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To mention that VMWare’s free virtualisation product, Player, now features Unity under Linux. For those who haven’t seen this feature before, Unity lets you break applications out of the virtual machine’s window and seamlessly use them beside your native applications. There’s a few rendering quirks and it’s a little slower than using them in full windowed mode, but I have high hopes these will be smoothed out. This feature was previously only available using the OSX desktop virtualisation tool Fusion, so I’m pleased to see a premium feature filter down into the free-as-in-beer product. Thanks VMWare!

I recently went looking for a good beginner’s resource for a budding Linux user, and came across Linux in Easy Steps by Mike McGrath. It’s an excellent primer for the new Linux user. Focused on the Ubuntu Linux distribution, Linux in Easy Steps covers installation, desktop configuration, and basic command line use in a slim volume with plenty of screenshots.

The ground covered makes an excellent prerequisite for more serious tomes on Linux systems. At the end of the book the reader should have managed to install Ubuntu and customise it to their liking, and have a general understanding of the Linux filesystem heirachy, the command line, and vi with which to embark on more complicated projects.

The pace is thorough without unnecessarily belabouring simple concepts. Preparing your system for Ubuntu is covered in reasonable depth, and the install process is detailed with step-by-step explanations. Once installed, the basics of desktop customisation are covered before moving on to a discussion of the Linux file structure and manipulating files in the graphical file browser.

OpenOffice is covered in some detail, and the last desktop-centric section rounds off with a look at working with internet and media applications, including how to get proprietary codecs.

Fully half of the book covers the shell and administration, and is a credible crash course in the basics of understanding the shell, manipulating text and files, and performing administration tasks. A command reference finishes the shell section wiith a clear, well formatted list of useful utilities.

Every section in this volume is colour-coded, making it easy to turn back to as a reference. Current Linux users who are shell savvy will find nothing here, but to the person holding an Ubuntu CD thinking ‘Now what?’ this may just be the book for you.

I spent a very enjoyable two hours today at the Ingram Micro Showcase. I had a pretty good look at the ASUS Eee 1000, the HP Mini Note and what was for me the star of the show, the Acer Aspire One. Sadly the only camera I had on me was my cell phone so the pictures are woeful.

The ASUS Eee stand had only Windows XP models on display, at which more than one attendee expressed disappointment. The 901 was conspicuously absent, but I was able to get a close look at the 1000. I’m not sure how I feel about the new styling choices – the original EeePC did look particularly cheap, but the glossy finish on the 1000 is a dreadful fingerprint magnet and the chrome highlights look a little overdone. The keyboard is very reasonable size, and would make an appreciable difference to those who found the original Eee too cramped. Unfortunately it still feels dreadfully thin and plasticky to type on. All around though I think ASUS have gently evolved throughout the Eee series to a very solid and capable machine.

The HP Mini Note was definitely the most stylish of the trio. With brushed metal casing and a minimum of frills, it conveys professionalism and class. It’s a real shame they made it completely unusable by loading up a sluggish VIA C7 with Windows Vista. I was surprised though that the performance wasn’t worse – it does seem like it would be usable for light productivity work as long as you were patient with it. While I only had about 15 minutes to fiddle with the device I also noticed that it a lot warmer to the touch than either of the Atom based models. Again, HP had no Linux based models on display which was a disappointment – I’d been hoping to get a glimpse at their SUSE based model. It was also lurking in a dark corner, and even photoshop can’t save that picture. Note to self: You *always* want to bring a real camera.

Then, across the crowded hall, I saw the Acer Aspire One.

It’s very slightly wider than my ASUS Eee900, to accommodate a larger and more usable keyboard. This gives it some quite chunky screen bezels, but the overall weight and size of the unit is still among the smallest of the netbooks. I think the Acer staff were a little bemused when I popped up a terminal and started digging around under the hood.

I was very impressed with the Linpus Lite distribution it was running. The interface draws heavy similarities with the ASUS Easy Launcher found on the EeePC Linux models, but I believe looks even smoother and more appealing. It looks just as hackable, but with more modern underlying libraries which hopefully means it’s easier to add software from a Fedora repository without risking incompatibilities with Acer’s customizations.

I’m trying to arrange reviewing this unit, and I look forward to seeing exactly how hackable it is while still maintaining the Acer drivers and software. An ASUS product manager spotted me shortly afterwards lurking in a corner taking advantage of the free wifi. He was very excited I was using an Eee900, and we discussed the decal I used to decorate it and where to get them from. I didn’t have the heart to tell him I was using it to email my editor about the Acer Aspire One.

I also scored a jar of jellybeans for knowing Lenovo’s product line so well. Yay me!

The netbook is fast finding a comfortable niche as a second or even third computer. The majority of consumers seem to be buying them to supplement the systems they already own. I certainly saw the Eee that way when I first got my hands on one to review for Linux Journal. I already owned a 15” laptop for ‘serious’ use, and saw the Eee as a secondary internet device – much like a PDA or smartphone, but actually usable for light productivity and content creation.

The circumstances described by Moore’s law have ensured that our computers today are vastly powerful, with more memory on my graphics card than was in my entire computer only 2 years ago. Outside of gaming though, how much have my needs really changed? As an experiment, I decided to use my Asus EeePC for a day at work. I’m a Linux specialist supporting a large number of Linux servers as part of an exceptional team of Linux administrators. Most of my day is spent head first in a terminal window and processing requests that come in through email.

I used an Asus EeePC 701, with a 2GB SD card for extra storage and 2GB of memory running Windows XP Professional SP3. Yes, that’s the 701. With the 800×480 screen.

I’m afraid I was mercilessly mocked by everyone who saw me with my ‘toy’ computer. We’re all issued a certain brand of big, black, serious business laptop at my office and while my fondness for gadgets is already well known, it seems the EeePC was considered just too much of a toy for real work. It was absurdly dwarfed by the 20” monitor I had it plugged into while sitting at my desk.

What workedl:

Processing email was relatively painless, although I had to disable the preview pane on the 480px high screen and open emails in a new window to read them. My job doesn’t require much in the way of content creation, but I get sent a steady stream of relatively complicated Microsoft Office documents to read. The EeePC handled 30 page design documents heavy with images and tables with aplomb.

Accessing intranet sites was a little frustrating. If you want to find some of the least usable web design ever to be rendered, the internal tools used by a large corporate are pretty fair game. I spent a lot of time scrolling around, and sometimes discovering certain frame layouts just completely broke on such a low resolution.

When it came to what I think of as Real Work, things got a lot better. I don’t think the system requirements for PuTTY have changed in the last decade or so, and even a 7” screen can display an adequately sized console. I found I was maximizing console windows and alt-tabbing between them, but that this wasn’t anywhere near as frustrating as it looks when I watch the people in marketing use their computers in the same way.

I spent a few hours in the afternoon sitting at a customer site, and here I really enjoyed the Eee. I found myself perched on the corner of someone else’s desk, working through configuring systems with them. One terminal window open with many panes in gnu screen (<3) and I barely noticed the screen resolution.

What didn’t:

Using Citrix/rdesktop was about the most painful experience of my life so far, and that includes breaking bones and military service. By the time I’d nested multiple Citrix sessions (don’t ask) I was left with a postage stamp of window at around 600×300 pixels. Ouch.

The battery life really wasn’t great. I had to go hunting for a power supply only 2 hours into work on site. My work laptop might be a brick, but it’s a brick that can be fitted with dual batteries. I also found that while the screen resolution wasn’t unworkable, it was just that little slower and more frustrating and the multitasking penalty was a lot higher when I had to sort through windows trying to find where I’d left off.

At the end of the day though, I’d managed 8 hours of solid work without once needing to fetch my Regulation Issue Brick. I did however cheat. There are two applications I use in my daily grind that require Microsoft Windows – on the brick I run Ubuntu Hardy, and have a Windows VMWare session running when I need to use those applications. VMWare just wasn’t going to be an option on the Eee, so I installed Windows on it natively. Had I tried to replicate my actual working environment instead of the nearest equivalent the Eee was capable of, it all would have gone pear shaped a lot faster.

I’m still impressed at exactly how close the Eee comes to replacing a full-sized laptop for tasks that don’t require a lot of storage. With cloud computing as implemented by Google becoming the norm, the EeePC becomes far less of a toy and more a serious productivity tool.

Sometimes I wonder - if I spent the time I usually spend browsing http://www.43folders.com/ and http://www.lifehack.org/ getting work done, would I have less need for productivity tips? ;)

I read a pretty neat article today from http://www.43folders.com/2004/11/18/hack-your-way-out-of-writers-block about how to get past writer’s block. A lot of the comments to the article are really excellent as well.

One of the tips in particular that really resonated with me was:

“Write crap - Accept that your first draft will suck, and just go with it. Finish something.”

That’s something I’ve struggled with for a long time, and for me at least it really is the key to being a productive writer. It’s far too easy to fall into the trap of wanting what I have to say to be absolutely perfectly formed in my head before I commit it to paper. I end up staring into space endlessly polishing sentences and lining up paragraphs, marching in lines all in my head, before I’ve even touched pen to paper.

It’s a productivity killer because the longer I polish something that doesn’t exist yet, the longer it’s going to take me to actually get started. When I started actually meeting deadlines at least most of the time was when I learned to do what I called ‘Just write’. I would go away from my computer and away from the internet with a pen and some paper and just go and get any old thing down. I could check my facts later, research content I wasn’t sure of when I got back to my laptop. The most important thing was to separate writing from researching, and just write some crap down.

I found it was a lot easier to get into a zone where I just wrote and it flowed if I used pen and paper and got away from the computer. In the interests of not having a million notebooks around the house and never being sure which one has which article in it I’m after, I’m trying very hard to digitise this process. To save me from myself I’m in the process of doing up an apple e-mate. No network connectivity, long battery life, sunlight readable screen and an absolutely fabulous keyboard. I’m hoping it will help me learn how to spark that creative process sitting at a keyboard, while still providing me with the distraction free environment that paper does.

These are by far the two most effective tools in my arsenal against writer’s block. Just write some crap, and turn off the darn internet.

Now ironically, I should stop procrastinating from working through the writer’s block on my latest assignment and go and just write some crap.

Linux has gotten So. Damn. Cool.

The end result of my Dell fiasco is that I threw a tantrum, demanded a refund, and marched down to my local Sony store to buy their similar product. I’m now the proud owner of a Sony Vaio SZ. Sony haven’t been known for their Linux compatible machines in the past, but these days if you pick a machine with mostly Intel components at least you know there are good Linux drivers for them.

I had some pretty stringent requirements for this machine. It needed to be able to be docked and undocked many times a day from a docking station with very little fuss, preferably being able to switch between dual monitor and single without needing to restart Xorg. I wasn’t even sure if this could really be done - it’s been a while since I used dual monitors under Linux.

I am extremely impressed with the current NVidia drivers and *buntu Fiesty. I can put the laptop on or off the docking station as I please, and all of the devices happily disconnect and connect themselves at the right times without anything getting upset at being yanked away from the laptop. The last time I tried a docking station with a laptop was a few months ago with a Lenovo X40, and it used to kernel panic every time I tried to undock it.

The excellence of the current NVidia driver is what’s really blown me away though. I dropped the laptop on the docking station and connected my external panel up to the DVI port and then ran nvidia-settings. I could immediatley see that it had detected the monitor, so I selected it and clicked to enable Twin View.

I almost fell off my chair when it worked.

I didn’t have to restart Xorg or fiddle with any settings manually - it truly JustWorked the way one expects a modern desktop would. About an hour later I had a meeting to go to - I (a little nervously) pulled my laptop off the docking station and pulled up nvidia-settings again to disable the second display. All of the windows that were open on my external display trotted back to the main one and everything was rosy.

When I came back from my meeting and enabled the second display again, windows that had previously been on the external display appeared back there. It was very, very nicely done and I’m very very impressed.

So, that’s two Sony Vaio machines I’ve bought recently that have worked excellently with Linux. I think it’s my new favourite brand :)

(I still have the itty bitty guy - he’s just not powerful enough to run all the vmware I have to run at work :()

In the aftermath of aKademy I’ve been sketching out some content for kde.org, and trying to come up with a way of restructuring the FAQ that will make it easier to navigate. I think I need to have a long talk with kde-docs people about plans for khelpcentre4 and docs.kde.org to find out whether some of the things I want are even possible. Some cool new innovations should be coming soon - an ‘edit’ function is planned for docs.kde.org to allow users to send in small documentation patches, similar to the ease of using a wiki.

I’m slowly migrating content from the backups of my old site to wordpress, and adding my TUX & Linux Journal articles as well. If you’re interested in how-to style articles about KDE applications and didn’t read them in TUX/LJ the first time around, then please have a look around canllaith.org. Most of my article writing is in an effort to showcase KDE applications, although I do write about the odd Gnome application (usually on the suggestion of my editor).

More changes in my life - I’ve just started at IBM NZ as a Linux specialist with a significant pay rise and hopefully better working conditions. It’s only been a couple of days but I have a pretty good feeling about the position - it seems like IBM can provide a pretty nurturing environment, and of course working with open source software is a must for me - especially being able to run KDE on the nifty T42p they gave me =)

I also have some articles and a documentation proofreading contract to do this month, so it’s all very busy!