesstimate and you get a very big number. According to World Stats as of June 2012 there are 2.4 billion unique Internet users. Add shared connections and that number must pass 3 billion. 1.5% Linux users = 45 million. Half go to Ubuntu = 22.5 million.
Nobody will deny that those figures are all guesswork. It is impossible to ever know for sure.
And, just to be clear, I dislike Unity and would never use it. But I do use Gnome Shell and would never go back to the old ways.
To the author of this article.
You have made a lot of assertions, rehashing "what everybody knows". But can you back it up with real evidence? There are a lot of "news" items all repeating the same assertions, and all referencing each other and a comment by Linus Torvalds. In his time Linus has criticised every desktop, next year it will be KDE again.
How many Gnome Shell users are there in the world? How many Cinnamon, Unity, Xfce4, KDE and Enlightenment? A group of angry and noisy bloggers filling comments sections does not imply "everyone". I could almost guarantee that Unity would win by 20 million users (a rough estimate plucked from the air). Given the popularity of Fedora and Debian then Gnome Shell will be at number two (if not now, soon). Debian Wheezy will be Gnome Shell 3.4 by default (news items to the contrary have proven to be rubbish). Linuxmint might have a hundred thousand users, split over their desktop offerings. Cinnamon and Unity are merely alternate Gnome 3 shells, without Gnome they cease to exist.
I am a happy Debian Sid Gnome Shell user. There are possibly millions of Gnome Shell users, who knows? The difference is that we do not usually fill comments sections with angry comments. We just get on with using our computers. And given some of the rubbish printed above I think many of the commenters have never used Gnome Shell, or only in a trivial sense. I have themes, I can maximise and minimise, alt-tab., task switch. I do not know what Gnome Shell you are railing against but it is not the one I use. Locked down and not configurable? Seriously? https://extensions.gnome.org has 20 pages of extensions and growing. Gnome Shell can be bent and twisted in a myriad of ways using extensions and Gnome Tweak Tool. Gnome Shell leaves Gnome 2 in the dust for modifiability. Gnome 2s configuration superiority is another myth that "everybody knows" and rehashes without thought or research.
cheers
I had a Microbee. I hacked the hardware to run on a "D" cell battery pack I made with tape and a soldering iron. It ran for two years on batteries, without replacement. My wife used the inbuilt ROM Word Processor for all her projects for a Post Grad Diploma, printed on a Gemini 10 dot matrix printer with a custom cable for the Microbee. Then one day around 1984 I bought an XT PC and that was the end. I was made an offer to sell it to a Ham radio hobbyist who used it to control his radio gear, because it ran on D cells it emitted virtually no RF. It continued in that role for a few years, all the time running on ordinary batteries.
Would I want a new one? Unlikely. But, good luck to the project. Someone out there must need a CP/M machine. Maybe Bill gates should get one for a laugh
The EeePC700 was ground breaking. It offered a few simple applets running on a cut down version of Linux. It was small and you could carry it around easily to check email or read the news. At a pinch you could even type on one for small documents. Then they just kept making them bigger and putting Windows on them, while restricting the power of the hardware. They were no longer netbooks, just cramped underpowered notebooks.
Then someone had the bright idea of removing the keyboard, make it a touch screen and using a cut down OS with small apps to make it easy to carry around and do stuff. At a pinch you can even type on one for small documents. Meanwhile notebooks have gone back to being notebooks.
:)
When Princess Mary returns from visiting mum in Tasmania do the customs officials search her bags for illicit Vegemite?
Does Mary feed Vegemite to the Crown Prince? Will the little princes and princesses grow up eating illegal toast spread?
Perhaps Vegemite can be un-banned by Royal decree and Marmite can come along for the ride.
"but I've been trying for ages to get Chromium on my EEE PC"
This 17 year old makes daily builds of ChromiumOS. It works on my EeePC900 and WiFi "just works". It is still a bit rough around the edges as you need to refresh the home page and app page a couple of times when you first boot as it loads them before it establishes the WiFi connection. Very much a work in progress. I have not tried my 3G connection as I have a mobile hotspot. You login with your gmail name and password.
http://chromeos.hexxeh.net/
Good to experiment with, but it is not yet ready to be used seriously.
I have Chromium OS installed on an old EeePC, and it is rough as guts - but you get the idea. The Chrome OS netbook will be useful to many people. For a start they should be cheap as chips, light and come with a good keyboard. So if, for instance, you are a student then you have a light cheap device to type up notes and save into you Google Account. When you get home you can download them to your main computer or just access them from Google Docs. If someone steals your netbook it does not matter as your data is elsewhere. If you upgrade you just login and you are running as you left the old machine. You cannot seriously type on a phone. Tablet touch screens are better than phones, but not anywhere as good as a keyboard. You can add an external keyboard to an iPad and have lots more functionality, but then it will be 4 or 5 times the price and you would not want it stolen.
I cannot see a Chrome OS netbook being you only machine unless all you do is read the web and email, but I can also see that it will be very useful for a lot of people as an adjunct to their main system. It just has to be cheap enough to make it a disposable item.
To fix Skype menu colours got to Skype options and change it to "System Colors" - just run the mouse up and down the grey boxes to read what they say. Once changed and restarted it all looks peachy and fits in with the desktop.
Skype and the webcams worked out of the box on my two notebooks.
Not every piece of hardware is going to work out of the box, but most will. Installing XP from scratch is a long and tedious process, harder still without a shoe box full of old driver disks. A clean Windows 7 install is better than XP, but 7 will just not work with a lot of older hardware.
Ubuntu installs are, MOST OF THE TIME, quick and painless, but with tens of millions of users and a billion combinations of hardware there is always going to a few problem devices. Any OS install will require fiddling with drivers and installing applications, but Ubuntu is generally easier than the other Linux distros or Windows 7, and a thousand years ahead of XP. People who criticize are generally also the ones who have never installed Windows from scratch.
This forum is not the place for technical answers, for that there are the Ubuntu forums. So the only conclusion is that all of these whining posts about device "X" not working are deliberate fud.
I have an EeePC 900 and use a Globalsat BU-353 USB GPS and a Gigabyte U7000 USB DVB-T tuner. Both work well with Ubuntu. I use Me-TV for TV viewing and Navit with Openstreetmap for the GPS. Navit takes a bit of reading to set up and download the maps. I also have a Huewei E169 HSDPA USB modem that is plug and play with my provider here in Australia.
The uses for a netbook are only limited by the imagination, but IMHO what they are not good at is being small cheap notebooks - there are plenty of "real" cheap notebooks for that.
I do like the windscreen mount thanks for the tip
Abstract8
I use an external 2.5" HDD and have played two hour programs in xvid format with no audio sync problems.
Your thumb drive is not up to supplying the speed or the files are encoded at very high bit rates.
So far my only problem is losing hdmi setup and having to redo and the HDD not powering down when the unit is switched off. I hope a firmware update will address these minor niggles. I did have to reformat my USB HDD from ext3 to fat32, but that was no big deal.
I think it is a great device and the video quality at 1080p is superb even when playing back content encoded at lower resolutions.
I am with Jim, if ASUS stop making the SSD smaller models then my next one will not be ASUS.
I am just upgrading my Ubuntu Netbook Remix to "intrepid " on my 900. I have a usb gps and usb DVB TV attached to mine (as needed) and an extra 16gb SD card. It was all working beautifully with "hardy" - fingers crossed. The default Xandros is rubbish, I wonder if ASUS do it deliberately to get people to use XP.
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