My Continuing Adventures with a Netbook

So here we are fast approaching the end of January 2010 and I have itchy Netbook Operating System Syndrome, again. Having played with what i thought were the front runners in the linux distribution stakes for my Netbook OS it seems I may have missed one. One that is about to take an evolutionary step as well.

Eeebuntu currently, as the name implies, is a build of Ubuntu (9.04) for EeePC Netbooks. Now there are plenty of Ubuntu based distributions out there, in fact there are actually precious few not based on Ubuntu; Ubuntu Netbook Remix, JoliCliud, Moblin, ChromeOS, etc all have their roots in Ubuntu. And Ubuntu has its roots in Debian.

Now I’ve never really been a Debian user when it comes to servers or desktops, but truth be known, I’ve never heard a bad comment about it, quite the reverse in fact. Eeebuntu 3 is the current release and as its based on Ubuntu 9.04 the obvious question is where is Eeebuntu 4 which will obviously be based on Ubuntu 9.10, well no, it won’t. Its going back to the top of the food chain, so to speak, and will be based on Debian. So no longer will it be tied to Ubuntu’s coat tails and this could be a good thing. There are plenty of 9.101 ate my desktop stories out there and Ive had a few issues with it myself, nothing serious, but enough to taint my opinion of it.

As a precursor to the (soon hopefully) release of Eeebuntu 4 (name change required I think) I thought I would take version 3 for a spin. I’ve just gotten a little tired of UNR and its lack of finish, its good, don’t get me wrong, but its just like every linux desktop in that it feels unfinished, unpolished and, quite honestly, second class to Windows or OSx. UNR is a remix for Netbooks, but essentially its a screen real estate limited front end to Gnome and not much else.

Eeebuntu has a Netbook friendly Kernel plus EeePC friendly tools for Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, Screen, Sound and CPU mode. Other than that its a ‘full’ desktop, in so much as the GUI is full on Gnome and not a cut down. If this is a good or bad thing I’ve yet to determine. There are a few flavours to choose from, Base (my choice to start), UNR (a netbook remix, which is what Im getting away from) and a Standard version. As I prefer to pick and choose my applications and not have to remove some else’s clutter I’ve opted to install the base version.

Downloading and burning to an SD card was simple. Running as a live disk to have a quick tour showed everything to be present and correct, all working out of the box. Full installation was the usual uneventful affair and once installed and booted an update offered to update to the underlying Ubuntu 9.10, I declined and just updated the 9.04 install. So here it is, ready to be loaded up with OpenOffice, Putty, Opera 10, Skype, TweetDeck, iPlayer and a few other daily needed applications.

Downloading and burning to an SD card was simple. Running as a live disk to have a quick tour showed everything to be present and correct, all working out of the box. Full installation was the usual uneventful affair and once installed and booted an update offered to update the underlying Ubuntu to 9.10, I declined and just updated the 9.04 install.

So here it is, ready to be loaded up with OpenOffice, Putty, Opera 10, Skype, TweetDeck, iPlayer and a few other daily needed applications.

The little display on my EeePC 901 seems to cope fine with a full desktop, where I had previously thought it might not, hence my previous choice of UNR.

There is a certain pleasure in getting a desktop setup just the way you want it, I was happy with the UNR interface but over time found it limiting and ultimately short on delivery of its promise. Let’s see how Eeebuntu performs and hopefully soon how v4 raises the bar for Netbook linux distributions.

Initial impressions are good, everything I use installed without incident, I tend to keep anything other than essential offline data online these days, and this is especially true with the various portable devices I use. Dropbox and my own NAS system serve my purposes perfectly well and the odd SD card full of mp3’s gets me by.

Screen real estate on a Netbook desktop is scarce so the bottom panel bar has to go, the window list moving up into the top panel bar. Date and time was shrunk to just time. I’ve seen quite a few Netbooks running various Docks (like the OSx Dock) and though I find the one I run on my full size desktop linux PC to be a very useful way of getting to key applications there simply isn’t room on a small screen to handover space, that leaves the Gnome menu system, lets say its adequate and leave it at that for now.

#UKSNOW gives way to #UKFLOODS

With the inevitability of Simon Cowel’s next awful superstar (or RATM gaining a few hundred thousand purchasers of their records who will never play it let alone ever buy another one) we find our selves on the verge of #UKSNOW giving way to #UKFLOODS.

Here at Redwood the snow has almost completely melted, the lake has a thin covering of broken ice over most of it but its melting fast. The swans and ducks look a little happier about getting their habitat back. The lake often rises quite a bit after heavy rain and over our time here I would say we have seen it crawl up the bank by 2 to 3 feet. But the lake is not really the concern, the Loddon is.

The Loddon floods every year, certainly every year I have lived in this part of Berkshire I have read or seen it flood, with quite often disastrous results for some. Just before Christmas the following Flood Warning was issued, as far as I know its still in place. It did seem amusing to drive past the cinema and see people’s cars under water, not for the owners though I suspect.

The snow certainly caused chaos here over the last 10 days but the snow melt arriving is going to be worse. You can check flood warnings with the Environment Agency web site.

I will be keeping an eye on the local warnings, though thankfully we are high enough to not have to worry about it effecting us directly, at least for now

It seems the BBC has us down for another snow fall mid week, according to their forecast

Redwood Weather

Posted via email from Steve’s Blog

#uksnow – Snow and the Weather Station

As every one not living under a rock will know the UK has been hit by quite a lot of snow in the last week. Here at Redwood we still have 8 to 10 inches laying on the ground, now frozen as we have not see a temperature above freezing for a few days.

I’ve been watching the weather station sensors of my WS2350 out on the roof outside my office windows and its stood remarkably well to its second winter in the snow. The wind speed anemometer has not frozen and has continued to provide good readings, The temperature, pressure and humidity have provided readings as accurate as they are ever going to be and well with in the margin of error when cross checked with other local weather stations. In fact only the rain sensor lets the side down a little by having no way to distinguish between snow melt and rain fall, hardly the sensors fault I know, but it does raise the question of how one avoids measuring snow melt in the rain fall stats. Its also bound to suffer from frozen water on the tipper which when it melts will add to rain fall stats too, less of a snow issue, more a freezing temperature issue.

I was also thinking about how to deal with recording snow fall, both depth and rate. Obviously there is no sensor to record this automatically (that I am aware of) so one would need to take manual readings and record these. The excellent Cumulus software (www.sandaysoft.com) I use as my data logger and web site feeder has provision for a weather diary in which snow conditions can be recored but it does not seem like the standard Cumulus site presents this diary. Of course snow fall is one thing, sunshine is another and lightning strike, both of which can be measured by the amateur using available sensors and software. Snow, it would seem, is not so easy to measure with automation.

There was an excellent series of weather programs on the BBC Four earlier this year, The Weather (www.bbc.co.uk), in four parts. One of which covered snow in some detail. I was hoping there may be a repeat showing but I cant find them.

The excellent #uksnow twitter tag mashup by Ben Marsh (uksnow.benmarsh.co.uk) has been incredibly popular again, showing a simple picture of snowfall across the UK based on a tweet comprising your postcode then a 1 to 10 scale of snowfall. But it only records snow fall not depth (in fact it only records what you tell it so its very subjective). I think there are definitely a few changes that would take it forward and make it even more popular.

The Weather Underground (www.wunderground.com) has a fantastic mashup map, based on personal weather station feeds, such as the one here at Redwood, but again, snow is obvious by omission only.

I’m sure in places where snow fall is greater that recording and publishing methods are much further advanced than they are for the typical personal weather station, but I am curious what else I can do. Its likely that these winter conditions are indicative of future winters and that snow fall will be a useful addition to the recording going on here at Redwood.

You can follow the weather here at Redwood on the web site (weather.60redwood.com) and on twitter @RedwoodWeather

There is more snow expected this weekend

Finally, here a few pictures from my office window out over the frozen garden Redwood lake

See and download the full gallery on posterous

Posted via email from Steve’s Blog

Linux Desktop Cohesion part 1

I’m a big fan of Linux and also Windows, I work on a simple concept of using the right tools for the job. All the servers I work with are Linux based, but that’s because it provides the right environment and performance over Windows (though its a much narrower advantage now than ever before). If Windows turned out to be the right server for as particular deployment, in exactly the same way if a Sun box or iSeries did, then I would use it. Operating System Fundamentalism is pointless and does nothing to drive forward anything useful.

On the desktop it gets more complex. Windows works. OSx works. Linux really struggles. Why does Linux struggle? Well look at Windows and OSx, they do not provide a dozen different window managers, desktop managers, theme engines, windows controllers, widgets, gadgets, thingies, whatsits and godknowswhateles. They do one! I’m all for diversity and choice but how about some natural selection too? (or is that what’s happening and the Linux Desktop is breeding itself out of the gene pool?)

Under Windows or OSx pretty much every thing works in a similar way, looks the same at the application control level, uses the same mechanisms for interaction. One of Linux’s greatest features is the one thing that continually stops it making any real inroads into the desktop market. Saying Linux allows you to make it work exactly how you want it to is great, pointless, but great. Sadly though no one wants to spend a week building a desktop environment that works and doesn’t hurt their eyes. Even distributions that try to (and continue to) tidy up the mess only get so far and once you go past the very basic and very short list of distributed applications you’re lost in a sea of miss matched GUI’s and bad UX. I think a fair measure of acceptable levels of success would be to be able to move from word processor to email to IM to web to micro blogger without having to adapt to 5 different UI’s for the basic applications.

You would (sensibly) think that this mess should have been resolved by now, but in my opinion its getting worse. Its probably true to say that Gnome and KDE represent the two dominant desktops under Linux and they are both as bad as each other. I love them both but boy they make it hard to create a desktop environment that looks decent and works across all the applications required. And its not just the Linux side that continues to make a mess of it, so called ‘cross platform’ systems like Adobe AIR also make a hash of it, seriously how much of an ask is it to expect a application to use the standard frame buttons for min/max/close?

So how much of this is down to the development philosophy of ‘my way is better’, well possibly all of it. I’m not saying ‘your way’ isn’t better, but if it makes ‘your’ application behave differently then quite likely that’s going to mean it doesn’t get used as much as it would otherwise do.

The UI/UX battleground is a war torn landscape dotted with small victories lost in a mire of defeats.

Perhaps the increasing number of interface systems; desktop, web, mobile, netbook, is making for a problem that is simply too large, too out of anyone’s hands to ever be solved in a meaningful way. Gesture based multi touch can greatly simplify things and if you can think past your preconceived ideas of Windows Icons Mouse Pointer, can be intuitive and productive, but it does not lend itself easily to being a cross device method. We will see multi touch desktop based systems and even if their price makes them real they wont work as the keyboard is the primary interface and ‘touch’, multi or otherwise is a control method.

An early conclusion could be that the reason we have such a diverse ecosystem of interfaces is because no one has got it right yet, I would say that after Xerox got the basics and everyone stole/copied it progress has been very slow.

So, what do I want for my Linux desktop? Well I would like to be able to have a desktop environment where everything worked well, was easy to make it look like it is all part of the same thing (without a degree in astro-emerald-compiz-physics) and looked good out of the box. Until then I will still be using it as a desktop (alongside Windows of course) but I’ll be one where a thousand others will stick to Windows (or OSx) only.

Posted via email from Steve’s Blog

JoliCloud moves into Pre-Beta

Previously I wrote about Jolicloud while I was testing different Linux distributions on my EeePC netbook. I chose distributions that were, in theory, better suited to life with a netbook. After some basic trial use of Google ChromeOS, Ubuntu Netbook Remix, Moblin and Jolicloud I settled on Ubuntu and for the last month I’ve been using it quite successfully on my little EeePC 901.

The thing I liked about Jolicloud was its ‘Jolicloud application installer’ this provides a whole slew of applications ready to install and not just the off the shelf Linux stuff, this also has applications that would normally require you to compile from source or run through Wine (the pseudo windows emulation library for Linux)

Since that initial look Jolicloud, which is based in Ubuntu so shares the same solid foundation, has gone from alpha to pre-beta. Pre-beta drops the need to be invited to try Jolicloud and opens it up to the wider world, in their words, “We consider the product and its installation stable and simple enough for a broader release.”, I would agree.

Now the thing that potentially interests me again in Jolicloud is the ‘New UI’, reading the Jolicloud blog further reveals this to be a lot of theme and icon redesign with the goal of providing a more consistent feel to the, lets be honest, mixed bag of typical Linux distro’s.

The launcher has been given a HTML5 makeover and looks greatly improved, cleaner, clearer and ultimately more usable. Compare

with the current/old

It seems to me that if Jolicloud roll out the UI update and pull off a good attempt at a cohesive UI for Linux then they will have a success on their hands. Google’s play is to simplify (dumb down?) the UI to a HTML5 browser, but its tomorrow’s toy, Jolicloud looks set to offer this today.

Season the mix with 98% netbook compatibility and a Windows installer that will install Jolicloud alongside Windows on your netbook (assuming you have the disk space) and there might never be a better time to give Jolicloud a spin and see what the latest world of Linux has to offer the daily netbook user.

So I am going to be re-installing Jolicloud soon, once that new UI is available, and quite possibly moving on from Ubuntu Netbook Remix. That is as soon as I get hold of a new SD card to load it onto.

Posted via email from Steve’s Blog

Posterus – the evolution of online blogging?

Today I finally got around to looking at Posterus, I even sent it an email copy of a recent blog post. Result, my email is now blogged at Posterus.

If you look at the breadth of social media applications on the interweb you can see how life consuming it would be to post to even half of them on anything like a regular basis. This is why we see an ever increasing number of ‘clients’ and ’sites’ that offer to take our musings and pass them on, on our behalf, to each and every service they support and we authorise them to. In reverse there are as many sites and services that aggregate posts and present back to us a tailored and filtered view of things we find of interest above the background that is the white noise of social media.

To me Posterus represents a natural evolution, it takes the simple blog concept and makes posting simple. Send it an email, you don’t need to sign up, just send it an email. Traditionalists can sign up and set up their site, but you can just email it something. Go on try it, send an email about what toothpaste you use to post@posterous.com, your toothpaste preferences are now blogged.

This in itself isn’t particularly impressive but if I instruct Posterus accordingly it will post to pretty much the rest of the social media world as well, all from my one email. So Posterus can become the central hub of my social media posting world, write once and once only. My random scribblings of totally pointless rubbish can now be made so much easier, email Posterus and let it twitter it, facebook it, and so on. Its like spray painting the underpass with graffiti then having a little army of vandals go and spray paint your message every where else.

Once you’ve posted you can follow the returned email and go claim your blog, set it up, theme it, make it yours. Much like you would do with any other blog really.

At this point I have three thoughts on this

1. This is fantastic and I really like it

2. What happens when my blog is fed to every thing else and then aggregated back, do the aggretators count the content once or many times?

3. How much fun is it going to be to add the post@posterus.com address to the emails at work and watch the enhanced carnage of the ‘reply to all’ button

http://stevewardell.posterous.com/posterus-the-evolution-of-online-blogging

Browsers – one ring to rule them all

There are plenty of web browsers for us to choose from. The fact that are plenty is a web site designers nightmare because mostly none of them truly follow the defined standards properly, they all add things, they all do it slightly different. Viewing a web site in a browser that doesn’t render the web site correctly can be annoying or downright painful, it may mean the site is unusable.

Web site designers employee as many tricks as they do good design practices to deal with this and still they can be beaten, how many people are still using Internet Explorer 6 and for how much longer?

In my work I spend quite a lot of time using different browsers, so I have Internet Explorer 8, Firefox 3.5, Google Chrome and Opera all installed on my Windows desktop.

However, I don’t just use Windows, I also use linux. My Ubuntu 9.10 desktop comes with Firefox as the  default. I also have a netbook, which now runs Ubuntu Netbook Remix 9.10, thats Firefox too. Then there’s my PDA/Cell phone, a Sony Ericsson Xperia X1, this has Windows Mobile 6.1 and comes with both Internet Explorer and Opera Mobile. Then there is my other cell phone, a little Nokia 6210 Navigator, that runs S60.

What I need is some continuity, a browser that, broadly speaking, is the same on all platforms. One that can be my browser of choice, the default, no matter which device I’m using and will, more or less, work the same, render the same (within the confines of the device, of course) and not be an annoyance to use.

You would think that my requirement shouldn’t be that big a deal, right? Well it is.

What if we dropped the pda/cell phones off the requirement? Well it doesn’t really help that much, our choice is pretty much Firefox. Google Chrome could be used but its not officially available on linux yet and besides I don’t want to drop my pda/cell phones from the requirement. I do accept that my requirement may be a minority request though.

So here is the requirement

• Must be able to download and install easily, no messing about with source, compiling, etc.
• Must support Windows Vista and Windows 7
• Must support Ubuntu 9.10 and Ubuntu Netbook Remix 9.10
• Must support Windows Mobile 6.1 on Sony Ericsson Xperia X1
• Must support S60 on Nokia 6210 Navigator
• Must render the sites I use in a usable manner
• Ideally share a common ‘cloud’ of bookmarks
• Nice if it handled email
• It MUST work, browsing should be an easy experience, not a chore.

Who are the candidates? I checked on wikipedia and this list seems to be

• Internet Explorer
• Safari
• Opera
• Chrome
• SeaMonkey
• Camino

Now this is just part of the whole list, trust me (or don’t and go look for yourself) there are a lot of browsers out there.

It doesn’t take long to whittle that lot down to one, in fact the only one that can support my requirement (and more besides). Opera seems to support almost everything out there in one of its forms, everything except the iPhone.

Welcome to Opera.

Opera has been around for quite a while, from their web site

“Opera started in 1994 as a research project inside Norway’s largest telecom company, Telenor. Within a year, it branched out into an independent development company named Opera Software ASA.

Today, Opera Software develops the Opera Web browser, a high-quality, multi-platform product for a wide range of platforms, operating systems and embedded Internet products – including Mac, PC and Linux computers, mobile phones and PDAs, game consoles, and other devices like the Nintendo Wii, DS, Sony Mylo, and more.

Opera’s vision is to deliver the best Internet experience on any device. Opera’s key business objective is to earn global leadership in the market for PC/desktops and embedded products. Opera’s main business strategy is to provide a browser that operates across devices, platforms and operating systems, and can deliver a faster, more stable and flexible Internet experience than its competitors.” – http://www.opera.com/company/

I’ve been using it now for the last 12 months or so and I am impressed, hell its even the browser on the Kid’s Nintendo Wii. In every day use I’ve had no real problems but I do come across the odd site that doesn’t want to render quite right, this is more to do with the site than the browser, however that means a switch to one of the others. Typically this is so rare that its not an issue, in fact its just as likely to occur with any of the browsers. Sometimes its more an issue of linux not supporting all of the rich web media as well as it could in most cases.

Opera also has Opera Link, this is a portal system that allows you to, among many other things, synchronize your bookmarks to a single account and share that account on each device. This means if I update a bookmark or a start page on my linux desktop when I come to log in on my Windows desktop the same change is there. This feature alone makes life so much easier, if it ever extends to the mobile version as well it will be fantastic.

Update : Opera Mobile 10 Beta 2 adds Opera link to the mobile version, providing synchronized bookmarks and more between Windows, Linux and Mobile (S60 and Windows Mobile)

Would I stop and use something else? Of course, if something else comes along and is better I will use it. This is about getting what I need from the browser, my requirement is what is important, not the tool used to deliver it.

Use your PuTTY SSH Key on linux or Mac

I look after an ever growing number of linux servers as part of my job, almost all of this I do remotely and with the help of our data centre.

All remote access is by secure keys NOT passwords. I use PuTTY SSH terminal on windows so I wanted to use the same key on my linux desktop with, as it happens, Gnome Terminal. I could have just generated a new key pair on linux but that seemed silly.

First export your PuTTY key using PuTTYGen Conversions option and Export as OpenSSH key. Save the file with a sensible name. This is your PRIVATE key, this is the part you DO NOT give out. If this ever does get out in the wild you need to remove the public key from all servers and build a new key pair. If you don’t have a password/pass-phrase on your key you should add one.

Now copy the exported private key to your linux (or Mac, its exactly the same process) home folder, or where ever.

OK, you now have your private key on your linux desktop (or Mac), you need to set the right file permissions on it, ‘chmod 700 private_key_filename’, if you don’t do this it wont work (and the number of times I’ve missed this part…)

Now you should be able to SSH into your server

ssh -p port -i private_key_filename username@hostname_or_ip_address

-p port — on my servers I run the SSH daemon on a different port to 22, if you use 22 you can omit that part

-i private_key_filename — is your key that you just copied

username — is the username on the server you are connecting to, if its the same as the username on your linux (or Mac) desktop then you can omit it

hostname_or_ip_address — obvious

Mamma don’t take my Kodachrome away

I’ve been a keen photographer since I was a child. I remember acquiring my dads 35mm SLR, a Yashica TL Electro with a 50mm f1.8 lens, and snapping away on Kodachrome and then Kodacolor. It was with some sadness that, inevitably, Kodachrome passed away in June this year.

It used to be a art in itself to get anything on slide or print that bore a passing resemblance to the subject you took a photograph of.

Never being just content with taking the picture I also developed and printed my own. The smell of photo chemicals washing over film and paper and the sheer magic of watching the image appear is an experience now almost completely lost and I think something that will, and should, be missed.

Now, as with all things, technology marches on and its never been better for the photographer. The digital age has provided easy to use, accessible tools to capture, manipulate and print our pictures.

But its important to remember why you have a camera. Its not because its the latest technological masterpiece, its because you want to take great pictures. I’ve been through a stream of different cameras over the years, taking in

1. Yashica TL
2. Canon A1
3. Canon T90
4. Minolta Dynax 700
5. Minolta Dynax 800
6. Canon EOS3
7. Minolta Dimage7 (hateful thing)
8. Canon EOS40D

I’m often asked by friends and relatives ‘what camera should I buy?’ or more often, “what do you think of abc, is it any good?”, the question seeming begging for an answer that will guarantee any and all future photographs are worthy of Magnum.

In truth I think today you would be hard pushed to buy a ‘bad’ camera. Interestingly though hardly ever do they ask, “what is the lens like on abc?”, or , “which bounce head flash gun should I buy with abc?”, two questions that just through asking show a path to much better pictures than “it has 15 megapixels, is that enough?”.

The modern digital compact is a marvel of performance and price. The D-SLR though is where things can get quite complex, but don’t let them. In over 30 years of taking photographs I would say the thing that will make you keep taking them is using a camera that you enjoy using. That may sound simple, and it is, but its also true.

My eldest son (Eos40D, f/5.6, 1/250 sec, 78mm (iso400)

My first foray into the digital world, at the time I had been using an EOS3 for a few years, was a Minolta Dimage 7. Now this thing at the time along with the Nikon of more or less the same spec and price was supposedly the dogs dangly bits. I hated it. Almost from the minute the novelty of ‘going digital’ had worn off, the cracks started to appear. Now at this time a D-SLR was something that required a second mortgage, the Dimage was a new breed, sort of compact SLR. The Fuji was the popular choice but I had loved the two previous Minolta SLR’s I had owned (in fact I would say the Minolta Dynax 800 was one of the best handling cameras Ive ever used) so I went for the Minolta, an IBM 1GB microdrive (at the time this cost about £200, 1Gb Flash CF is 20 quid these days, if that!) and a few sets of high power rechargeable batteries.

Well, this thing sucked down batteries like nothing I had ever seen, the images were great, fantastic quality, but using it, well it was an ergonomic wreck, I couldn’t find a comfortable way to handle it and more often than not it came out, snapped few pics then went away. Hardly the camera that was going to capture the great shots when it spent most of its life in the camera bag. I found myself using my EOS3 and more and more Velvia, rather than embracing the digital age I was going retro.

When the thing finally broke, and it wasn’t actually that long, I was almost relieved. I went back and stuck to film for quite a while. Then the EOS20D arrived on the scene, at this point my interest in a D-SLR was awakened. The EOS30D arrived and I would have jumped in at this point save for the rumors of the next model, I waited and then plunged in with the EOS40D. My existing lens all fitted (albeit with the 1.6x multiplier as the sensor is not full frame), flash, all the bits I used with my EOS3. I added the additional battery grip to give me a vertical hold shutter release and to be honest I felt like I had the modern equivalent of my Minolta 800 back, it all just felt… right. Because it felt right it gets used and its a pleasure to use, I pay attention to my subject not my camera.

So my advice about which camera to buy..set your budget then go to your local store and play with them, if it feels right in your hands you will use it and you will get results, if it feels wrong, try another. Budget for a few memory cards, a bounce head flash gun (trust me on camera direct flash will be a huge disappointment) and the right lens. Now take photographs, lots of them, don’t take one snap of your kids, take a hundred, then take some more.

Windows, linux or Google?

It doesn’t take a tech genius to realise how much of a player Google’s ChromeOS could become in the netbook arena. Ignore all the talk for now, its just an open source preview and their desperation to show something is coming. It doesn’t make sense until they get closer to launch and (or) the first leaked hardware is shown.

But here is the pitch; you’re in PC World, well you’re not because you never would be, but Mr and Mrs Wewantanetbookforlittlejohnny are in PC World. They walk admiringly past rows of shiny Macs and start poking at the Acer’s and the Asus’, the Samsung’s and the HP’s, the netbooks.

As we have no known hardware differentiators at this point lets skip that part and come back to it in 6 months time.

They look at the Windows netbook. Its going to be either still running XP or maybe by now its got Windows 7. Its recognisable, somewhat familiar and they don’t take too long to find the web browsers, see the Google search page and their gmail account, they can even find Flickr and this new fangled twitter thing that littlejohnny keeps raving about. Yep, Windows netbook seems to have it all and all is good with the world.

Next they see the linux based netbook. Now the eye is caught by the price tag, its cheaper than the windows netbook, possibly by some margin. Then they start to prod it and look at each other, “what is this?”, “where is the start thingy?”, the conversation doesn’t really go very much further. Its not familiar, in fact it can seem downright alien. They look lovingly back to the windows netbook and start to look for a salesman to do the deal.

Now then, this we all know. Netbooks arrived with linux, various distros, mostly horrid, all perfectly useful and workable. Then XP arrived and linux disappeared like the dinosaurs.

Enter stage left, Google.

Mr and Mrs Wewantanetbookforlittlejohnny switch it on and oh, its on, that was fast!

Oh there is the Google search page and gmail, that all looks familiar. Pretty quickly they are at home with it. The price tag is good and the sales sheet talks about; no messy software updates, all safely backed up online, easy to use, all your web applications. Sold!

linux is trying to build a UI that can work and provide an experience that allows users to ‘use’ the netbook and not have to fight the OS. Moblin, Ubuntu UNR, these are valiant efforts. But they are not there yet, not for a mass market. I use UNR on my netbook every day, everything works perfectly, I love it. I use linux on one of my desktops, windows on another, windows 7 on a laptop. I am not a typical user, Mr and Mrs Wewantanetbookforlittlejohnny are!

Google will steal this market from linux by being linux but calling it Google. Canonical know it thats why they are working with Google.

The choice could be a Windows 7 netbook or a Google netbook, the decision will be made based on price and Google is banking on delivering a hardware device that can be cheaper than the one needed for Windows.