So today CrunchGear has a very cute USB drive in the shape of a penguin that is bootable and has a booktable version of Ubuntu Linux on it. awww. While this device is certainly very adoreable and the shape is apropos to what’s on the drive, I have to wonder: are there just too many of these things, now?

Like the Transformers ones I pointed out the other week. Or these ones shaped like bombs (yes — but cartoon, round-ball bombs, not IEDs). Or any number of cute, toy-like USB drives which, can I point out, usually have lower capacity and a higher price. Like I said, they are the keychain toys of the new millennium.

There has to be a point at which the lack of storage space makes cute USB drives too useless ot bother with. The penguin one has added functionality and supports a good cause. Most cute drives don’t even offer those benefits. (Plus, I think I paid $20 for the last 16GB drive I bought and it was very simple to turn it into a bootable drive and install Linux distros from it.)

I can’t tell if I’m just being cranky and middle-aged or if this really is as silly as I see it. You decide!

The May issue of Laptop Magazine is on the stands (has been for a bit, actually) and includes two contributions by yours truly. One is the massive roundup of Linux reviews I did and another is a tips article on how to live without an optical drive.

I’ve steadfastly resisted the temptation to buy an external DVD drive for my netbook mainly because of the research I did for that piece. I haven’t had trouble installing any program I have on disc and in the past few months I’ve installed various Linux distros from USB drives (over and over and…).

It’s very odd to me that, when I was in college, having a CD-ROM drive was a big deal, then it was a big deal if you could get a DVD drive included, and then came the wonders of writable DVD drives which seemed so fancy and awesome. Now we’re back to having computers with no optical drive. But considering how you can download almost anything you need from media to software, it isn’t such a big deal any more.

I try not to feel old when I think of things like this…

Anyway, go buy Laptop Magazine. It’s a great issue even beyond my small contributions. 31 free apps that don’t suck! And more.

I love open source and free software, I really do. I dream of a world in which I no longer have to deal with the likes of Microsoft Office and instead blissfully use OpenOffice all the live long day. Heck, if I could leave behind the Microsoft OS completely forever and ever, I would. I long to ditch Photoshop for a fully-featured and free open source replacement every time I see the price tag.

However, I feel that these blissful days are a long way away.  Because even though programs like the OpenOffice suite and GIMP emulate the non-free programs in broadstrokes, it’s always some small, seemingly marginal function that’s missing or doesn’t work as well that puts me right off.  I find myself even angrier, because I want to shake the open source community and scream “Why do you tempt me with a brave new world and then smack me in the face?!”

For example: OpenOffice Writer.  In many ways the parallel of MS Word.  I can create and format documents just the same in both programs as far as I know.  When I’m doing basic to intermediate tasks, Writer serves me well.

But then.

I want to do something that is really easy to do in MS Word: find paragraph marks and replace them with two sequential paragraph marks, thereby inserting a line between every paragraph. This is especially useful when posting things to blogging software. In plain text mode, two line breaks means insert a p tag.

In MS Word, it’s very easy and quick to do this.  You click Find & Replace and, if you don’t know the code for “paragraph mark” by heart (it’s ^p) then you click More>> and you’ll see a dropdown for special characters — paragraph marks, tabs, em dashes, a whole long list.  If you want to insert two breaks, you put ^p in find and ^p^p in replace. Simple, easy.

Not so with OpenOffice.  Not only is there no helpful dropdown in the Find & Replace window, the method for doing the operation I described above is completely counter-intuitive and flawed. After over an hour searching I was able to learn a bit about Regular Expressions and how they applied to the Find & Replace process. In order to get something approximating the simple process of finding one paragraph break and replacing it with two, I had to look through 7 web pages and I still did not find a method that produced completely satisfactory results.

And forget about doing my other oft-used Find & Replace maneuver: find all text formatted a certain way (ex: italicized) and put certain text or characters on either side of said formatted text (like HTML code). This is another fairly simple process in MS Word. I spent 3 hours trying to find a way to do this in OpenOffice one day. I gave up.

Another aspect of OpenOffice that bugs a lot of users (though not so much me) is the inability to have a “normal” page view. Not the Print Layout or the Web Layout, just straight text all the way down with a little dotted line indicating the page break. MS Word has this and OpenOffice users have been clamoring for it since 2001, apparently. And yet there is no satisfaction. Sad.

This kind of thing means that I can never use OpenOffice as my primary office suite. I will continue to need Word. I don’t want to need Word! And  I should not need to take a course in programming in order to do really simple tasks.

I could spend another 1000 words talking about the problems I have with GIMP over Photoshop or even Paint Shop Pro 6. I feel like every intermediate or advanced function of GIMP takes more steps or requires more hunting than is necessary for an image program. And having the tool menu in a separate window from the window with the image is maddening. Every time I have to use GIMP to do something as simple as crop then resize an image my blood pressure rises.

Take those frustrations with individual programs and apply them to a whole operating system – yeah, I’m looking at you, Linux. As Laptop Magazine commenter Gary Reaves so elegantly put it:

How would you like to own a toaster that requires you to design a timing circuit switch every time you want a piece of toast? Try marketing that to consumers. That’s basically what Linux Distros are all about…

Most problems don’t quite reach the timing circuit design level of complication. Still, any time a simple function or feature isn’t there or requires a lot of work and research to do, users are going to be unhappy. Heck, even non-free/open source software and operating systems run into this problem. Windows Vista, anyone? How about Office 2007? (That travesty of an office suite has kept me using Office XP for almost a decade now.) But Microsoft is the dominant force here. They can afford to pull crap like this (somewhat).

If open source software wants to play with the big boys, the programmers need to step up their game. It’s not the broad strokes of functionality that are going to make or break you with consumers, it’s the little things.

You can now see the result of all my hard work (and whining).  The five Linux distros I reviewed are online and conveniently in one roundup, so you can see them all: What Flavor of Linux is Right For You?

Linux Mint earned the Editor’s Choice, as well it should, as it was my favorite of the five.  Ubuntu was a close second. As I mentioned before, I am not partial to PCLinuxOS or Mandriva, and Fedora makes me want to never see Linux again. (This is especially sad because Fedora is the one that works best with the Samsung netbooks.)

Click on over to read. Maybe you will find yourself thinking about trying Linux. I am glad I did, despite everything.

Up until a year ago when I bought my first Eee PC, I’d heard of Linux but never had a desire to use it. Not in its desktop form, at least. I’d dealt with Linux web servers before. Until last year, I was vaguely aware that Linux was an operating system that was free and an alternative to Windows, but it also seemed to me that Linux was mainly for people deeply into technology. Also people who didn’t mind jumping through a lot of hoops in order to do what I considered very simple tasks. Linux was not for me, I reasoned, and thus I ignored it.

I don’t think I’m all that different from most informed computer users. I use this funny box to do more than just check email and process words. My computer is central to my livelihood. And yet Linux held no temptation for me.

Then I got an Eee PC.

When I heard that Eee PCs came with Linux on them (a tweaked version of Xandros, as we all now know) I wasn’t put off. I was actually happy to hear it, because I figured not having Windows helped keep the cost down. After I bought it, I used that little netbook every day for months. In that case, I did mainly use it for surfing and writing and not much else. Still, Linux didn’t make things more difficult, trip me up, or otherwise annoy me. I actually enjoyed it. Plus, I will admit, it made me feel like an ubergeek, which is a good feeling.

When I interviewed for my current job I even said that I thought Linux was pretty awesome and would be willing to try it elsewhere. My boss hasn’t let me forget that yet. Especially in light of the last 5 weeks.

(more…)

The other day I wrote a story about people putting Android–the Google operating system for phones–on netbooks.  I can’t say that it was my most exciting assignment ever.  I put porting Android to the EeePC on a long list of things people do just because they can.  Possibly because it’s cool.  Sometimes because they want to stretch their abilities and test their own limits.  But the end result for everyone is not always practical.  Yes, you can put Android on some netbooks, but it doesn’t work all that well and won’t connect to the app store/market, either.

Perhaps I’m being a bit curmudgeonly.  I use my netbook to get work done, so I need it… working.  But for developers, figuring out how to port things to different platforms and hardware is work.  Still, I always look at news of this type with a bit of skepticism.

Yesterday Brad Linder (of Liliputing) and Adam McDaniel put up instructions on how to create a LiveUSB of the HP Mi Edition version of Linux (which is basically Ubuntu with some semi-extensive tweaks).  This is big news for anyone interested in the Mi OS because up until now you could download it but the install would overwrite everything on your hard drive.  Most Linuxes have the ability to make LiveCDs or LiveUSBs so you can try a distro out and, as far as I know, all of them can install alongside an existing OS (in theory).  But I don’t know if HP expected there to be this kind of interest in the Mi Linux.

Anyway, Brad and Adam spent some time figuring out how to tweak things, so now anyone with a lot of time who isn’t turned off by using Terminal can spend an hour making a LiveUSB of this (admittedly sleek) OS.  Does this fall into Because You Can?  Maybe not.  After all, the OS is usable and meant to run on a netbook.  On the other hand: look at all this tech speak!

I’ve already been promised that I don’t have to do it.

I’m writing up reviews of 5 Linux distros for work and it’s killing me. Linux is both wonderful and completely frustrating, and resolving those two things is hard. Especially when I am trying to be objective. One thing I am really enjoying about some of the Linuxes is their ability to run from USB thumb drives so you can try them out without installing. I really, really love that, with some, the OS can save changes to said USB drive, so I can add programs, tweak settings, etc., and it will be there next time I boot up no matter what computer I’m on. Pocket OS — score!

I also installed the PortableApps platform on an SD card I had in my Eee PC (before I gave it to my niece for Christmas). PortableApps is amazing — lots of great, useful software on an SD card that, again, retains settings and information and leaves no trace behind on the computer you’re using. It’s great for security and supremely useful for me since I test a lot of netbooks and notebooks and don’t want to always install the same core programs over and over.

PortableApps utilizes all open source software, so there are many things I’m not entirely familiar with. But I’m taking it as an opportunity to learn about what’s out there. Of course I know all about Firefox and Thunderbird (which, by the way, everyone should be using instead of MS Office) and Open Office. I’m trying to evaluate whether KompoZer is an adequate substitute for Dreamweaver. GIMP isn’t adequate for anything, alas. There is a dearth of open source photo editing stuff. Someone please correct this!

Anyway, I’m getting very much into my portable OS and apps. Maybe, maybe, maybe it will facilitate my eventual switch to Linux, but I’m extremely dubious about that at this point. Mainly because I’ve had to deal with installing, configuring, and testing five distros in the past month and none of them have been easy or without problems. But that’s a post for another day.