The HP Mini 110 Netbook: Almost One Year Later

Last October, after my third Sylvania netbook failed, I took the refund I had received and bought an HP Mini 110 netbook as a replacement. I ordered directly from HP and customized the little machine to my needs, choosing a 16GB SSD over the 160GB conventional hard drive. I also chose to upgrade the machine to 2GB RAM but did it myself with after market RAM rather than pay HP's rather inflated price for memory. My system came preloaded with Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy Heron) and HP's now defunct Mi interface. I've now had the machine for just short of 11 months and I am still completely pleased with it.

In my various articles about since late 2008 I've had numerous comments about how netbooks are really toys, how they are underpowered, how they can't do real work, and so on. I have a one word reply: nonsense! Oh, perhaps they are underpowered when running Windows, a bloated and overly resource hungry operating system. Running Linux, as in any of a variety of distributions, there is nothing I can do with my desktop that I can't do with my HP Mini 110. Video editing? No problem. Compiling software? Yep, just fine. Writing with the little, built-in keyboard? I do it all the time. The netbook isn't as fast as the desktop when I use resource intensive applications, of course, but the portability has made it a constant companion for me.

I also write Linux distribution reviews now and again for either O'Reilly or DistroWatch. The net result is that I have installed and tried probably far too many distributions on the little machine. All of them except for openSUSE 11.2 worked well. (I have not tried a newer openSUSE version yet.) I did find some distros require that a parameter be passed to the kernel in order for the installer to boot properly.

The most frequent complaint I've read online from folks who install Linux on the HP Mini 110 is that some have problems getting Broadcom 4312 wireless to work with some distributions. I've found that Ubuntu works out of the proverbial box and on others I need to add the proprietary Broadcom STA (wl) driver. Some distributions package the driver (i.e.: Pardus) but most do not. If you are relatively new to Linux you probably want to stick to Ubuntu or one of the derivatives that use the Ubuntu repositories. The Pardus wiki also has good instructions for getting wireless and the 3G modem going. If those instructions are clear to you then Pardus is another distro that is quite easy to use on the Mini 110. A more advanced user who is comfortable at the command line, with editing configuration files, and with compiling software should be able to make almost any Linux distribution work well with this system. I am currently using SalixOS 13.1 as my primary Linux distribution on the netbook. That is, as always, subject to change.

It did take me a little while to get used to the keyboard but the small size was not the issue. I don't mind a small keyboard. This netbook actually has larger keys than my old full size Toshiba laptop did but the keys aren't beveled: they are completely flat. Until I got used to typing on the HP I made more errors with this keyboard than I did with the smaller Sylvania netbook. Now that I've had the HP Mini 110 for 11 months I can type at full speed on the keyboard and it seems perfectly natural to do so to me.

The screen on the Mini 110 is bright and easy to read even without my reading glasses. Battery life is OK, at something under three hours, but I have not upgraded to the long life battery pack. I am still using just the stock pack that came with it. The Sylvania was better in this respect.

In summary: everything just works for me and works well. The HP Mini 110 is rugged enough to go anywhere and it has been 100% reliable for me. I like the SSD because the system is all but silent and the performance seems to be every bit as good if not better than a conventional hard drive.

Why write about a discontinued netbook now? Well, for one HP has a very similar model (the Mini 210) for sale. Second, there is always the used market. Finally, I've actually used the thing long enough to write in an informed way. It's a pity HP no longer offers Linux preloaded. If they did I would recommend their netbooks to anyone.

An Amazing Coincidence or Something More Sinister?

Yesterday, as anyone involved in computing knows, Windows 7 was released by Microsoft with much marketing hype and fanfare. Apple responded with some new clever commercials basically saying that Windows 7 comes with all the security problems and other issues that previous Windows versions have had. Maybe so.

Canonical chose the day to announce the release candidate of their upcoming Ubuntu Linux 9.10 (Karmic Koala), scheduled for final release next week. I'm running Karmic on the HP Mini 110 in a dual boot configuration with HP Mi, a customized Ubuntu 8.04 LTS for netbooks. So far this release is extremely promising and may be their best since Edgy Eft. I certainly haven't found any show stopping bugs.


Hewlett-Packard also did something yesterday, albeit very quietly. HP removed Linux entirely from the part of their website where they sell netbooks. The day Windows 7 became available the HP Mi interface appears to have died a quiet death. A visit to the HP Mini pages reveals that HP is only offering "genuine" Windows 7 and "genuine" Windows XP. I also noticed that the HP Mini 110 also sports a new, higher starting price, a full US $25 more than when I ordered mine earlier this month. I have to assume the Windows license is part of the higher price.

The timing of the apparent death of Mi may be an amazing coincidence. I have no inside knowledge of the decision making process at HP. However, there is substantial history of Microsoft playing hardball with hardware vendors. There is also significant evidence of increased interest and demand for Linux, with Acer unveiling a new Linux (Android) netbook offering after having previously dropped from the Open Source operating system.

The Asus story is particularly striking example of how Microsoft is widely believed to have forced a hardware vendor out of the Linux market. The company which started the netbook revolution with their EeePC running Linux in 2007 launched an "It's better with Windows" campaign early this year which drew the ire of many in the Linux community. Then in June at Computex in Taiwan Asus proudly displayed an EeePC with a Qualcomm Snapdragon (ARM) processor running Android. The following day Asus' chairman Jonney Shih found himself sharing a stage with Microsoft corporate VP, OEM Division, Steven Guggenheimer. Shih apologized for showing the Android EeePC, a move which resulted in many angry columns about Microsoft strong-arm tactics.

Around the same time Asus executives were doing all they could to throw Linux under the proverbial bus. Asus Australia consumer market product manager Gordon Kerr stated in late May that Linux was likely to be completely phased out by Asus on netbooks. At the time he said:

"People bought the original seven- and eight-inch Eee PCs for a computer to give to the kids. If you want the full functionality of a notebook you are going to go with Windows.”

Never mind that the relatively poor performance of Windows on netbooks when compared to Linux didn't exactly help create satisfied customers as I reported back in June. The response from many previously satisfied Asus EeePC owners was typified by blogger James Sparenberg in a post titled "We don't need you either Asus."

As I reported in my survery of Linux netbooks currently on the market published just yesterday it turns out Asus never did fully leave the Linux market. Toys 'R' Us still sells Linux based EeePC, albeit older models, both online and in its stores. Asus also continues to offer Linux on their Eee Box nettop PCs. However, when Betanews questioned Josh Norem, a senior technical marketing specialist at Asus, about the possibility of a new Linux offering last month he replied "Not at this time." This from a company that had touted its Linux offerings and high Linux sales early this year.

Some may also remember testimony by Garry Norris of IBM when the U.S. Department of Justice went after Microsoft a decade ago. He detailed how Microsoft effectively killed OS/2, IBM's technically superior operating system, and how Microsoft effectively controlled IBM's PC business at the time.


There is little doubt that Hewlett-Packard devoted considerable development effort to the Mi interface. I'm not one who believes much in conspiracy theories but in light of Microsoft's historical dealings with it's vendors it sure would be one amazing coincidence if HP decided to kill Mi on precisely the day Windows 7 launched without any undue influence from Redmond.

American Brand Name, Chinese Computer

10 days ago I wrote an article for O'Reilly about the premature failure of my Sylvania netbook. I ended up deciding to buy an HP Mini 110 Mi Edition (more on my choices soon) and ordered it custom built to my specs directly from Hewlett-Packard. It was competitively priced (and slightly less expensive than what's on HP's website now) and I was promised that the netbook would ship within six days. The turnaround time was much better than what Dell offered. I've read mainly positive reviews of this particular netbook, including one by Ladislav Bodnar on DistroWatch Weekly. As many of you probably know I write fairly regularly for Ladislav and I definitely to respect the man and his opinions. The netbook did, in fact, ship on the sixth day: from Shangai, China.

I knew that most if not all the netbooks, laptops, and notebooks sold today are built in a handful of factories located either in mainland China or Taiwan. I was under no illusion that buying an American brand name meant an American product. What surprised me is that HP apparantly doesn't even have stock of this netbook in the U.S. and doesn't even do simple customizations here.

In recent weeks Dell announced it was closing a Winston-Salem, North Carolina manufacturing plant and giving the work to "third parties" in Mexico and other countries. Despite President Obama's campaign rehtoric about keeping American manufacturing jobs in the United States companies keep outsourcing the work offshore or moving their own facilities to other countries with less expensive labor costs, poor or no environmental regulations, and little or no protections for workers. Meanwhile unemployment in the United States continues to rise. Here in North Carolina our unemployment rate is well above the national average.

I see this continuing loss of American manufacturing capacity, which is already a small fraction of what it once was, as a long term disaster for this country. Anyone who knows their history knows that when the U.S. entered World War II it rapidly converted the then unmatched manufacturing facilities to wartime production very quickly. If a major world conflict started today or in the near future I fear that we have no ability to do the same thing again. A pretty smart guy named Albert Einstein, who was a pacifist prior to the Second World War, held much more pragmatic views after the rise of Nazism. He famously said, "So long as there are men there will be wars." Sadly I believe he was right. That makes it the height of foolishness to leave the United States in a position where it cannot be ready for war quicky no matter how much we value peace.

I've come to believe a little protectionism would go a long way, particularly when it comes to industries vital to our economy, our defense, or both. I am mindful of history and the last thing I'd want Congress and the President to do is pass something like the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act during a deep recession or what, I believe in retrospect, we will call a depression. The last thing I want to do is severely curtail international trade. Having said all of that I am no longer the believer in free trade that I once was. I do feel trade will need to be a little less free and a bit more regulated to insure both American jobs and American defense capability.

The kind of severely under-regulated free trade we now have has meant lower prices for consumers. The fact that my new computer is made in China is one of the reasons it is so inexpensive. I would gladly pay more for one made in the United States. I can remember when this country was the leading manufacturer of personal computers. Today, to even recapture a small share of PC manufactuing in the U.S. would require government intervention.

Every President we've had since Ronald Reagan, Republicans and Democrats alike, have repeated the mantra of free trade over and over again. I wonder how Republicans who claim to be so concerned about national defense can justify promoting the wholesale export of manufacturing which has happened over the past 30 years. Similarly, I wonder how Democrats who claim to be so deeply concerned about the environment and workers' rights can do precisely the same when many of the countries which have succesfully imported manufacturing capacity and jobs have no such concerns. Any claim of concern about human rights by either party, by liberals or conservatives, rings hollow when we export our jobs and manufacturing capacity to countries that have abominable human rights records. It seems corporate profits and corporate lobbyists trump any and all other concerns. Greed remains the real G-d of early 21st century America.

It's way past time we examine the real costs of "free trade" instead of just parroting well worn lines about the benefits. I think if we do an honest cost-benefit analysis of free trade we will find that it is anything but free and, indeed, may do more harm than good as it is structured today.

Circling The Wagons

As anyone who reads my blog regularly knows by now I do a fair amount of writing about Linux and Linux distributions for a number of websites. Over the past year I've been paid to do so, moving me out of the "just another blogger" category and into the tech journalist category. Once upon a time when someone called me a "journalist" I would dispute the label but writing professionally has changed that.

Writing honestly about Linux distributions is not a way to become popular or make friends. When a given distribution, any distribution, has problems and a reporter writes about it there are always fans who will circle the wagons and/or go on the attack. I am very used to that by now. It's no surprise at all that has happened with a few CentOS loyalists. What is surprising is that it is continuing more than two weeks after I last wrote about the subject. Ken Leyba's post on the Cooking With Linux blog gets things seriously wrong on a number of levels.

A netbook is nothing more than a small notebook. Mr. Leyba is completely off base when he claims otherwise. Machines like this have been used in business for about forever. I remember the CEO and other senior execs of a company I supported when I contracted to IBM Global Services using the itty bitty Toshiba Libretto with a 7" screen for travel back in 1999. Nothing has changed all that much other than the fact that you no longer pay a premium for tiny and that has helped make small machines popular. Linux makes them more productive.

Enterprise Linux is marketed for the desktop. To claim that CentOS, an EL clone, is only for servers and that my experiment was somehow invalid because it was done on a desktop/notebook/netbook is patently ridiculous. When I was consulting for Red Hat in 2004-2005 I visited a number of companies that were and undoubtedly still are using Red Hat Enterprise Linux on desktops, workstations, and yes, on laptops. Those enterprise customers would have considered a failure to deliver a Firefox patch that closed a number of critical security vulnerabilities to be a serious problem. The idea that a Firefox patch is irrelevant on an enterprise distribution as some have claimed is simply preposterous.

CentOS has to prove they can get patches out on a timely basis to be taken seriously as an enterprise product. Their track record in that area over the past year has been atrocious. It wasn't one Firefox package. It was a year of things arriving late, sometimes months late.

The response from CentOS developers to the security issue in the comments of my business-centric article for O'Reilly Broadcast on the subject was actually spot on:

"Your point about the security updates is well founded, we try a lot harder to make sure we get things right and we have a much more involved process to establish when the 'right' is. An easy way to work through this would be if Red Hat were to share more info with us. Not sure if that is likely to happen and what the timeframe for that would be, but over the course of the next few months we hope to have a more transparent process in place that lets users track exactly what is going on, where and how."

When patches are a few days late it can, indeed, have something to do with the upstream vendor. When they are two months late that seems entirely unlikely. The fact that a member of the CentOS development team is owning the problem making a commitment to "get things right" in the future is a very positive step.

My complaints about the dependency on third party repositories and the lack of packages in general is an issue that is hardly unique to CentOS. I raised the same issue when I reviewed Slackeare 12.1 last year. It's a significant issue for any desktop/laptop user, not just on netbooks. The need to go to third parties for packages to adequately support newer hardware isn't netbook specific either.

I also feel that the issues around the open letter to Lance Davis called into question how that distro is being managed. Yes, it was blown way out of proportion by the tech media and I said as much in my O'Reilly Broadcast article. That one issue may well have been solved and I certainly bear the CentOS devs no ill will. That doesn't change the fact that Scientific Linux has done a better job with getting patches out on a timely basis. It is not dependent on a few volunteers and has the backing of and funding from major laboratories and universities all over the world. From a business perspective that makes Scientific Linux a safer choice for an Enterprise Linux clone.

The attempt to replicate my business environment on my netbook was a valid experiment. I thought other Linux users, those who think highly of Red Hat Enterprise Linux as I do, might want to do the same. The original DistroWatch Weekly feature article documented the difficulties in doing so. The post here which Mr. Leyba responded to was the fourth of five if you include the original DistroWatch piece and the business-centric O'Reilly piece. Considering that I linked back to the preceding articles should be a very clear message that the one post shouldn't be taken out of context but as part of a larger whole. In any case it wasn't a "rant" against CentOS as Mr. Leyba claims, but rather it tied the proverbial ribbons on the end of my experiment and explained why I decided the whole thing was more trouble than it was worth.

I did make a mistake in putting issues regarding servers and desktop-specific issues in one blog post. While many of the issues involved impact both areas the fact that I did not make a clear enough delineation between the two almost certainly generated misunderstanding. In that sense I did fail to communicate clearly. Mea culpa.

It's important to note that the experiment really wasn't a total failure. In the end I did get the netbook hardware to be 100% functional running CentOS. I also managed to improve performance significantly. What I also did was document the difficulties involved. I don't think there was anything wrong with doing so.

Mr. Leyba has shown integrity by allowing me to respond to him and to his readers directly on the Cooking With Linux blog. I do appreciate that and I will certainly afford him the same opportunity if he wishes to comment.

I thought I had put this issue to bed and moved on a couple of weeks ago. Clearly some people had other ideas. That's perfectly fine. In the final analysis nothing has really changed. I stand by all the pieces I wrote on the subject of CentOS. I'm using Scientific Linux instead and that will continue to be my recommendation for anyone who wants a no cost, no support Enterprise Linux clone either in the server room or on the desktop.

The End of the CentOS Netbook Experiment

I no longer have CentOS running on my netbook. It won't be back. At the moment I am not recommending CentOS for anything, not even servers. On my netbook and on desktops in general it has very little to do with the overhyped and exaggerated claims that miscommunication between the developers would lead to the death of CentOS. I have a story I'm writing forO'Reilly Broadcast about that CentOS misadventure, a combination of self-inflicted pain when the developers aired their dirty laundry in public and some in the tech press sensationalizing a story. On servers that story actually does play a significant part in my decision making. Before the CentOS fans out there get all angry at me and start with the inevitable flames let me explain my decisions.

I've decided that RHEL/CentOS just isn't for the typical desktop. The repositories are sparse compared to other distros and I would have had to compile quite a number of apps and dependencies for things I use every day. It was just plain too much work. Yes, I am aware of and tried RPMForge and EPEL and Odiecolon Repo and CentOS Extras. ELRepo proved tremendously useful for firmware and drivers. All of these repos provided useful packages. I tried using yum-priorities to keep all the repos from conflicting with one another and for a time that even seemed to work. With all of those third party repos I still was missing way too many things I use all the time.

I also abhor depending on third party repositories of variable quality. Yes, most of the packages I ended up using were quite good. Some had issues. The fact is that I just do NOT want to rely on multiple sources of packages which I may or may not truly trust. I want the distributor to provide a decent selection of software which they maintain with a decent level of quality assurance. CentOS just doesn't provide that for desktop applications. This was one of my main complaints when I reviewed Slackware 12.1. As much as Slackware fans berated me for this complaint I still don't trust that multiple repos will always play nicely together. They don't. I also do not want to have to build my own packages all the time. I write reviews and write about Linux professionally nowadays. I have to try new things all the time. CentOS is just not well suited for that.

Speaking of new things, I had to go to a third party repo and to compile a webcam app (as there is none worth having in any of the repos) just to make all of my netbook hardware work. My choice of apps was further complicated by the old libraries and tools included with CentOS. Older code makes perfect sense for a stable server environment which, after all, is what CentOS and the upstream Enterprise Linux are designed for. If I want to compile a newer desktop app which depends on newer libraries it may simply mean that the app isn't going to build.

Next comes the performance issue, or more correctly the lack of performance issue. After much tweaking and shutting off of unnecessary services I still found CentOS to be slower than any other distro on the netbook. (This also applies to my aging Toshiba laptop which has hardware fully supported by CentOS.) Even allegedly bloated distros running KDE 4 were faster than CentOS running Xfce. CentOS was and is the only distro I've tried on the netbook that was sluggish at all. Might I have found more stuff to rip out and more performance tuning to do? Sure! I probably could have made it better. The big question is this: Why bother? Was I really getting that much advantage running a business environment on my netbook? I decided the answer was no.

So, between lack of apps, multiple sources and old code CentOS was pretty well doomed on my netbook anyway. The coup de grace came with my last update. After rebooting the system would hang when the ACPI module was loaded. Sure, I could go into single user mode and troubleshoot and fix the problem. I have no doubt about that. I just decided I couldn't be bothered.

OK, so CentOS isn't for netboooks or desktops. You've undoubtedly noted that I said I'm not recommending it on servers either. None of the above really applies to servers, of course. The issue, of late, is the speed, or should I say slowness, of CentOS security patches. This is of vital concern to business and organizational users. When Mozilla released Firefox 3.0.12, a security patch which closed five vulnerabilities identified as "critical", Red Hat had an updated package the very same day. That's what a professional enterprise distro has to do. Downstream Sceintific Linux had a package ready the next day. It took CentOS over a week. This isn't the first such case, either. CentOS has been erratic at best about getting security patches out. The Firefox package was simply the straw that broke the proverbial camel's back.

The net result is that I am now recommending Scientific Linux for people who need a RHEL clone for their business or organization. The story about Lance Davis, the developer that went missing for a time, while overhyped and exaggerated in terms of the impact on the future of CentOS, is relevant here. Scientific Linux is backed by Fermilab, CERN and other major labs and universities. As a result it has a level of funding and stability that an independent project like CentOS does not have. One of the reasons Red Hat does such a good job selling their Enterprise Linux offerings is the support they offer and the strength of the company behind the distro. Scientific Linux may not offer the support or charge for the subscriptions, but the organizational backing insures its future and makes it a stronger choice than CentOS. The recent news forced me to take a long, hard look at Scientific Linux and I decided it was a better choice.

So, for me, CentOS is gone. I do wish the project well. I just hope they find a way to reassure their user community that they can be stable and reliable. The recent bad press has hurt them in that regard.

The Ongoing "CentOS 5.3 On A Netbook" Saga

Last week I wrote a feature for DistroWatch Weekly on the trials and tribulations of installing CentOS 5.3 on my Sylvania g Netbook Meso. I was very pleased when Dag Wieërs, a CentOS developer and long time packager and maintainer of an excellent repository of additional packages for Red Hat Enterprise Linux, posted in the comments section with some useful suggestions and a request that I document how to get the netbook completely functional in the CentOS wiki. That's a project I'll take on when I have everything working to my satisfaction. In the meanwhile I thought it might be useful to report my progress here. That's the kind of thing blogs are for, right?

Anyway, following Dag's suggestion I ripped out the wireless driver I compiled from source and tried to use what CentOS provides. As before that simply didn't work. Then I installed the rt73usb-firmware package from ELRepo. This worked after a fashion. CentOS did recognize my wireless card and, three passwords later (for the keyring and twice for my own WPA2 protected network) I actually was able to connect. I did have one instance since yesterday when NetworkManager locked up, something I used to see in Ubuntu all the time. That, plus the relatively slow performance and all the GNOME dependencies are just a few of the reasons why I tend to truly hate NetworkManager. Unfortunately nobody has a wicd package for CentOS. If I stick with CentOS I will definitely have to package wicd and write a how-to documenting replacing NetworkManager with it.

I also followed Dag's suggestion for installing the kmod-video4linux package from ELRepo in the hope that it may contain drivers for my webcam. No distro supports the webcam out of the box so far as I can tell. Only the factory preinstalled Ubuntu Netbook Remix 8.04 worked without significant effort. Testing with the video conferencing software is a royal pain and possibly not a fair test so I decided to install either wxcam or cheese or both. Guess what? None of the CentOS repos have packages for those either. Grrr!

I did install Xfce 4.4.2 from the CentOS Extras repository and, as expected, it's a bit faster and less resource intensive than GNOME. I'd have liked a somewhat newer version but I'm happy with the results.

I also received an e-mail from Radu-Cristian Fotescu, who writes the Planète Béranger blog, asking me to test his recently rebuilt Odiecolon repository for RHEL/CentOS 5. He has some more up-to-date multimedia packages than other repos so I decided to give it a go. His repo is also known to conflict with the much larger and definitely necessary RPMForge repository. In order to avoid "rpm hell" I am trying to keep things in order with yum priorities. So far it's doing a good job of excluding conflicting packages.

If all this sounds overly complex, well... it is. Back when I wrote my somewhat controversial review of Slackware 12.1 one of the things I complained about was the dependency on third party repositories of variable quality. RHEL/CentOS as a desktop distribution definitely suffers from the same shortcoming. Getting all the repos to play nicely together, even with yum-priorities, appears to be an arcane art. Only time will tell whether or not I've mastered it. I will also need to compile a bunch of apps from source and will probably end up building and contributing significant numbers of packages if I intend to stick with CentOS.

I should also add the performance is still nowhere near as good as my favorite desktop distro, VectorLinux or even as good as Ubuntu Netbook Remix. With further tweaking and streamlining I'm fairly certain I can improve things enough to be reasonably happy.

If it weren't for the fact that Red Hat Enterprise Linux is the absolutely dominant business distribution I honestly wouldn't bother with all of this. The main reason for the effort is to be able to use the netbook for business related demonstrations and to have a fairly uniform operating environment for my systems. Check back for further progress reports.

Netbooks Become Ubiquitous and Linux Becomes Mainstream

Last Tuesday I took my ferret Chin Soon to her vet. While I was waiting I pulled my Sylvania g Netbook Meso out of its case to get some writing done. When the vet came in she commented on my "cute little netbook" and asked me if it was an Acer. Hers, it turns out, is an Acer and mine looks quite similar.

I read the reviews last year where people claimed that netbooks looked more like portable DVD players than computers. Well... nobody has mistaken mine for a DVD player. Lots of people recognize it as a netbook. I keep running into more and more people, both in the real world and online who have taken the plunge and bought themselves a little netbook. Many, like my ferrets' vet, are intelligent, professional people but are by no means technology professionals or even particularly technically inclined.

16 million netbooks have sold so far with growth estimated at 60% per year. I expect it could be higher that that. Netbooks are the least expensive new computers on the market in what is now a seriously troubled worldwide economy. Cool new technologies tend to snowball when they catch on. I've found I can do everything with my netbook that I could do with a conventional PC. Others will discover the same. Netbooks probably won't be as ubiquitous as cell phones but they will turn up in more and more places with more and more ordinary, non technical users.

Yes, the vet's Acer runs Windows. While the vast majority of new netbooks will be sold with either Windows XP or Windows 7, a substantial minority will continue to be preloaded with Linux. Millions of people have been introduced to Linux through netbooks and are satisfied with it. Educated consumers who learn that Linux, which requires fewer system resources, will run faster and comes with a wide variety of software preinstalled will choose Linux.

Despite the posts by various so-called tech journalists who always cheerlead for Microsoft claiming that Windows has "kicked Linux to the curb" or "crushed" Linux on netbooks, Microsoft's own estimate places Linux at 30% of current market share. Asustek's Samson Hu, quoted in the same Bloomberg article, places Linux on 30-40% of all EeePCs currently sold and expects Linux to maintain a 30% market share. Acer spokesman Henry Wang expects 20% of his Aspire One models to ship with Linux this year.

There were one million netbooks sold in 2007, all running Linux. There were 15 million sold last year. Assuming that Microsoft has no reason to deflate its own sales figures or inflate Linux numbers then the 30% figure becomes a good, conservative estimate of Linux netbook market share in 2008. That would make 4.2 million more Linux machines sold. Estimates for 2010 are as high as 29 million units. I've seen similar estimates for 2009. Let's assume the total market share for Linux across the industry will fall somewhere between the two leaders, around 25%. That would mean 14.5 million more new preloaded Linux boxes over the next two years, putting the total number since the summer of 2007 at 19.7 million.

I'm sure the Windows cheerleading section will be happy to point out that three times that number will run a Microsoft operating system and this will be touted as another great victory for Windows. Of course, these are the same folks who just a year ago were claiming Linux was insignificant in the consumer market with a less than one percent share of preloaded systems. Tell me again how going from less than 1% to 30% in the fastest growing segment of the consumer PC market is a crushing defeat for Linux and a great victory for Microsoft. Sorry, but I don't see it.

Consumers now are aware they have a choice and Linux has gone mainstream. Oh, and speaking of things snowballing, how many of those 19.7 million Linux netbook users will also choose Linux for a desktop or conventional notebook? How many will show Linux to their friends, family, or neighbors? How many of those friends, family, or neighbors may then make the same Linux choice? The results for an OS that's been "crushed" or "kicked to the curb" might be quite impressive indeed.

More Kudos To J&R Music World

In my last post I wrote about the premature failure of my Sylvania g Netbook. I also noted that the dealer, J&R Music World of New York City, offered an immediate exchange. I called to follow up this morning and I should have my replacement on the way very shortly. I also am being reimbursed for the shipping and insurance charges to return the netbook. In addition the price has dropper by $40 since I ordered mine and I am, in fact, receiving a $40 credit as well. When all is said and done I will have paid $239 for the computer, a price that is still available today.

First, kudos to J&R Music World for their outstanding customer service. Second, if the new computer works as expected I will have gotten a very capable little laptop for a truly minuscule price. $239 for a system with a 1.2GHz processor, 1GB of RAM, and a 30GB hard drive is impossible to beat. Oh, and yes, it runs Linux.

The Netbook Experience Is A Little Less Shiny Right Now

During the holidays I received some Hanukkah gelt from family specifically earmarked for buying myself a new computer. The Toshiba laptop I'm writing this on is six years old now, it's slow by today's standards and it has developed a highly intermittent harware problem. Sometimes, out of the blue, it will shut itself off for no apparent reason. Since having a reliable and portable computer is vital for me to make a living right now a replacement was the best gift I could possibly get. A netbook seemed like the perfect solution to me and I ordered the one that seemed to give me the most power for the least money in a very small and lightweight case: a Sylvania g Netbook.

For the first couple of weeks I was thrilled with the little laptop. I was less than pleased with the stock gOS Linux implementation but once I replaced it with a Linux distribution that actually had the proper support and drivers for the hardware I was really, really happy. I used the little Sylvania for everything. Then, like the Toshiba, it started having an intermittent problem. It would lock up for no apparent reason. I went back to the stock gOS configuration and it still locked hard at random times.

I bought the netbook from J&R Music World in New York City via Amazon.com. Kudos to J&R for immediately authorizing an exchange and promising that they would ship a replacement within 24-48 hours of receiving my defective unit. J&R is a long established brick and mortar store that I shopped at when I lived in New York. They have an excellent reputation for customer service and it seems to be well earned so far. They also had some of the best prices on netbooks when I shopped for mine. So... the replacement should be here next week some time.

In the meanwhile I'm back on my old computer. Having worked on the Sylvania for two weeks this one really does seem slow now despite only a small difference in the processor (1.2GHz Via C-7M ULV in the netbook vs. 1GHz Intel Celeron in this one). Of course the fact that the netbook had twice the memory (1 GB vs. 512MB RAM) is probably a big part of the performance difference.

Back in the 1980s I did work for a major electronic manufacturer. I learned back then that 90% of electronic failures happen in the first 5% of service life. What happened with my netbook is just plain bad luck. It could have happened with a Dell or an HP or an Asus netbook. In any case it would have been handled promptly under warranty. I certainly don't blame Sylvania at this point. I really have nothing to complain about. OTOH, it's always frustrating to have something new fail like this. For me, temporarily, the shine is off the netbook experience.

I have written a detailed review of the Sylvania g Netbook for O'Reilly Broadcast but for the moment I'm not publishing it. I want to make sure the replacement works as it should before I publish my opinions on a large public tech forum. I expect the review will go out pretty much unchanged but... Yeah, things just aren't shiny right now.