In my endless quest for the perfect tiny laptop, I bought an Eee 1008HA (it's shiny and black!). It came with Windows 7 Starter, which annoyed me just enough to make me feel like wiping the whole thing and installing Ubuntu linux might be a good thing. (Seriously, I have to pay $50 to get a version where I can change the desktop picture? No thanks, Microsoft/Asus.)
Now, I have about zero patience for managing my home computers. I manage servers at work, so normally if I'm troubleshooting some annoying linux problem, I'm a) getting paid for it, and b) saving the world. If I am forced to fiddle with a home machine, mostly what I am doing is wasting a valuable Sunday.
My main requirements for a laptop (any laptop) are:
- all of the hardware features work reliably.
- long battery life
- picasa
- itunes
...the first two are pretty easy. I installed the Ubuntu Netbook Remix, which has a customized UI meant for small screens, kinda like an internet phone. (I'm pretty fond of my Android which has softened me to this approach.) The main difference is that it has tabs of programs instead of a normal desktop, and all the windows are maximized by default, to make the most of really small screens. It's mostly successful. Having used it a little bit, I don't hate it enough to get rid of it.
All the laptop features work. With the previous Ubuntu release the network drivers (both ethernet and wireless) were busted with the Eee PCs, but this version was fairly flawless. The last time I installed a laptop of my own with Linux was an HP netbook about 10 years ago, with Slackware linux, which was an extremely manual process - it took me weeks to get everything working right. Things have come a long way in 10 years - I just plugged in a CD drive (a usb stick will also work) with a burned Netbook Remix CD, and everything just worked without human intervention. The Ubuntu team has done a really good job on the basic install.
Things that were hard:
- getting Picasa to work. I'm not super familiar with Ubuntu as a personal machine (I use it a lot, but I really only use the terminal and the browser), and it has a lot of terminology for stuff that is completely unfamiliar (wtf is a "synaptic"? a "software stream"? I have no idea.) Google has a Linux download for Picasa, which runs it with the Wine windows emulators, and it completely did not work - like, I click the button (or type the command) and nothing happens. The "stable" linux version is Picasa 2.7 - I was eventually able to get it working by installing the beta Picasa 3.0 version.
- iTunes. This is so unlikely that I'm leaving it for another day. My main goal is just to be able to play music off the itunes server, and optimally to be able to buy things (like tv shows and movies) - I'm not worried about syncing an ipod from this machine. Like Picasa, it will also have to be the windows version running under Wine, and it's not clear how well that will work.
- getting the netbook hooked up properly to our network file share server. We have a relatively new network backup drive, which is all snazzily redundant and so forth. I wanted to do the equivalent of mapping a windows file share to a drive (so I can tell picasa and itunes where to find my pictures and my music and have it always just work). This was harder than it should have been. Firstly, ubuntu does a really nice job of connecting to windows network shares via the file browser UI. This is great - until you want to access the drives via the command line (like to mount them automatically in a permanent location), and then it's really confusing. In the UI the drives look like they're mounted normally via Samba (the location is smb://servername/sharename), but that does not work to access or mount them via the command line. You can't mount them that way, can't navigate to them, nothing. (They're in a virtual file system, hidden in an invisible .gvfs folder in your home directory, which is almost helpful except that it's not, really.)
So, fine, there are docs for manually mounting windows drives under ubuntu. That should have worked easily, except for two things. 1) The docs assume you can access the share by name, which in reality needs to be preconfigured. 2) Accessing the shares as "guest", with no password, should have worked, but didn't, because of the way our file server is configured. It's intended to have a share correspond with a user, so we have it set up with two "users" - "media" and "backup". Trying to mount the drives as a guest user should have either worked, or failed with a "Permission denied" error, but didn't. I had to dig through the NAS configuration to discover that I needed to use the "media" and "backup" users (with no password) instead.
Minor issues:
- the Netbook Remix has no easy way of switching back to the regular desktop, in case you get tired of the UI experiment. However, according to the internet, downloading the package "ubuntu-desktop" should do the trick.
- the UI for downloading new software is a pain in the ass - there are 3 separate tools for it, "Software Sources", "Synaptic Package Manager", and "Ubuntu Software Center". If I wanted to browse for apps iphone-style, the software center should do the trick - only, it's only apps provided through Canonical. When I wanted to download Google apps I had to add Google as a source (which was fine), but then I thought the google apps should appear in the Software Center, and they didn't. They *did* appear in the Synaptic Package Manager, but I had to search for them a few different ways before I could find them, and even then, I still had to download and install Picasa manually. Just doing a "apt-get install [package]" from the command line is a whole lot easier. This is one of the times when all the UI work seems like a thin skin over much older unix bones.
Still, at the cost of one Sunday, and a level of minor irritation that always comes from having to mess with personal computers, the Eee is happily running ubuntu now, and it is much shinier than the mysteriously clunky Windows 7 Starter.
(Having gone to all this trouble, my final conclusion is: Apple, for the love of god, please make a small laptop. The Air doesn't count. It is not small. It is flat, but it is not small.)
