What I do is a volunteer service. I’m not making big money on these tutorials. A lot of hard work went into making and maintaining the tutorials for the past four years, and the money I make off ads covers server costs and gives a bare minimum compensation for the time I put into making the site (I can’t quit my day job to make Ubuntu tutorials, believe me).

I’ve already made it quite clear in my FAQ that I don’t mind people mirroring the site or translating it:

Can I translate or link to the tutorials here?
I’ve had numerous requests asking if people can link to or translate the Psychocats Ubuntu website. The answer is yes. You can link to Psychocats without asking my permission. If you want to translate Psychocats Ubuntu, you may do that as well (please let me know, though—I’m just curious to know what’s going on), and I encourage spreading the knowledge.

I haven’t officially licensed the documentation, but the closest I’ve found to what I’d say embodies the spirit with which I’m giving Psychocats Ubuntu to the community is the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 license. If you would like to mirror Psychocats, you may do so, but please send me a link to the mirrored site, so I can know to refer people there also. And make sure you keep the mirror up to date!

Yes, the Creative Commons license I refer to actually specifies attribution. You should acknowledge where you got it from. Don’t pass it off as your own. And hotlinking is just really bad netiquette. If you’re going to steal images, steal them properly—download, upload to your own server, link to the new upload. Don’t hotlink them—use my server bandwidth and link to my hosted images directly.

After this kind soul let me know about the content and bandwidth theft, I reported the infringement to Blogger and also changed the images to let the offender know about the hotlinking and how it’s not cool. Very shortly afterwards, all the blog posts from that site were removed. I’m not sure if Blogger shut the blog down or if the (intentional or unintentional) thief took the postings down herself or himself. I’m just glad it’s down.

If you like my tutorials, link to them. If you want to steal the whole tutorial, don’t hotlink my images, and also make sure you give proper attribution and a link back to the source. If you plan on making a translation of the tutorials, send me the link to the translation so I can refer to it users who speak the translated-to language. Really, it all just boils down to common courtesy. No one wants to get involved in a legal battle. Just don’t be an asshole.

P.S. My blog posts are not released under any Creative Commons license. They are all copyrighted in the usual way (immediately upon writing).

But some good food, a walkable downtown, charming parks everywhere, and… an excellent public transportation system.

My wife and I have been two years without a car in San Francisco, and it has been worth it overall. Nevertheless, every now and then you just have to curse MUNI and think, “Life would be so much easier right now if I had a car.”

Not so in Portland. Whether it’s lightrail trains, proper buses, or the streetcar line, in our almost-a-week there, we never waited more than 10 minutes for a bus (usually 2-3 minutes), we never had a bus driver who appeared to have aspirations to be in NASCAR or to be doing stunts for Michael Bay movies, there was virtually no graffiti, the fares were low (in most places, free even), and the time to get from place to place was minimal.

This difference between Portland’s public transit and the Bay Area’s wasn’t more apparent than when we finally went home.

We woke up at 4-something in the morning, walked half a mile from our hotel to the nearest lightrail stop, paid $2 for a ticket to the airport, waited three minutes for the on-time train to come, and then were at the airport within an hour… with a smooth ride to boot.

Coming back home from the San Francisco airport, we had to hop on a shuttle to get to the BART subway station. Then the BART train (which costs $4.70) we got on just randomly sat there for about fifteen minutes with no movement and no announcement from the conductor as to when the train would actually depart. The BART train was smelly and loud. From BART, we got on the MUNI bus home ($1.50, if we didn’t already have monthly passes), which was extremely crowded and full of permanent marker–graffiti. The bus driver drove like a maniac.

It is great to be home (and at least away from tobacco city), but is it really that difficult to get a decent public transit system here?

Yesterday, I saw a different kind of “community” building (and then disappearing) around something else free—music. My wife and I were on the way to dinner, and we saw a huge cardboard box on the side of the road next to an apartment building. We looked inside and saw hundreds of audio CDs. We looked all around it to see if there was some kind of sign. As far as we could tell, this was someone’s garbage, free for the taking. Just as we’d decided this, three men in their early 20s came around, and all five us dug around through the collection and picked what CDs we wanted, often politely ceding our initial choices to each other if we saw someone else who wanted that CD more. An older Russian woman came by and started remarking on how there were probably hundreds of dollars’ worth of CDs in there that someone amassed over years, and now it was just garbage, and how we do the same thing (accumulate and discard) with clothes sometimes. She eventually had a look inside, too.

It is kind of an interesting idea. The CD you used to wait months for and save up for, the CD you were so happy to get and listen to over and over for weeks—years later, that CD is just a toss-away for strangers to rummage through.

What impressed me most about the whole situation is how polite and friendly people were with each other, as they picked up CD after CD. Folks were making small talk and reminiscing back to their own first CD purchases as kids. Even though everyone at one point or another audibly toyed with the notion of taking the whole stash and selling it to Amoeba (a local used music store), no one actually did. We all just picked the CDs we wanted and then went on our way. It wasn’t a madhouse. It was civil.

At that moment, scrounging around for musical scraps, I felt a part of a community, even though I didn’t know these people, I didn’t know their names, I probably wouldn’t see them ever again, and if I did I probably wouldn’t recognize them (”Hey, it’s you! Remember that time we were looking through the same cardboard box of CDs back in 2009?”). It’s amazing how a “community” can form around free stuff. It can even form for only a matter of minutes and then quickly dissipate. Almost like a flash mob. But less organized.

It’s also kind of funny how people would make remarks about the CD collection’s owner. Is it a guy? Is it a girl? Why does the owner have such eclectic tastes? You try to imagine, based on a collection of CDs, what this person is like. Would you be friends with her or him? Who owns a Rick Astley album, let alone two? Berlin had more than one greatest hit?

If I ever do get rid of the rest of my CD collection, maybe instead of selling it, I’ll put it in a large cardboard box and install a hidden camera, so I can see what people say about me while they’re taking my music. It’d be an interesting experiment.

• When people said in their reviews that the touchpad buttons on the side meant you have to use two hands, I thought they meant the right hand index finger using the touchpad and the left hand index finger using the button. In fact, it’s better to rest the left hand in normal keyboard position and then pop the left hand thumb down to press the button as needed.
• The touchpad on/off button is stupid. Yes, I know I already said it in my initial review, but now I hate it even more, because it emits a very bright white light that is wholly unnecessary, impossible to turn off, and probably the reason the battery life on the HP Mini is so poor.
• The speaker sound, while loud, is still kind of tinny. I have yet to see a non-Apple laptop (or netbook) have the same full sound that a Macbook or Powerbook internal speaker has. Of course, this isn’t intended to be a multimedia machine, but I do occasionally listen to music on it, and it’d be nice to have it sound less tinny.
• The underside of the netbook gets very hot. Granted, it’s no hotter than the underside of my wife’s Macbook Pro, but it is considerably hotter than the Eee PC 701. Oddly enough, the heat is on the front part of the bottom (near the RAM) and nowhere near the back part of the bottom (near the battery).
• I pretty much never use the webcam. I did try it out, though, just to see what it’s like, and it’s terrible. You need some serious lighting in order to get it to work. I’d say there are probably no conditions under which you could have an ideal video chat with someone on the HP Mini 1120nr with the 10″ screen. If it’s too bright out, you will see mainly your reflection in the screen and not what’s displayed on the screen. If it’s too dark out, the person you’re talking to won’t be able to see you through your webcam. Way to go, HP.

All the positives are still the same. It’s still light. It’s still cute and sleek. The keyboard still feels huge to me. The bootup times are quick. Resume from suspend works. Vanilla Ubuntu 9.04 runs like a champ on it.

Just thought I’d share a few more annoyances, in case anyone’s curious.

Religion aside, there seemed to be (and sometimes continues to be) an objection to the very notion that you might take a Linux distribution, change the default packages and artwork in it, and then re-release it as a modified distribution (or “remix” as the Ubuntu folks like to call it, as per their trademark policy). Even now I still see people on the forums asking “Why? Why would you bother? Why can’t you install those packages yourself?”

To answer this question, let’s imagine Ubuntu stopped distributing itself the way it does now. Right now, the default Ubuntu comes as a CD that has a live session that runs off RAM, and if you want to install it to your hard drive, you can do so. Both the live session and the fresh install give you a set of applications—a web browser, an email client, a bittorrent client, a word processor, an image editor, etc. What if Ubuntu stopped doing that? What if they said “Eh. People can just install applications themselves. Let’s just give them a command prompt after installation”?

Well, I actually know some Ubuntu users would be thrilled with that. There is a reason, though, why the mini.iso is less popular than the Desktop CD .iso, and it’s not just because the Desktop CD is the main download on the Ubuntu website.

Defaults matter.

I can’t tell you how many Windows users I see with the taskbar on the bottom and a green rolling hill with a blue sky for the desktop wallpaper. People use Internet Explorer because it is the default web browser in Windows. A lot of Ubuntu users like Gnome because it has two panels instead of one. Guess what, people—Gnome can easily have one panel. Just delete the bottom panel (or the top one).

Have you ever taken a default installation and tweaked it to be exactly the way you want it? For some people, that can be just a couple of minutes. For others, it can take hours. I’m not kidding.

What if you felt the default Ubuntu packages weren’t a good way to introduce Ubuntu to folks interested in trying Linux? Would you carry around a live CD with you and then say “Hold on. Hold on. I’m going to boot this up, but it’ll take me about forty-five minutes to make this interface presentable and install a bunch of packages… oh, which may not fit in your 512 MB of RAM”? Wouldn’t it be far more effective to have a live CD with Ubuntu exactly the way you want it?

I recently created my own Ubuntu remix called the Ubuntu HP Mini Remix. Yes, you can do all those things in Ubuntu after installation (fix sound, make sound settings stick, have wireless resume more quickly after suspend, consolidate panels to make room for more vertical real estate), but it involves editing configuration text files and doing a lot of annoying little tweaks.

And some folks with HP Minis haven’t been able to get those tweaks working. Maybe it’d be good if I just gave them an .iso they could use right away that had those tweaks in them?

More importantly, though, what’s the harm? You don’t have to use my remix. No one does. In fact, if I were the only person using my remix, I’d still consider it worth the effort. It doesn’t take anything away from Ubuntu. I’m not a developer or programmer. I’m not a graphics artist. The time and energy I put into my remix would not benefit vanilla Ubuntu, since the tweaks I’m making are specifically for the HP Mini 1120nr. Yes, there are some bugs that could be fixed, but I’m not fixing bugs. I’m employing workarounds for those bugs.

Remixes are a good way to make easily available to a niche population a set of default packages that its members can install on multiple systems or demonstrate as live sessions on multiple systems without them having to make an hour’s worth of tweaks to get going.

Defaults matter. That’s why remixes matter.

Well, obviously if you like Windows and enjoy using it, you should stick with it. But it’s not usually those who enjoy Windows who ask about Mac or Linux. It’s usually the dissatisfied Windows users—the ones who imagine Mac or Linux offer a perfect world of trouble-free computing.

So, to you restless Windows users, I have a few questions for you (answer honestly):

• Is vast consumer hardware selection important to you, especially for base models (not as much peripherals)? Would the thought of researching hardware compatibility before a purchase make you shudder?
• Do you use any Windows-only software? (AutoCAD, OneNote)
• Do you own a Zune?
• Do you often like to play the latest commercial game on your computer (not on a gaming console)?
• Do you hate learning new ways of doing things?

If you answered “yes” to any of those questions, I would highly recommend you stay with Windows. If you worry about Windows crashes and security issues, here is what you should do: back up everything, reinstall Windows, set up a limited user account you use all the time, set Windows updates to install automatically, use Firefox with the NoScript extension, educate yourself about social engineering, and stop pirating! Do all that, and you won’t have to deal with (useless) antivirus software, excessive crashing or slowness, and various security compromises.

Now, if you answered “No” to all of those questions, then you may actually be a prime candidate for a switch to Mac or Linux. Windows is not a bad product, despite all the bad-mouthing it gets from some Mac and Linux zealots. Unfortunately, though, it has been shoved down students’ and employees’ throats all over the world to the point where a lot of folks are just crying out for alternatives.

There are various reasons (which I outlined in my last post) you might want to switch to Mac OS X. The biggest one I can think of for considering it as a Windows alternative over Linux is if you have an iPhone or iPod Touch. Apple has made it difficult to get those devices working without iTunes. The ways to get those working in Linux are complicated and often end up obsolete in the face of firmware upgrades.

You might be a prime candidate for Linux, though, if you are a dissatisfied Windows user who avoids iPods altogether (or has an older-model iPod), especially if you don’t have enough money for a Mac and if you primarily email, web browse, lightly word process, organize photos, and listen to music. Linux can do a lot more than that, too, but if you are a professional graphic designer or video editor, you’re probably better off with a Mac.

The best thing about switching to Linux from Windows is that it can be done in slow steps and for free. You can run Linux inside a Windows session (using portable Ubuntu), you can run Linux as a virtual operating system inside Windows (using VirtualBox or VMWare), you can run Linux as a dual-boot with Windows (using Wubi or a traditional repartitioned drive), you can run Linux as a “live” session that doesn’t affect your hard drive at all (just using your RAM and a CD or USB drive), and, of course, you can install Linux right over Windows (though I would recommend that only as a last step).

I’d really like people to get rid of these stupid OS (operating system) wars. Mac isn’t better. Windows isn’t better. Linux isn’t better. There is no better. There is only better for you. It’s all about assessing your needs and your means. If you need Windows-only programs, you’re going to need it (Sorry, but Wine does not work 100%). If you like Windows, use it. If you like Mac OS X, use it. If you like Linux, use it. You actually can use all three (you don’t necessarily have to choose).

At the end of the day, an operating system is only a platform to run applications and manage devices. If your operating system runs the applications you need and manages the devices you own, then you’re set. Switching from Windows to something else isn’t a magic bullet that brings you to computing nirvana. My wife is happy she switched to Mac, and she would never go back to Windows, but she still has problems from time to time. Likewise, I’m happy I switched to Linux, and I would never go back to Windows, but I still have problems from time to time. Computers aren’t magic. They’re wonderful machines that sometimes have problems.

Are non-Apple users just ignorant people waiting to be (or too poor to be) enlightened? Are Mac owners unthinking sheep who just do whatever Steve Jobs says?

Why can’t it be somewhere in between? Why can’t we acknowledge that Macs have some good points and some bad points? As I have mentioned before on my blog, Macs are computers. They are not magic. They are not garbage either.

Here is what I consider to be the God’s-honest-truth as the good and bad of Macs, and this is from someone who uses Mac OS X and Linux at home, and who uses Windows at work.

The Price
The entry level for purchasing a Mac is very high compared to purchasing a Windows PC. This should be an incontestable fact. If you compare spec-for-spec on low- to middle-end hardware, the Windows PCs will be cheaper for sure. As you get into more high-end hardware (the most suped-up Macbook Pro, the most suped-up Mac Pro), you’re far more likely to get a better deal with the Mac than the Windows PC.

What I have stated above I have observed by comparing many Windows systems to Mac systems over the years. Once you present a Mac fanatic with actual dollar amounts, you get the backpeddling about the difference in money being worth it and about Mac OS X coming with iLife and Windows having nothing like Garageband. You also get the anti-Mac fanatic proclaiming that Mac is overpriced garbage and Apple is ripping off its customers.

I don’t want to get into questions of whether the price difference is “worth it” or not. That is something each computer user must decide for herself. Right now I just want everyone to agree—Macs are usually more expensive than Windows PCs with similar hardware specifications.

What does this mean? Usually, not a whole lot. As I said before, most Mac fans will pay the difference anyway and think it’s worth it, and most anti-Mac fans will refuse to pay the difference. If you’re on the fence, though, and like Mac OS X and Windows Vista equally (i.e., if you are marginal and almost non-existent segment of the population), then I would say if you have basic needs (email, web browser, word processor, photos, music) and have only a little money, go for a cheap Windows PC (or even a Linux PC). Otherwise, go for a Mac PC. Simple. Isn’t it?

Hardware
I’ve heard many a Mac fanatic say Apple charges more for Macs because the hardware is superior to non-Apple PCs. I’ve also heard many an anti-Mac fanatic say Macs have exactly the same hardware Windows PCs have.

I have found the exterior hardware for Macs to generally be well-thought-out and well-designed. In that sense, the exterior hardware is superior. The edges seem to be smooth and aesthetically pleasing. The weight seems to be reasonably light for the size. The blinking light for sleep mode is not obnoxiously bright (it slowly fades in and out instead of blinking on and off). The power cord for laptops is magnetic (and, yes, I am, like many others, clumsy, and I do trip on power cords, so it’s nice to have the cord pop out without breaking when that happens). The power button is never too small to press, and it’s flush with the surface so as not to be too obtrusive. The laptops all have backlit keyboards and high-resolution displays.

But the interior hardware is exactly the same as the interior hardware in non-Apple computers. I’ve seen hard drive failures in Macs just as often as in Windows PCs. That’s because those are hard drives manufactured by the same people who manufacture hard drives for Windows or Linux computers. The RAM isn’t some special RAM made by Apple. The graphics cards are regular graphics cards also in Windows PCs. Macs use Intel, Nvidia, Seagate—all the regular brand names in Windows PCs.

Apple does put a lot of care into making sure laptop speakers aren’t tinny and webcams work in low light. The hardware is always well put together. That doesn’t mean the hardware is of a superior build.

Customer Experience
I don’t agree with Apple’s closing off (via End User’s License Agreement) of people using Mac OS X on non-Apple computers. I do, however, agree with their being proponents of tightly integrating the software and hardware by limiting the supported hardware options and thus making it easier for OS X developers to optimize the operating system (it doesn’t have to work on everything, just these few models). I wish Ubuntu went this route. The Linux kernel, of course, does try to support as much hardware as possible, but it’d be nice if the Ubuntu developers could especially vouch for no bugs or regressions occurring in certain Ubuntu-supported laptops and desktops.

Of course, Apple does sometimes take it too far. They don’t say “Oh, install it on whatever you want, but we support only these models.” They say “These models only. Only our computers. No other computers.” And that’s generally the Apple way, which is good and bad. If you play the Apple way and don’t mind those restrictions, it can be a very good experience, because you don’t have to worry about anything. If you buy an Apple TV, an Airport Extreme, an Apple Cinema Display, an iPhone, and a Macbook, you know they’re all going to play nice together.

The flip side of that is that you may not get as good support or as seamless an experience with non-Apple products. Maybe the wireless card in your Macbook Pro isn’t playing nice with the WPA encryption on your D-Link router. If that happens, do you think Apple is going to say “So sorry. We will work on getting that working as soon as possible?” No. They’re going to say “It should work, but if you want to make sure it works, buy this Airport Extreme instead.”

It’s certainly possible to use non-Apple peripherals with an Apple computer, but you will constantly get the message from Apple “use our stuff, use our stuff,” and they’ll have very little sympathy for you not using their stuff.

User Interface
Even though Mac OS X’s interface has some nice touches (uninstalling applications by just deleting the application icon from the Applications folder, being able to drag and drop files to an application icon to launch the file in that application), I’ve generally found Mac OS X does not have an intuitive user interface. But I’ve also found that intuitiveness is highly overrated. There are counterintuitive aspects to Windows and Linux as well. These counterintuitive parts of Mac OS X are surmountable, but I do get annoyed when Mac fanatics keep repeating that Mac OS X is intuitive, when it is not. Here are some bits that are counterintuitive. If you can get over these quickly, maybe a Mac may be good for you:

• Enter renames files. Cmd-O opens them.
• Double-clicking an application download does not install the application. It mounts the application into a disk image container that has inside the application files that should then be dragged into the Applications folder.
• Dragging icons from the Dock to the desktop does not move or copy the icons. It makes them disappear in a poof of smoke.
• Even though you can cut and paste text or copy and paste files, you cannot cut and paste files through the menus or through a universally recognized keyboard shortcut (like Cmd-X, which works for cutting text).
• Dragging mounted volumes to the trash ejects them.
• The plus sign on a window has no consistent or predictable behavior. “Zooming” is pretty much useless (supposedly, it adjust the window size to fit the contents of the window, but if the content size changes, the window does not dynamically shift to refit the contents), and in iTunes you don’t even get a zoom—you get a switch between mini player and normal player.
• Closing the last window of an application does not close the application. This can be useful for some applications, but it doesn’t make sense for most of them.
• Windows can be resized from only one corner (and that corner may well be behind the Dock).
• There is no keyboard shortcut to access the toolbar menu.
• The symbols for certain keyboard keys are confusing (option, control, command, shift).
• The toolbar is for applications and not for windows within in application. This sounds great in theory… until you are using a huge monitor or extended desktop.

One thing I will give Apple, though—they seem to have put a lot of thought into their interface decisions. For every counterintuitive tidbit I see, I also can easily imagine a rationale for it. A lot of it sounds good in theory but just works out poorly in practice.

Looks
Why doesn’t it matter to Mac users that Mac OS X is counterintuitive in so many ways? Well, apart from the fact that people just get used to counterintuitive interfaces and deal with it, Mac OS X is a beautiful interface, and that beauty makes a lot of its users overlook the counterintuitive aspects. Now I’ve heard many a Linux user say Compiz looks much better than Mac OS X and can do fancier stuff. In screenshots, yes, I have seen some amazing-looking Compiz themes. And, yes, Compiz can do fancier things (raindrops, wobbly windows, spinning cubes).

But Mac OS X has really smooth animation that I have never seen in Compiz. Everything seems to just flow. I rarely see excessive pixelation in icons or stuttered movement when dragging things. And even though a lot of Linux users I’ve “met” online think Aqua is ugly, every person I know in “real” life thinks Mac OS X just looks amazing. I love the high resolution icons, and I’d love for my Linux computer to look just that way (and not a single Mac clone theme I’ve encountered over the years has come close to the real thing).

One thing I will say against the Mac OS X look is that it isn’t very easily customizable. If you’re into customization, I don’t know if Macs will be your bag, though.

I’ve also not seen any real performance gains in OS X. I think all the Mac users claiming Macs are faster than (Windows) PCs must have had malware-infested Windows installations. If anything, I’ve found OS X to require (perhaps like Windows Vista, as opposed to Windows XP) a lot of RAM in order to perform adequately. The smooth animations I mentioned before may also contribute to perceived notions of better performance or speed.

Security
Here is another area where I rarely see balance presented. On the one hand, you have some Mac fanatics saying Macs are nigh-invincible—use a Mac, and you won’t have to worry about any malware. Go on your merry way! On the other hand, you have some anti-Mac fanatics saying Macs offer no security advantages over Windows, and the only reason Macs haven’t been exploited as much as that they aren’t as big a target for malware writers.

The truth is somewhere in between. Yes, a larger marketshare does make you a juicier target for malware, but Macs do generally have better security than Windows, especially Windows XP. Macs are not invincible. You do still have to use strong passwords, not enable extra network services, install security updates, back up your files regularly (note: antivirus is as useless on Macs and Linux PCs as it is on Windows PCs). But Macs implement sudo, which allows administrators to operate as a limited user and temporarily escalate (after a password authentication) to root privileges. Unlike Windows Vista’s UAC, this isn’t annoying, and it also cannot be easily turned off.

Unfortunately, since more and more malware uses social engineering (i.e., tricking the user instead of exploiting software vulnerabilities), Mac OS X will be compromised more and more (as we recently saw with the trojans in pirated copies of iWork and Photoshop) if Mac users continue to be complacent about security.

Security isn’t just the best or non-existent. There are many shades in between (good, okay, bad), and if you have an ignorant and gullible user who can be tricked into installing software from untrustworthy sources, then all your operating system security goes out the window anyway.

I’ll also say that if you are a Windows user who is considering going to Mac for only security purposes, don’t bother. If you like Mac OS X for other reasons, that’s fine. If you actually like Windows, there are some easy ways to make Windows just as secure as a Mac (use a limited user account, install Windows updates, use Firefox with the NoScript extension, get rid of useless antivirus software, turn off autorun, etc.). And if you’re just looking for an alternative to Windows, most Linux distributions actually have more robust security than Mac OS X, and they’re free.

This is like that lie about Macs not crashing. If you have a problem with Windows crashing, you’re either using Windows ME, or you don’t know how to secure your Windows installation (see tips in last paragraph). Occasional crashes might happen on any OS, though. I’ve seen the blue screen of death on Windows XP about as much as I’ve seen the rainbow circle of death on Mac OS X or the black screen of death on Ubuntu Linux. Crashes happen. Get over it.

Application availability
If you are part of a small minority of computer users who uses computers for high-end commercially created gaming (instead of using a game console or just not gaming at all, like the rest of us), then of course you will use Windows. If you use Windows-only applications, you should use Windows. But if you are reliant on only cross-platform applications, then you can choose from Windows, Mac, or Linux.

And for all those Mac users who say “Oh, you have all these Windows-only applications? That’s what boot camp is for,” are you really going to suggest people buy a Mac only to install Windows on it?

The applications you use should be one of the primary reasons you pick an OS. If you need specialized software, make sure it works on the operating system you pick! Only if you are like me (email client, web browser, office suite, photo manager, music player) can you pick from any OS on the market.

Is Mac OS X for you?
Unfortunately, despite my long rant about the pros and cons, I don’t think anyone should make a computer purchasing decision based on what people say on the internet. (Unfortunately, with the dearth of Linux netbooks available in brick-and-mortar stores, I had to do that.) If you are a Windows user thinking about moving to Mac, don’t believe the Mac fanatics, and don’t believe the anti-Mac fanatics. Go to an Apple store and try it out yourself. See how you like it. If you don’t have an Apple store near you, just find someone with a Mac and ask to try it out (it helps if you say you’re thinking about getting one… it also helps if you’re in a public place like a coffee shop and not in some dark alley).

I’m a big Linux fan, and I prefer open source software, so I won’t be switching to Mac full-time, but I do enjoy the time I spend on my wife’s Mac (which has made it financially impossible for me to also get a Mac, anyway). It is a good user experience. It’s not perfect. It’s not magic. It’s not god-awful. It’s just good. Same as Windows. Same as Linux. Just use what works for you.

Good thing I didn’t give up on it, though, just because of the bad MIE interface. I installed vanilla Ubuntu on it, and it’s great now!

First I had to consider whether to install Ubuntu lpia (lower-powered Intel architecture) or the regular i386 version. Presumably the lpia version is optimized for the Intel Atom processor in my HP Mini, but…

• The Ubuntu Netbook Remix comes with i386
• There isn’t any regular Ubuntu with lpia, as far as I can tell
• According to someone’s benchmarks, there aren’t any definite performance gains right now by switching from i386 to lpia
• And the supposed gains from lpia would be only an additional 10% battery life

…not to mention the fact that almost all third-party .deb files (TrueCrypt, DropBox, Opera) are compiled for i386. Since the battery life on the HP Mini appears to be between 2 and 2.5 hours (less than the 3 hours I got on my Eee PC 701), an added 12 to 15 minutes of battery life wouldn’t really help anyway. In any case, I don’t travel much, so battery life would be just something to brag about, not necessarily something I would need.

Instead of the hours I spent trying to make the MIE interface usable (to no avail, by the way, and it wasn’t any more responsive even after I switched from 1 GB to 2 GB of RAM), the Ubuntu installation and configuration took me only about 40 minutes and was extremely painless.

I took a vanilla Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty Jackalope), booted it from USB, clicked the Install button on the desktop, answered the easy questions quickly, resized my MIE partition to make way for regular Ubuntu, took 20 minutes to install, then rebooted.

Almost everything worked straight away—Compiz, screen resolution, function keys, resume from suspend. Even wireless worked (and it’s a Broadcom card, which is notoriously Linux-unfriendly). The only thing broken was sound. So I did a quick Google search and came across this fix. I pasted those few commands into the terminal, rebooted, checked a couple of boxes in the sound preferences (check to enable speakers, uncheck to disable PC beep), and everything was running quite smoothly—and with no lag at all.

It’s a shame HP didn’t put more usability testing into their preinstalled version of Ubuntu… or just put more thought into sticking with regular Ubuntu.

Edit (26 May, 2009): Actually, the sound settings would reset after each reboot. Usually, I just suspend to RAM, but every now and then I reboot, and it’s annoying to have to mute the PC Beep and unmute the PC Speaker every time.

The fix is:

1. Get the volume settings exactly the way you want them.
2. Paste the command sudo alsactl store into the terminal.
3. Edit the /etc/rc.local file as root (sudo nano -B /etc/rc.local) and then add in the line alsactl restore before exit 0

Now if you reboot, your sound settings should stay the same.

Turns out I should have waited just another few months until a 1.6 GHz Atom processor with 1 GB of RAM, an 8.9″ screen, and a 16 GB SSD became the standard. I love the size of my Eee PC, and I did adjust to the keyboard. But the dealbreaker for me is the screen size. And I don’t even mind looking at the screen. The real problem is that web designers have abandoned the notion that 800 pixels wide is the limit. And side-scrolling is not fun.

So for months and months, I’ve been searching for a new netbook to replace my old Eee PC. Netbook reviews now are funny to me, because people still complain about the small screens and small keyboards, even when the screen is 10″ and the keyboard is 92% the size of a normal keyboard. Clearly they haven’t used an Eee PC 701 before!

The best netbook I could find was the Asus Eee 1000HE. It’s only US$389 and comes with a 10″ screen, 160 GB hard drive, multi-touch touchpad, 1 GB of RAM, and 9 hours of battery life. But I didn’t end up getting it, because it also came with Windows XP, and I’m not buying another computer with Windows preinstalled.

Unfortunately, the Linux preinstalled options in the US for netbooks are getting slimmer and slimmer (maybe this will change with the new ARM processors, but a decent ARM netbook probably won’t be out for at least another year). On NewEgg, I saw the Linux options go from 8 to 6 to 4 to 3 to 2 to 1 and then back to 2 again. But the 2 left were older models that were hardly worth the money (or that offered a keyboard the same size as my 701).

The HP Mini Mie: What I was expecting
Eventually, I settled on the HP Mini 1120nr (”Mobile Internet Experience”). I did a fair bit of research and, based on the reviews I read and videos I saw, these were the general pros and cons I thought I would encounter:

On the positive side, it uses a customized version of Ubuntu (my distro of choice) with a beautiful interface, it has a very large (compared to my 701) keyboard, and is relatively affordable (the model I bought was under US$350). Even with a large keyboard, the exterior design of the netbook is gorgeous. It’s slim and sleek.

On the negative side, the Ubuntu interface has its flaws (clicking a Thunderbird message in the preview screen takes you only to Thunderbird and not to the message you clicked on), there are only two USB slots, there’s no VGA, there’s no multi-touch, the trackpad has buttons on the sides instead of the bottom, the battery life isn’t much better than my 701 (unless I buy a 6-cell battery, which costs a lot more and physically juts out the bottom).

Turns out the hardware was more beautiful than I thought it would be, and the software was a lot less usable than I thought it would be.

Major Criticisms
The worst part of the HP Mini MIE as it’s sold is the lack of proper usability testing. Why do major OEMs screw up Linux so badly? Why can’t they just use vanilla Ubuntu or Ubuntu Netbook Remix? Why do they have to create convoluted interfaces that are difficult to use? Yes, on the surface, the MIE interface is pretty and slick, and it looks very simple. You have emails on the left, web stuff in the middle, and music and pictures on the right. One button always takes you back to that screen. The other button helps you cycle through the open applications or launch a new application. Sounds good, right? It’s actually terrible, and not for any reason I found in reviews I read of MIE.

Performance
I bought the 10″ screen version with a 16 GB SSD and 1 GB of RAM. You would think (especially with a 1.6 GHz processor, as opposed to the 900 MHz processor on my Eee PC) the performance would be decent. It’s not. It’s barely usable. Seriously. Boot time is rather quick. I didn’t time it with a clock, but it seemed to be about 40 seconds… less than a minute, in any case. Launching applications doesn’t take too long (the requisite few seconds). It’s actually using and switching between applications that is slow and often inelegant.

There is a lag. You still see the last bit of the other application’s window fading out as you begin focusing on the new application, and you often have to wait a second or two in order to start typing in that new application. There’s just a general sluggishness. In fact, when I installed updates with the update manager, Firefox was pretty much unusable because dpkg was CPU spiking.

The Mobile Internet Experience
Not helping in the performance area, the MIE designers replaced the regular Alt-Tab behavior with a custom Alt-Tab command. In a regular Linux (or even Windows) installation, Alt-Tab will allow you to switch applications quickly. Pressing it once automatically switches to the other most recently used application. Hold down Alt while Tabbing will cycle through to the other open applications. In MIE, the first time you press Alt-Tab, the available applications appear but the focus is on the window you already have open. Why would I want to switch to what I already have open? So switching between the current window and the last-used window requires two Alt-Tabs instead of one.

The MIE interface is generally inflexible. The tweaks on the simple interface for the Eee PC were pretty simple and straightforward—edit this text file, paste in this command. Not so with the MIE interface. I’ve looked up tweaks, and I can’t find a way to completely free up the Gnome panel or to make search (and not URL) the default on the web search dialogue. I even tried just installing IceWM and using that instead of the MIE version of Gnome. No go there. If I used IceWM, the Network Manager applet would launch but not work, and resume from suspend-to-RAM did not work either in IceWM. There are some hidden scripts or something in MIE that make things work, and it’s a little annoying.

The startup questions asked if I didn’t want to be prompted for my password, and I thought they were talking about an autologin. But apparently, that just took the password completely off sudo, and I don’t see any simple way to get it back. Maybe I’ll have to dig into the /etc/sudoers file. For any setting you have to change something, you should have another setting to change it back.

Hardware Problems
A couple of other general annoyances: granted, I’ve had this for less than one day, but I’m finding it extremely difficult to adjust to the touchpad buttons being on the sides instead of the bottom of the touchpad. And the touchpad is just too sensitive, even after I installed gsynaptics and tried tweaking the settings. Yes, there is a dedicated button to turn off the touchpad, and that button would be handy if you’re typing a long novel, I guess, but most of the time you want to constantly switch back and forth between typing and mousing on a netbook!

Another annoying thing about it is the display is extremely bright. Even at its lowest setting, it is bright. When you plug in the power cord, the brightness resets to the highest brightness, and even if you unplug the power cord, the brightness resets to the highest brightness. I don’t want my netbook on the highest brightness… ever. I can’t find a setting to change this, though, and I think it’s one of the reasons the battery life is so poor.

The power button is oddly placed on the underside of the front of the HP Mini, and it’s one of those ones you have to pull to a side instead of push. I guess in one sense that’s good because you’ll never accidentally press it. But, really, it’s annoying to pull a button.

Wireless
Even though WEP is far less secure than WPA, my wife’s Macbook Pro cannot work with WPA reliably, so we use WEP because I still think it’s better than no encryption at all (won’t stop the serious packet sniffers, but it will stop the casual leecher). Unfortunately, the MIE would simply not connect to the type of WEP encryption we were using, so I had to change to another type. Then it connected just fine. But that’s a bit odd.

Other thoughts
Not really a problem, but I did notice the HP Mini came with no carrying case or bag. It didn’t have to. It was a nice touch that Asus included a bag with my Eee PC, though.

Ordinarily in a review I would put the criticisms last, but the MIE interface and the Mini defaults are such a bad implementation of Ubuntu that these defaults seriously hamper the Mini experience so that I cannot overlook them in any moment I’m using the Mini.

The Good Stuff
There are good things about the Mini, though, and that’s why I’m going to stick with it.

As I said before, the physical construction of the netbook is genius. When closed, it looks tiny. When open, the keyboard looks impressively large. The screen is a bit too shiny, but it’s a very nice, large screen. I read one review that complained about the plug not going in all the way, but I didn’t have that problem at all. I like how the SD card slot is a bit recessed, so when I put my SD card in, it’s a bit hidden and doesn’t jut out (as it did on my Eee PC).

The speaker is cleverly placed on the hinge of the netbook so that it doesn’t take up extra space, but it isn’t hidden behind anything either. The sound comes out very strongly.

Even though it’d have been nice to have another USB slot and a proper VGA-out, the slimness of the netbook simply does not allow for it—there’s a lot of machine to cram into such a small package.

Not a big deal to Windows and Mac users, I know, but suspend-to-RAM works perfectly (as long as you use MIE’s custom Gnome and not IceWM). I haven’t tried hibernate yet.

More importantly, there seems to be a relatively rich set of packages available in the HP Mini repositories (which live on Canonical servers). Even though the regular Add/Remove has a pittance of applications, Synaptic is also installed and can be easily reached with an Alt-F2 and gksudo synaptic. Some reviews I read said applications installed this way wouldn’t show up in the regular application menus, but I installed both GIMP and gsynaptics and both made their way into the menus. (Of course, when I tried to do a –force-architecture installation of DropBox that didn’t quite work out.)

I bag on MIE’s usability, but the visual design of it is quite slick, from the USplash theme to the GDM theme, right down to the buttons and window decorations. Everything looks really nice, even though MIE does inherit some of the transitional flaws of Ubuntu (a quick view of terminal text before USplash loads up).

Despite the touchpad’s configuration being a bit annoying, its physical surface has a nice textural feel, and the buttons are not loud when pressed (unlike the serious clicking sound from my Eee PC’s buttons). The keys on the keyboard, likewise, are fairly quiet and easy to press.

Conclusion
I have to say I’m disappointed. All the reviews I’d read of the HP Mini MIE made it sound a little limiting but not a total disaster. Even a few hours of use has made me frustrated, so I would say MIE is a total disaster, definitely.

Since most of the flaws seem to have to do with the MIE interface configuration and general sluggishness, though, I want to give a proper vanilla Ubuntu installation a try on this (especially since I do have a 2 GB RAM stick on the way). The best thing is that with 16 GB of space on my SSD, I can do a proper dual-boot (unlike on my 4 GB SSD Eee PC). More later…

What I’ve noticed is a cycle of Dell pricing Ubuntu cheaper and then offering some kind of promotional discount that makes Windows cheaper. The Linux community complains, and then Dell adjusts the pricing. I created an IdeaStorm idea called Implement a system by which Ubuntu systems automatically get promotional discounts their Windows counterparts get, but it got only 19 votes. No word from Dell on that.

The only official word from Dell on pricing is another IdeaStorm idea (Implemented: Ubuntu Dell is Le$$ Than Windows Dell) that was marked as implemented back in 2007 and that obviously has gone from implemented to unimplemented and back again. A Dell representative wrote on March 24, 2007:

Changed status to **IMPLEMENTED**.

On average, comparably configured Ubuntu systems will be about $50 less than Windows systems.

Well, I’m not sure if they’re going to make this suddenly in favor of Windows again, but I did a price comparison on the Dell Inspiron 15 (Windows Vista) and the Dell Inspiron 15n (Ubuntu Intrepid) today, and Ubuntu is more than US$200 cheaper.

See screenshots for more details:

(American? I haven’t checked the other Dell sites yet) Linux users complaining about pricing? Get them while they’re still hot!