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What was Asus thinking when they picked Xandros for the EEEPC?
01/17/09
The experience of Linux on the EEEPC neatly summerizes the problem with Linux, that is Linux is a concept and not a thing. For some unfathomable reason Asus picked the Xandros distro as the version of Linux to install on the EEEPC. The charitable interpretation is that ASUS didn't realize the the minefield of Linux distributions. ASUS' decision to use Xandros means that EEEPC Linux users can't easily run Firefox 3 or Flash 10. This means that using their webcam via Flash is too difficult for the average user to manage. I recently updated video player version using the built in update program and now the volume control doesn't work in the video player.
There are so many flavours of Linux available that many modern Linux software programs can't be used on the EEEPC because the version of the windowing toolkit and the base libraries aren't modern enough. I know that I can install another distro like Ubuntu for the EEEPC because of the hard work of Linux enthusiasts around the world. The point of buying a Linux based netbook was not to have to wipe out the O/S and install a different version in the first year I owned it.
One last unrelated gripe. my wife and I started watching Battlestar Galactica last year and have been working my way through the first three seasons on DVD thanks to Blockbuster. We were happy to see that the Space Network in Canada was streaming the first half of Battlestar Galactica season 4, less happy when we found that they only offered from episode seven forward. As we were almost all caught up in anticipation of the premiere of the second half of Season 4, with one episode left to watch, the Space website gave and error when we tried to watch it. Sigh.
1 comment
Well, Linux is just a kernel. I don’t know anything about Xandros, but from your description, it sounds like it only includes the X libraries without GTK+ or Qt. Not that either are that hard to install. For GTK+, grab the source of the latest versions of glib, atk, pango, and gtk (in that order) and in each one do a simple:
./configure
make
sudo make install
sudo ldconfig
I’m using Ubuntu currently, but I thought Mandriva was much better. Ubuntu espouses the Windows philosophy that computer users are idiots and everything should be hidden from them. Plus, the .deb-package database is rather kooky (making me get things I decided to cancel anyway; telling me that I should apt-get autoremove to get of unneeded packages and then the next time I decide to install or uninstall something, it tells me I need the packages I autoremoved last time; etc).
