RR in Wine

[Bernard Devlin]

Mikey, I've been using Linux since SuSE 5.3 (must be 10 years ago).  Whilst
many things on the server side required some tinkering in the past, that
just got better and better.  But the desktop side was woeful.  It required
someone with incredible patience to put up with it (in that first year of
using Linux I remember my joy, after weeks of trying, when I finally got
XWindows to work, even though it looked terrible because of the video
resolution)..  Whilst every year Linux advocates said 'this is the year of
the linux desktop', I never believed them and it never transpired.  But what
I've seen on my Acer Aspire One has amazed me.  Everything works.  In fact,
I get better wireless reception on that piece of el cheapo kit than I get on
my powerbook, my ibook, or my compaq Laptop.  (My powerbook often loses the
signal; the ibook can't even find the network.)

Once I enabled the full desktop on the AA1 (it required editing a couple of
lines in a file), and had access to the Fedora repositories I could install
things like Erlang and Smalltalk in a couple of clicks.  Python and perl
were already pre-installed.  As was OpenOffice. A couple more clicks, and I
was printing to PDF, just like in OS X.  Multiple desktops, just like OS X
(I know *nix had them before OS X).

It is great to finally be using a Linux laptop: I've been waiting for this
day for 10 years.  I love OS X, but the laptop prices are pretty outrageous
- I could buy 9 AA1s for the price of my 17" powerbook, and the AA1s have
all the *nix power, are faster, weigh less, and have better battery life (of
course, the screen is much smaller).  My AA1 boots to the desktop in 8
seconds, and has everything else started and connected in 40 seconds
(including negotating the wireless network connection).  My powerbook takes
88 seconds.  My Vista laptop (with at least twice the cpu power of the AA1
and the powerbook) takes 114 seconds -- and that's with Aero switched off
and no AV (with AV running it was taking so long to copy files and to
extract from archives that it was driving me crazy).

On the AA1 I'm running Lotus Notes under WINE. I would say that WINE is
working even better than Windows, because Notes is just as fast as on native
Windows, but there's no fear of viruses.  I installed a few more pieces of
Windows software in WINE - they all worked (with the sole exception of
Rev).  WINE is an amazing achievement.  I never thought they would get there
but they have.  I'm sending them the cost of a Windows license, because
otherwise I would not have been able to run Notes on my AA1.

I made a few observations on my visit to the pc store.  On day 3 of that
week I went to look at the Asus, knowing that I needed a very lightweight
laptop, but my memory was that the Asus was just not of adequate quality.
Whilst in the store I saw the AA1, and thought 'finally, something with a
reasonable build quality'.  The Asus and the AA1 were the only two UMPCs on
display.  On day 4, I went back to check that Rev would work on the AA1, and
as it appeared to do so I bought it.  When paying for it (in an otherwise
empty store), the people behind me were also buying an AA1.  On day 7, I
went back to get something else, and now the store had a whole section
displaying UMPCs - about 8 in total (mostly Linux).  That store carries at
most 2 kinds of Mac.  It's quite clear that these UMPCs are satisfying a
huge unanticipated market.

Of course, some of them come with Windows pre-installed (hard to know what
the percentages are, and hard to know just how much leverage MS has exerted
to ensure that happens -- look at what happened with OLPC).  Nevertheless,
it's clear from looking at the AA1's user forums that a lot of new people
are being introduced to linux this way. There are currently 7585 posts from
Linux users vs 2849 from Windows users.

Bernard

On Fri, Oct 3, 2008 at 6:37 PM, Mikey <mikeythek at gmail.com> wrote:

> Well, as long as this has morphed into a Linux discussion, here we go.
>
> 1) On the bad news side, the most annoying thing is the lack of
> hardware drivers for various gear, and the need to therefore work
> around some of those issues.  On this lappie, there isn't a straight
> wireless radio driver, so I'm reading through several threads on how
> to fix that - time that I'd rather spend doing something else.  There
> isn't a native driver for my mouse, so one of the things I'm used to
> being able to do with it (and I just do by instinct) causes something
> entirely different to happen instead.  A couple of printer brands
> don't work.  For as much help as most of the forums are, there is a
> lot of time to be invested and unfortunately some dead ends that are
> there.  Some applications don't run on it, even virtualized,
> apparently.
>
> 2) On the good news side, this machine is a POC.  It really is.  It's
> using a chipset and motherboard that's 4 years old (even though the
> machine was new last year).  When I have to get into Vista, I yearn to
> return to Linux.  It is SO DAMN FAST by comparison.  Holy crap is it
> fast.  It is hard to believe ow slow Vista (and even XP are) compared
> to Linux.  It's unbelievable.  There are also nifty things built in
> (that run fast) that I don't ever remember seeing in Windoze.
>
> So, I'm hoping that we can get everything resolved, because I know
> that I have to replace my old lappie shortly.  Thankfully I've been so
> busy the last few days doing things that I can easily do in Linux that
> I haven't had to think about it.  Hopefully it will stay that way.
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