On my Macs I’ve been mostly happy with Firefox, but I have to admit that it is slow.  When Safari 4 came out I tried the beta and was pretty happy with it and only had a few unexplained crashes and only one of those caused me to lose some work (ironically, I was editing a WordPress entry when it crashed). I found myself using Firefox for the extensions (namely Delicious). Since the official release of Safari 4, it has become my primary browser on my Macs. The reason being speed; it is noticeably faster than Firefox. I even downloaded it on my PC so when I happen to have booted to Windoze, I run Safari.

I recently discovered DeliciousSafari and a few other extensions which work on my mac so I’m moving even further away from Firefox.

If Firefox wants to win me back, it’s got to do something about the speed. I notice it more and more now that I’m used to how fast Safari starts up, renders pages (cover flow, hot sites), etc.

On the anti-Microsoft movement, more recently than what I described in the first paragraph, I’ve tried to ditch Microsoft more and more (even though I am using Apple’s products, I just don’t get the evil vibe from Apple (but it may be coming)).  For instance, I have several computers in my office and only run Windoze when necessary. My PCs are running Ubuntu and my Macs are running OS X.  I do have to boot to Windoze on my gaming machine to play games, but that’s really the only time I’m running Windoze.  I don’t use MS Office as there are alternatives (iWork, OpenOffice, Google Docs) that work well and only open documents in MS Office if I’m concerned that an export for a co-worker or client may have gone amuck.

I was torn for a while as I already have an iPhone that handles just about anything I would do on a Netbook with the exception of document editing.  The iPhone, though tiny, is very nice for checking e-mail just about anywhere and sending back the short replies that we have become so familiar with since the days of clam shell pagers, Blackberries, and now iPhones (and other small e-mail devices).

Another reason I was torn for a while on the idea of a Netbook is that I have a laptop that I use for business and for business travel I usually lug it around. It’s not an aircraft carrier of a laptop (it’s not a 17 incher) but it’s still large and can’t just be chucked in a suitcase or backpack. I don’t like carrying it on personal weekend trips or even longer personal vacations but often find myself doing it just so I can keep in touch (even if I’m not “technically” going to be working while away from home.

Granted there are smaller full use laptops available, but since I don’t have an actual desktop at work, I think I need my 15″ Macbook Pro as I like the screen real estate and I also like the full size keyboard since I’m often writing several hours per day.

Even considering that I already have a laptop and an iPhone I often found myself reading reviewes and comparisons of the eeeeeeeeeeeeePC, Wind, Aspire One, and others. I think the coup de grace was when I actually got my hands one. I was traveling recently saw someone using an eeePC surf in the airport. I am usually an intravert but I just asked the user how he liked it. He couldn’t stop praising it and said that it is the only computer he travels with.

Now that I’ve decided I want one, I don’t know which features are a must have for me.

• I am set on Linux as I can’t stand Windoze to begin with and on a lower powered Netbook it would drive me batty. I’ll probably put Ubuntu with NBR launcher on it anyway so don’t want to pay Microsoft for something that I’m not going to use anyway.
• I think I want SSD as opposed to a magnetic hard drive as think for having it on my lap the heat and spinning hard drive would bug me. I also don’t think I need that much space as I already have an iPod so I don’t know what large media files I would put on it.
• In regards to size (and this is the most difficult decision for me), I want one that is small but I don’t know if I want the smallest of the small. I’m seriously leaning towards the eeeeeeeePC 901, but it’s one of the tiny ones and from what I hear the keyboard is an issue. Why I’m torn is I want something that is usable.
• I also want something with a super long battery life. The reason for a UMPC/Netbook is mostly form factor and I don’t want to have to keep a power brick with me all the time. If I knew I had a solid 5 hours of use, I don’t even know if I would travel with a brick unless I knew I would be away from home for extended periods of time.

I’m open to suggestions. If you have a reason you love or hate your eeeeeeePC, AAO, Wind, or other Netbook drop me a comment with your experiences.

The first order of business was to update my Mac and iPhone and they were pretty easy and benign (and the latest iPhone upgrade rocks).  I applied all the updates to several Windoze computers or Virtual Machines, and performed all the updates for the various flavors of Linux running around the house.  No problems with the basic updates.  Everything went as planned.

The next order of business was to upgrade my desktop to Ubuntu 8.10 (Intrepid Ibix) from 8.04 (Hardy Heron).  This didn’t go as smooth as I had hoped and was not as smooth as my previous experiences with Ubuntu release upgrades (I had even upgraded a virtual machine running on VMWare Fusion on my MacBook at work with zero problems).  It turned out that my video cards (it’s a gaming machine pulling double duty as an Ubuntu desktop) were configured in SLI and the driver installed with 8.10 didn’t support my cards (2x Nvidia GEForce 8600 GT).  It took quite a bit of messing around, but I finally determined I needed to download the latest (beta) driver from Nvidia, compile and install, and also make one change to the configuraion file (I needed to add a BusId “1:0:0″ line to the Device section of my /etc/X11/xorg.conf file).  This complete, I upgraded to OpenOffice 3.0, installed Songbird, Gnome Do, Avant, and a few other odds and ends.  Overall was not too big of a hassle, but I can imageine if I wasn’t familiar with downloading drivers and compileing them I would have been up a creek.  With that said, at least there were drivers…

Even though I had that problem with the desktop, I upgraded my MythTv box (Mythbuntu) and another Ubuntu desktop with no problems.  I decided to leave my Webserver (blackcow) as it is running Ubuntu 8.04 which is a LTS or Long Term Support release and the laptop isn’t doing much but sitting under my desk serving up the occasional blog entry.

I did upgrade my WordPress version on blackcow with no problems (which prompted me to write this blog entry).

What I’m getting at is that MobileMe does not support Linux.  I’m pretty sure it isn’t a compatibility or a features issue as if you spoof your browser using a well known FireFox extension (user agent switcher) you can get it to work, but why bother?  What is Apple saying to the non-Apple Hardware, non-Microsoft crowd out there?

I have an iPhone and a MacBookPro for work, but I’m pissed that I can’t have access to my address book from my eeePC or from any of my other Linux boxes.

Ubuntu Screenshot

I have to admit that the upgrade procedure in Ubuntu is yet another tick in the positive column in regards to the distribution. My install isn’t even a standard install and using the upgrade tool to upgrade from 6.10 (Edgy Eft) to 7.04 (Feisty Fawn) was a breeze.

I’m not sure why Ubuntu chooses to use these strange monikers to refer to releases, as most other linux distributions still use release version numbers. Even Apple still uses (mostly) version numbers (10.4.9) with the exception to the huge releases which are usually major version number changes (i.e. Panther, Tiger (10.4), Leopard (10.5?) (now delayed until June or August due to developers being pulled from OS X and put on iPhone)). I think back to the changes of naming of major releases and I can’t help starting to think about Microsoft and their changes from Windoze 3.1 and 3.11 to using years (95, 98) to using names (me, XP, and of course Vista (and all it’s various flavors). Likewise, we somewhere seem to have lost the use of version numbers in most Microsoft products (Office used to have version numbers, then years (2003), then names (XP (can’t remember which one came first … the banana or the egg)), and I now they are just moving to marketing terms (to try to keep Google and other “software as a service” models from gaining (more) market share) like Office Live (ROFLMAO) and yet they are back to (or continuing to) use years (Office 2007).

Regardless, the upgrade process for Ubuntu involved opening the upgrade manager, clicking the upgrade button, reviewing the changes (I think this could have been skipped, but I was curious as my install isn’t standard), and clicking install. It then downloads for an hour or more, crunches through the file changes, reboots and comes up clean. I’d be interested to see how others feel the upgrade process is when compared to other “commercial” upgrades (linux and otherwise, but I’d rather not hear about the Vista upgrade problems people experience as I’m sure that they are too numerous to count (I’ve had some folks call me in tears) (in fact, I’m boggled that anyone actually WANTS to upgrade an existing Windoze machine to Vista)).

Ubuntu

Now that I’m just about fully converted off of my old PC, I’ve decided to have some fun with it. Some folks wonder how I can consider this fun, but to each his own.

I’ve decided to try to live without Windoze. I’m sure that I”ll have to run it for some things (Stacie really likes the buttons on the front of the scanner that make “copies”), but most of those things can be done in a virtual machine. I won’t delete my XP partitions just yet, but will attempt to use native XP (as opposed to XP in a VM) as little as possible.

I started with downloading some of the live CDs/DVDs for some Linux distributions to figure out which ones I like. I tried Mandriva, Ubuntu, Kubuntu, CentOS, and openSUSE. I really liked KDE in Kubuntu, but am more comfortable with GNOME and it seems more stable and a bit faster. I narrowed my search down to CentOS, SUSE, and Ubuntu.

Next, I decided to actually install the distributions that I liked and take a whorl at configuring them and getting things set up like I like them (LAMP + Parallels + a few other odds and ends). Here is what I discovered….

SUSE
I learned to hate YaST (the configuration utility in SUSE) with a passion and also found that even with a company like Novell behind it, SUSE lacks documentation and the web documentation is not managed at all and the openSUSE wiki sucks (and I am a big proponent of wikis….as you’ll see in a minute).
The SUSE default firewall is a nice addition that the others seem to lack. However, management of the firewall is a bear (using YaST) and any modification that isn’t pre-configured in YaST (like enabling PASV ESPV ftp servers) is problematic and the YaST configuration for those configurations seems unwieldy (i.e. putting the word ftp in the port section rather than the numbers 20 and 21 and rather than putting the word ftp in the in the protocol section).
SUSE also seems to have no vision in terms of versioning releases and to the best of my knowledge had just about no concept of an upgrade.

CentOS
I liked CentOS. It’s basically a stripped version of RedHat, which I’m not about to pay for. CentOS supported several things I wanted out-of-the-(proverbial)-box. It’s use of RPM is great as most decent packages out there have RPM versions making installs and package management (including dependency checks) an easy task.
However, I found that some of the hardware support in CentOS isn’t up to par with RedHat (since it’s stripped of any of the non-GNU, non-Open Source material).
I’m still running CentOS in a Parallels virtual machine on my mac (for fun) because it installed under Parallels beautifully and even the Xconfig under parallels runs nice.

Ubuntu
My favorite of the distributions that I tried. Ubuntu is one of the ‘newer’ distributions (I used Slackware back in the 0.82 kernel days). It’s rather secure within itself, but lacks a firewall. It actually has no root login and uses sudo for most administration functions. I was very skeptical of this at first, but after playing with it for a while, I am now a fan.
Ubuntu has great hardware support and supported all of my peripherals with little or no configuration necessary. I did have to download the graphics drivers directly from NVIDIA, but that is because my video card is one of those that didn’t do so well (AGP 8x by the time most people had switched to PCI-Express).
I also liked the package management which is based on Debian and comes with apt, aptitude, and synaptic on Gnome.
The versioning vision rocks, even if it is a bit slow.
The online documentation is very well done and even the wiki is will managed and therefore finding what you need is not difficult.

So what am I going to do with all of this? Good question and I’m still trying to figure that out myself. I do know that over the next few days, I’m going to be converting all my websites currently running on my mac over to Elvis (my linux box (ask me why I named it Elvis)). I’ve already started that, but I still need to get a search engine, and some web statistics running on the Elvis. On the mac I went with Sphider and awstats which I will probably start with on Elvis. I went with those initially due to the compatibility with OS X, but now that I’m on linux which has much more support for search engines and statistics engines, I would like to branch out and try some others.

I’ll post my configuration (some of it) in the next few days once I get everything up and running. I’ll continue to use iWeb for most of my publishing, but am considering installing WordPress for my blogs and maybe even a forum application (even though it’s not long term, it give me something to do and helps me hone my system administration skills).