EEE PC: More Conclusions

I've been using the EEE as my primary system for over a month now. So what's it like?

First the upsides.

My data is always with me. That's the primary reason we use computers; to have access to our data and services. I always had my computer on at home with secure shell open and waiting for my connections in the first place; I could access it from a laptop or other computer when away. Now I have that data whenever my netbook is with me, meaning accessing it is a bit faster (since I'm not editing a manuscript over a network connection, for example). It also means that I can access the data when I don't have a network connection available.

This thing is a tough little computer. The hard drive in the 701/4G Surf is not a standard drive, meaning no spinning platters with a little read/write head floating a hairs' breadth from the surface of the metal, further meaning that if it were dropped or there are extremes in temperature it would scrape the platter and possibly damage the head or media. It also means it runs quieter and requires less cooling.

It's small. This thing takes portability to heart; it's so lightweight that I think the Vaultz case I use to carry it actually weighs more than the netbook.

It runs Linux. I know Linux. It's usable, it's relatively small, and commands that work on my desktop at work also work on my netbook. I now have it running the Ubuntu Netbook Remix, so it stays up to date with security fixes and again...the commands are familiar. I can use handy tricks like redirecting Secure Shell tunnels and mounting other Linux computer filesystems with sshfs, and there's no vendor-exclusivity.

This unit happens to be one of the ones that has an underside panel that unscrews to add memory. I have a 512 meg DDR2 DIMM card running at 400 Mhz. I can probably upgrade it relatively inexpensively and without needing to solder or screw around with modifications to the unit.

Once you get the hang of it, using encryption on the laptop isn't so bad. I have encrypted my home directory so that if it is stolen, someone would have to crack the password in order to gain access to my files. If I'm not logged in or didn't leave my account logged in, my files appear as gobbledygook to anyone that tries looking at my home directory contents from a boot disk.

The unit has a built-in SD Card slot. I like it because I'm frequently transferring images from my camera and video camera to my external drives. The EEE was initially using the SD slot as additional swappable storage to make up for the small 4 gig built-in drive, but I've found that it was ahead of its time with giving access to SD cards now that so many accessories store data on them and using the USB cable can entail special drivers or instructions or software to interface with the toys. Lowest common denominator tends to be more reliable. Just insert the data card and use it like a disk volume instead of farting around with your high tech sony insta-digital-camera's settings.

Then there are downsides.

My data is always with me. If my netbook dies before I make a backup or if it's stolen, I lose my primary working set of data.

The drive in it tends to be on the slow side. I'm pretty sure this thing is using something more akin to an internal flash drive than an SSD drive because I've read information and seen video of SSD-equipped systems and they are fast compared to standard drives. this thing has a tiny amount of storage space and tends to crawl. It could very well be the sub-par specs compared to today's machines; it wouldn't be the first time I've hit bottlenecks that I didn't think were caused by a particular technology (i.e., a server that was slow and I thought it was the network getting bogged down, only to discover that indeed we've hit a point where the RAID controller and slower drives couldn't keep up with data requests!)

The battery life is sub-par. I bought a new battery thinking the old one was dying; nope, I still get around two hours of usable time on it. Very annoying, given the small screen and lack of spinning drive. The time on comparable netbooks today is closer to six hours or more. Either the battery technology on this is really crap or there's somthing quirky in the early generation 4G's.

It's small. The portability comes at a price. I wish there were some easy way of getting a virtual keyboard or a keyboard that expanded; the keys on this unit are small, and my fingers are big. I know I've brought this up before. My take is that I can almost type on it well. My error rate is definitely higher, and I am glad when I use it at home that I have a USB keyboard to plug into it so the "native" keyboard is more of a fallback while on the road. It's annoying but not a dealbreaker.

Linux was created for geeks, by geeks. It scratches personal itches, meaning that usability "papercuts", as they're called by Canonical's CEO, aren't bandaged unless a particular programmer is irritated by it enough to fix it. More often than not that means that Linux afficionados find workarounds and make excuses, saying that it's not hard to get around the issue, just do XYZ. That works well for them, but makes the Linux system look piss poor when comparing a simple, everyday task on a Mac running OS X (which is running a derivative of UNIX under the hood) and a Linux system side by side and it just works on the OS X system. I shouldn't have to use workarounds after two decades of development under Linux.

What kind of tasks? This is another papercut. I use a desktop monitor at home, an LCD panel. I plug it into the Mac, the Mac recognizes it and sets the display and refresh rates correctly. I have the monitor in front of me and the notebook on my right; on the Mac I tell it to arrange the monitor on the notebook's left and then dragged the strip on the virtual monitors to the LCD panel, turning it into my primary display. Works great. I was pleasantly surprised when I connected it up again the other day and the display came up as my primary display again, complete with doc and menu bar, with the notebook acting as a secondary display. It must have filed away some information about my LCD panel to remember my settings. Nice!

The netbook, however, loses this configuration. I connect the monitor up and boot the netbook. Inevitably, the first time it discovers the monitor, it mis-sets the refresh rate so that things are readable, but vibrating so fast that graphics look like they're being buzzed visually. Highly annoying. Oddly enough, I reboot the computer, and it will display things more sharply, like the second time around it discovers the proper refresh rate. Two boots. Every time.

Furthermore, if I try rearranging the displays, it won't set the graphics properly. I lose the menu bars and task bars, I can't use the netbook with the monitor attached anymore because I've basically lost all the control elements. I need to disconnect the monitor and re-set my settings to fix it. No matter how I try to set it or arrange it, the netbook screws it up. So I'm left with my primary display being on the netbook on my right side, and dragging my windows to the right hand side of the netbook's display to have it "wrap" to the primary monitor I want to use, then re-maximize programs. It appears that the primary display on the netbook/Ubuntu system is the monitor that is set to be on the "left" side of the virtual displays. Since I can't rearrange the displays and have it properly arrange graphical elements like menus, I can't move the Samsung LCD monitor to the left; the netbook always thinks it's on the right. That sucks.

I think the USB controllers on the netbook are slow, or the combination of memory/CPU/controller makes it slow. The netbook has a tremendous system load appear if I copy a lot of data over the USB bus to external Western Digital drives. Given that the netbook has a low amount of storage to begin with, this really means that things I occasionally do on computers...audio or video editing, for example...are out of this system's reach. It can barely watch YouTube videos, let alone edit them. Using external drives to store large data files would be painful to even contemplate.

Power is screwy on this thing. I keep getting this "your battery may be bad" error. I looked into it after I replaced the battery and it still had the error message; turns out that the unit is apparently known for it. The circuitry reports the power level to the operating system as a percentage, so the operating system interprets it as being at 1.9% power since it's converting the percent to another percent; it's suppose to report the power output in mAh. 100 mAh on a battery reporting itself as having a capacity of 5200 mAh is indeed going to screw up the math, and it appears that no one is going to fix this issue with a patch specific to the ASUS battery model in question within Linux.

Related to power, when this gets low on power it just shuts off. Blip. All work not saved is gone. No warning. The MacBook I use from work will try to go to sleep or hibernate to save your work, and give ample warning. The most warning this gives is a red battery display in the upper corner of the menu (which I configured to show that information) and if I don't keep an eye on it, blip it shuts down straight dead. It's a nasty surprise.

There is no disc drive. I know this cuts down on power use and size, but still it's a little bit of a pain not to be able to burn discs or access burned discs, especially when Ubuntu's built-in support of disc burning trumps OS X's way of handling it in my opinion (in OS X it looks like I'm burning aliases instead of files. I was sure when I first did it that I actually burned a disc of shortcuts instead of the content I actually wanted. Not user friendly in that aspect. Ubuntu uses Brasero to open a window in which it looks like I'm dragging copies of my files to that window, then click the big "burn" button to finalize it.)

Conclusions...

I've been using it exclusively for my desktop work at home. I am able to use it for most things I need; but I am limited, and those limitations chafe me. I can't watch many Youtube videos because it stutters on some of them horribly; I'm better off using my iPod. I can't use my computer to sync my iPod; but I already have a Windows computer to which I connect it with iTunes (and use my netbook to VNC into the headless Windows computer to do updates and maintenance.) I can't run Virtualbox...I suppose I could, but man it would be horribly slow, and there's no way I could create a hard disk bigger than a couple hundred meg at most without an external drive, and that would make access even slower.

The tasks I primarly focus on...remote control of the Windows system for my iPod, editing my manuscript of a novel, composing email in Thunderbird and reading mostly static web content...it works okay for those tasks. It does get bogged down with flash content to the point where it'll stutter the interface (the web browser will "pause" as it loads content, making the menus and tabs unusable for up to thirty seconds at a time.)

It's portable and it boots relatively quickly. Actually running of tasks seems to slow it down, but booting isn't that bad, despite running with encryption on the home directory.

I am able to get my primary work done, just with a little more care and a few more...papercuts.

In the end there are systems today available for under $500 that are refined versions of this 701. Unfortunately most of them are Windows 7-based so support for Linux is limited to what you can find from other netbook pioneers and experimenters online before buying, and since netbooks often have specialized design considerations there is an increased chance that something won't work properly due to driver issues if you try installing Linux on a new netbook. Would I consider getting a new netbook to use as my primary system? I'd consider it. I'd like to find something that addresses limitations in storage and speed, but again that influences some of the things I like about this unit...size, quiet running, and the flash memory instead of regular hard disk drive. Most of the cheaper units out there use micro drives so there's plenty of storage (if it has Windows, it needs that extra storage). On the other hand the battery life has increased to 6+ hours despite the slightly larger displays and traditional hard disks.

So the unit is usable, but I'm on the lookout for something better down the road. If I had a ten star rating system I'd give it an overall six for my purposes; satisfied enough to keep using it, but I definitely look around at Sam's Club and Amazon and NewEgg at the current crop of systems and wonder if I have enough money to buy something that might possibly fit my needs better.

EEE PC: The Experiment Continues

I've been continuing to use the hardy little EEE PC with Ubuntu Netbook Remix on the 701 (4G) model netbook, and so far it's not been too bad.

Yes, the keyboard is still cramped.

But...it's the most portable little thing I've ever used, and the keyboard isn't an issue for extended use when I have it "docked" to a USB hub (with a USB keyboard attached).

Right now I'm waiting for a $65 battery to come in the mail. The current battery is giving me roughly 2-1/2 hours of charge at a time, which is probably average for an older laptop, but a netbook should give at least 4 (if not closer to 6) hours on a full charge. The production date on this unit looks to be around 2007, so I'm not too surprised at the reduced performance if the laptop is physically around 3 years old, even if it didn't get a lot of use before. I'll probably know more once the new battery comes in.

That means that my netbook is going to end up costing me roughly $80 with the keyboard and battery replaced.

I was hesitant to use this as a primary system because there would be limitations. Now that I've used it more, how does it stack up?

Fairly well, I was surprised to learn.

Fairly well in that I have aggravations, but nothing that makes me (so far) throw my hands up and give up. The limitations are a combination of technical and operating system issues.

The aggravations seem to be usability limitations of Linux at times. I'm saying that because most of the limitations I hit with Windows (and I'm a Windows XP fan out of the Windows family; I hate the arbitrary security and DRM limitations that are layered into each subsequent release of Windows with a passion) seem to be architecture and design issues. For example, when Windows gets infected with malware, the easiest, most thorough solution is to wipe the drive and start over. Most malware manages to get its hooks so deeply embedded into the Windows system (or mucking up your profile) that really anything else is a half solution.

Linux, not so much. It either works, or it doesn't. That's its major limitation. It was designed by geeks for use by geeks and damn anyone else...you're just not computer-friendly so it's your own fault.

What limitations am I running into?

I already mentioned flash movies bogging the system down. What do you expect? This tiny miracle has 512 meg of RAM and a fly's sneeze of storage space. I can play one video at a time, and I don't mind being patient when looking at things online most of the time.

Video. I hooked up my external 22" LCD panel to the laptop, and it sees it automatically. Yay! I have it arranged with the LCD in front of me and the laptop on the right. Now, ordinarily, you go into the display properties and tell it to put the big monitor on the left and the built-in display on the right and you're good to go...you can span the mouse across the desktops as if you have one big, wide display. Well, in theory this works. In practice, it throws my EEE into a tizzy.

It will detect the LCD and put it on the right hand side of the netbook, reversing my layout. If I try to put it the other way around, it seems to get confused with where to put the primary display (like the menu bar), and really throws the resolution into a tiz as well. Just totally confuses it. So I end up leaving it reversed and remembering to move the pointer the "wrong" way to get to the correct screen.

Second, there seems to be a slight discrepency in refresh rate. Sometimes it uses 60 hz, sometimes 75 hz. The effect? Anything on the LCD panel gets these tiny, fast moving "wiggles", like goose bumps on meth. It's the visual equivalent to a buzzing. Sometimes restarting the netbook seems to fix this. Doesn't seem to hurt the LCD, but it's annoying if you're looking at the display for long periods of time.

Mounted volumes. I have a 2 gig SD Card in the system to store my files along with 2 external 250 gig drives for backup (well, now semi-permanent storage) connected via the USB hub. The netbooks boots and sees them but doesn't always mount them automatically. I go to the files and folders panel and have to click them each once to get them to mount so I can use them. Why? I have no idea. I discovered it while running my backup script and having it throw an error at me saying that the external drives weren't hooked up even though they had powered up and were showing up in my drive display. The netbook saw them, but wouldn't mount them until I clicked on them. Worked like a charm after that.

These are the kinds of usability problems that annoy me with Linux on the Netbook. I'm reminded of them because I recently had a little project that I was working on; I'm trying to create a relatively simple Visual Basic program for someone where I work, and that means I needed to use a Windows system.

I decided to use the virtualized version I have on a MacBook (1 gig RAM, 2 Ghz processor dual-core, the MacBook black notebook) running on Virtualbox to use Visual Studio Express 2008.

I connected it up to the hub and monitor so I'd have a little more comfort while puzzling out the programming problem. The Mac detected the display and used the proper resolution without issue. It let me place it to the left side of the notebook without a problem.

The computer saw the two external drives but because they are Linux-formatted with the EXT3 filesystem, it couldn't read them, so it offered to erase them. Um...eject...eject...that's not a problem with the Mac, I expected this to happen. Didn't hurt them.

The Mac asked about my keyboard; I had to press two specified keys to identify it, and it was happy after that.

From there...things seem to just work. Display settings, keyboard, mouse...happy. The Mac isn't without warts, but it has more of the end-user experience ironed out, while Linux has more burps and hiccups along the way. It's sad because the Linux system is fantastically secure and capable, but when you run into issues with something that should be simple for the end user like arranging your desktops between two displays, it's extremely frustrating. Especially when I hook up a Mac and am able to alter resolutions and arrangement of displays without losing my desktop, my control programs (which I did on the netbook and had to restart it to have it redetect the proper display resolutions without the 22" display connected), or guessing where my programs went when it decided to place the programs off the display area somewhere.

I should not be afraid to change my display settings! With the Mac I'm not. With the netbook, there's always a little crossing of fingers.

On the other hand, the Mac is heavier, bigger, and not as portable (I guess the heavier and bigger parts sum up as being a little less portable, huh?). It has a spinning disk drive that makes it a little more susceptible to damage if there's a fall or bump, and the larger display increases the chances of having the LCD get damaged as well. Not cheap to fix!

Is it the ideal desktop? The jury is still out. I'll have more as I solidify my judgment more. Right now I'm using the Mac as a web browsing and Windows-virtualizing machine for the project, while my EEE is doing the day-to-day email and web browsing and editing of documents, so I'm comparing the two. But to this point so far the EEE has worked fairly well for the "average" use scenarios. I'd never try virtualizing anything on it, but I rarely have had actual call to do that...

More on the EEE PC

I had previously posted that I was confiscating my teenage daughter's EEE PC (the 4G model, also known as the 701) because:
A) she abuses technology in ways I didn't think was possible
B) she never uses it
C) she broke the keyboard, after having it sent back for a factory repair on a power/motherboard issue
D) she consistently had it falling on the floor and it was never her fault, it was always her little brother's fault that the power cable was strung across the room and the hyperactive 4 year old would stumble over said power cable.

So I thought I'd take it and try using it. The new keyboard came in (remarkably affordable off an Amazon third-party reseller, only $15). I also had said that I erased the Asus-supplied Linux version in favor of the Ubuntu Netbook Remix from Canonical; essentially Ubuntu with a graphical shell better suited to netbook desktop real estate. That means it's actually kept up to date (boo Asus!) and it was in parity with my desktop Ubuntu system in regards to updates and fixes and applications that can be installed.

I've been using it on and off for a few days and thought I'd do a quick revisit.

First, the keyboard install wasn't that bad. There are three tiny meal clips that you have to push back, located along the top of the keyboard (near the pause, f6, and ~ keys). They kind of felt chincy in the quality, and I think I managed to scratch them, is they don't look like they're holding the keyboard very securely but the keyboard hasn't fallen off yet so...I'm going with it.

Once the clips are pushed back you lift the keyboard and slide it out of the tray slightly. There's a ribbon that is held in with two slider clips; you push the clips back towards the display (parallel to the motherboard) to release the plastic ribbon and the keyboard comes right off. Slide the new ribbon in, lock it, slide the keyboard in place, and pry the clips back over the keyboard and it's done.

Now the bigger challenge. I haven't used it to edit my novel yet, but I have done some web browsing and watching movie clips (avi, mpg, flv...) to see what it can do. The 701 has only 512 meg of RAM and a ~900 Mhz processor, and storage is a premium, so how did it handle things?

Web browsing; it's running Ubuntu, so it has the latest Firefox available (with the flash blocker to stop ads; helps with processor power too). Because of the slower processor, you shouldn't try watching more than one video at a time. You shouldn't even scroll while a flash-based player is playing or the video stutters and starts caching a bit. It's not like I'm doing high-end HD video crunching and the performance was something I found to be acceptable. There is a bit of juggling to get multiple tabs to work well and some videos don't scale properly to the oddly proportioned display resolution. Overall, web browsing is acceptable, but I'd not be beyond trying an iPad as a web browsing tool primarily due to screen real estate.

The video watching was a test in seeing what it could handle with codecs. I stuck some movies of different formats on a 2 gig SD card and tried playing them. The built-in movie player application threw up a huge number of "plugin needed" errors, then would try to download new plugins to handle various codecs. I then opened a terminal and ran "sudo apt-get install vlc" to install the VLC movie player, which handled a larger array of formats and handled them well. I had one case where the plugin installer hung on the display (movie player, not VLC related). I couldn't move it and even though the interface was responding in the background I didn't know how to get a process list up to kill the offending application or how to bring up a terminal to kill the process or how to bring up another desktop to get to a process manager from there, so my options were limited to logging in from another computer using SSH or use Control-Alt-Delete to restart the EEE. I restarted it. Not that it takes that long, but it was annoying. I need to figure out how to use a shortcut to get to another desktop or bring up a terminal session.

Other than that movies played half-decently. Surprising.

And the most obvious: keyboard evaluation. The keyboard is indeed something to get used to. Especially when you're built like a fridge, like I am. I had quite a bit of trouble not hitting the right-arrow key instead of shift, which was a pain when I tried using a spreadsheet I created in OpenOffice. But I knew this would take some work to get used to, and I'm trying to give it time (like editing my novel on it...can I get used to the annoyance?)

Any other surprises? I'm continually surprised at the software this little thing can run. I may have already mentioned that I installed SSH and SSHD, so I can use secure shell to log into it from another Unix machine (or Windows using PuTTY). It's weird to think I'm remotely logging into this thing the size of a paperback book and then install software or alter files from a remote system. I can also use the FUSE filesystem with the SSHFS module to mount other filesystems (or the EEE's filesystem) using secure shell, so I can edit and manipulate remote files as if they were local.

I also installed Synergy. If you're not familiar with it, it's a GREAT application for people with multiple computers in the same area. I wrote about it before but here's a quick overview: it's a software KVM without the V.

Scenario: as I type this I'm using my desktop computer to enter text on the blog. Sitting next to my keyboard is the EEE. I'm bouncing between the blog and the EEE to do updates as well as configure a few things on the EEE. Rather than stopping what I'm doing and task switching to the tiny keyboard and touchpad of the EEE, I am using Synergy on the netbook and the Synergy Server on my desktop to link the two computers. I just slide the mouse off the left side off my desktop computer and the mouse "appears" on the EEE display, meaning now my keyboard and mouse are focused on the EEE. I type and the characters are on the EEE. I move the mouse, the pointer moves on the EEE. I slide the mouse off the right hand side of the EEE's display, and my mouse reappears on my desktop computer's display.

Neat, huh? Neater still is I can have four computers do this off the "Synergy Server" computer: top, bottom, left and right. And thanks to secure shell, I can encrypt the connection so the connection links are cryptographically secure.

It's a neat way to do work on the desktop and laptops at the same time, and the software (ssh, synergy, etc.) are all in the Ubuntu repos (and synergy itself is cross platform, so you can mix and match Linux, Windows and OS X clients and servers).

The keyboard is definitely annoying at times; I'm working to adapt to it, so I'm going to reserve judgment for the moment. In the meantime I'll note that the EEE has managed to recognize and use a USB keyboard without problem, just as it has recognized a USB CD burner (how I installed Ubuntu NR in the first place) and the SD card and a USB memory stick without issues.

The thing that is simultaneously neat and a bullet in the foot is that this is, for all practical purposes, Ubuntu Linux on a miniature PC. It can do a huge number of things, but it sometimes takes some stretching and bending to accomplish them.

For example, installing Synergy, VLC, and SSH were straight from the repos, no real work necessary (if you're used to Ubuntu, anyway). Just select and install. Or from the terminal, issue the apropos apt-get command. But the new interface tries to hide the ability to access multiple desktop workspaces (kind of like virtual desktops). Hitting control-alt- will select a new desktop so I can organize my applications, or in the case of the one app getting "stuck" I might have been able to switch to another desktop to pull up the terminal and regain practical control of my EEE. When I tried it, it wouldn't let me. Just kept telling me I had one workspace.

But...it could do it. It does support multiple workspaces. It just wouldn't let me because it was configured for one, which is a sensible default when the screen is this tiny, I suppose. I couldn't use the workspace manager to configure a new desktop the way I do on my desktop because that "useless" interface was removed for the streamlined Netbook Remix interface.

So the fix is to open a terminal and enter the command "gconftool-2 -s /apps/metacity/
general/num_workspaces 4 --type int" where the 4 is the number of workspaces I want. Intuitive? Heck no. It was a total Google job to find this solution.

And now I have 4 workspaces. But here's the thing; I'm mixed on this feature. The fact is that a tiny device like this is kind of stretching the computer metaphor. Now small can you make a computer before the desktop paradigms become stretched too thin? I'm multitasking desktop applications on something I can barely type on because the keyboard's too small, with a processor that is being pushed to it's limits if I have OpenOffice open and a web browser playing YouTube videos at the same time, with RAM that is furiously juggled because it's only 512 meg. The graphics subsystem can barely handle itself let alone adding the 3-D candy of Compiz (which is turned off, but seems to be available as an option).

In short there are a number of features on the EEE that are probably inappropriate for the platform but are available, taking up memory space or storage space (which is a premium on this little thing), just as they are available on my desktop. Is it really necessary to have the same features on a 512 meg 900Mhz system with 4 gig of storage and a all-in-one design the size of a paperback book as my dual-core 2.13 Ghz desktop with 2 gig of RAM and 200+ gig of storage?

Probably not, at least not for the average user. Still, I can connect a USB hub to the EEE, and from that have a printer, keyboard and mouse, and I can hook up an external monitor, even if the resolution isn't all that great due to limitations of the graphics processor. In other words, the EEE can be a really portable computer for going between work and home with emergency access to my data stored on it when I'm in between "docks".

That's the only reason I could see for using netbooks like this with features that don't really scale down this small; portable desktops where you can dock it for convenient access, while still having access to your data while out at the coffee shop.

I'm still using it and adapting to it. I find myself leaning on the Mac laptop still for things because while it's not as small or light, it does just work, and I'm not fighting frustration with the keyboard.

But I did swear I was going to give the mini-keyboard a shot...so look forward to another installment of triple-EEE info in the near future!

Karmic Koala Released!

Great news, Ubuntu 9.10, called Karmic Koala, has been released!

I upgraded my workstation at work and my home workstation and so far haven't had major issues.

It took about four hours over a dedicated connection to do an in-place (read: told 9.04 to upgrade to 9.10 instead of formatting and reinstalling a clean version) upgrade. Probably would have gone faster if I tried using a CD image to upgrade, but I haven't tried that. I just opened the update-manager and clicked on the button that said a new release was available; upgrade-manager handled the rest.

While it upgraded I couldn't help but think about the people that are upgrading to Windows 7. People are trying to grab release candidates, downloading pirated versions, paying hundreds of dollars for a store copy, or having to buy a new computer to get the latest version of Windows.

Usually the upgrades go fairly well, but when the upgrade goes wonky...I get especially mad, because it usually means I paid to get screwed. I paid money to lose my time in the upgrade, have hassle in trying to get things working, and basically I paid to create a headache for myself (whether the upgrade went well or not I still lose time in the process of upgrading). I also get more irritated at the idea that I paid for the operating system only to run into later headaches with the OS, but that's another topic.

Karmic, on the other hand, is Ubuntu Linux. Free. It has some irritations and quirks; it's not perfect and I would never claim it was. And I was upgrading to the latest and greatest version without paying anything but time. If something broke, I lost time. Not money. No expectation of support, and no resentment at a company charging me to get stabbed with such expectations.

My upgrade went well both times with one minor exception; one irritation with Ubuntu has been the network manager. It sucks. Never seems to work right. So the first thing I do is install Wicd, which drops in palce and replaces the network manager. My work system kept everything just fine, while my home system replaced Wicd with Network Manager again, and lost my static IP entry and thus broke my port redirection from my home router. I came home, checked out what happened, and told Synaptic to reinstall Wicd and all worked fine again.

I'm still experimenting with Karmic to see if things that quirked and broke in the previous release work in this one. Some of my compiz graphics coolness would malfunction or barf on my home system so I had to turn it off; now I've reactivated some of the goodies to see how well (or horrible) it works now. My work system used to lock up if compiz effects were left on too long. My home system just had weird application crashes. I upgraded before Halloween and so far it seems to be working better.

Canonical (the company behind Ubuntu) has integrated a new cloud-storage system so I could, if I wished, upload 2 gig of data for free to a storage area on their servers that then I could access from any other Ubuntu system or use a web browser to download documents and files to other systems. Not something I see me using, but maybe in the future something will come of it since Apple has been trying to leverage their version of cloud storage with Mobile Me and Microsoft has a trial system in place as well.

Canonical also changed the software installation system. Right now it's mostly eye candy changes, not something overly functional, and they're expecting the next release (probably next April) to include greater functional changes to the installation system so users can find and install software more easily.

Other than that, it's a lot of incremental usability and bug fixes. Nice touches, nice refinements, and best of all, I didn't have to pay for the upgrade. As soon as it was ready I clicked a button and got it.

I'm sure most Windows users I know will be upgrading soon. They usually do as soon as they need a new computer, since then it's preinstalled...

The iPhone Vs. LG Voyager

It's official. The iPhone 3GS has smashed records for AT&T and Apple.

I would love to have an iPhone but the only carrier in the US is AT&T and I'm already quite invested with Verizon. Every carrier has horror stories associated with them, but in our relations with Verizon we've had good luck with customer service as well as technical service.

AT&T didn't come into our area with coverage until late in the game and when they finally did put in tower coverage the coverage was unreliable and spotty.

In other words, they left a bad taste in my mouth after seeing how they ran their business. If you followed my blog you know how I feel about businesses that seem incompetent with their customer relations.

I'm told that they're better today. I don't particularly care. There's a similar effect for restaurants. It's quite common for a restaurant to work long and hard at building a loyal number of regulars, but it takes only one bad experience to lose a customer forever.

That doesn't mean I don't wish I had an iPhone. I have an iPod Touch, the iPhone's close cousin, and I owned a Verizon LG Voyager. The iPod gives a pretty close experience to what an iPhone is like in most areas other than actually calling and texting (and a couple other features like taking photos and GPS, since the hardware isn't available on an iPod). The iPod does give the computer integration, music, podcast, and touchscreen as well as close form factor to the iPhone as well as the app store integration. It runs the same operating system as well.

Having used both the iPod Touch and Voyager, I can tell you that the interface to the iPod is light years beyond the Voyager and it's Verizon technology kin.

The touch interface on the iPod is responsive and probably three to four times more accurate than the Voyager's.

The app store on Apple is convenient and makes the iPod more flexible. Yes, Apple acts as the gatekeeper for all applications on the iPod and you won't (intentionally) find porn-based applications on the iPod/iPhone, but overall there are a simply huge number of various applications to choose from and they aren't tying you directly to Apple's brand overtly. Verizon requires you to do everything through Verizon and they're quite limiting in what I could and couldn't do on their phone.

The iPod allows for wifi access. Not so sure about Verizon's phones. It's not on the Voyager.

The iPod/iPhone was integrated with my computer. I could back it up and sync data easily with my computer, without having to find some kind of accessory kit with the proper cable for use with my particular phone. There are even applications to allow you to explore and navigate your iPhone/iPod from your computer. My Verizon phone was very much a separate accessory; it is as if Verizon is afraid of diluting their brand by allowing the customer to have any control over the product.

The only place I preferred my Voyager was the tactile keyboard. I could type significantly more quickly than on my iPod. However I could learn to work the iPhone's key display in a pinch (on the Voyager you almost had to get proficient with the full keyboard; the touchscreen was horribly inaccurate and lagged, making it nearly impossible to use.)

The Voyager was barely usable with the touch screen. For anything more complicated than viewing text messages I often had to drop to using the keyboard to get anything done; I can't count the number of times my phone thought I wanted to edit or view a contact entry when I was trying to get the damn thing to scroll. The iPod? No problem. If anything the iPod was almost too responsive, the screen just begged to be touched. The Voyager was so finicky and glitchy that it was just the opposite.

I don't know if it's a problem with Verizon just not "getting it" or if they're so stuck in some paranoid business model of controlling the brand rather than creating a great customer experience that limits them so much. Verizon has a great network, I've had excellent luck with coverage. The services offered by their website have worked well for us.

Now I just wish they had good products to match those services. I'm hoping that at some point Apple will cut their exclusivity with AT&T and create a product with Verizon...so far Verizon has show zero ability to "get it".