My perspective on things.
Posts tagged review
Don’t Overlook Ubuntu 9.10 This Fall.
Sep 24th
With Mac OS X Snow Leopard released at the end of August, and Windows 7 coming in mid-October, it’s easy to overlook the third desktop operating system, Ubuntu Linux.
Despite a perceived Mac zealotry, I’m actually rather open to any operating system that gets the job done. I own a Dell Mini 9 “netbook”, and it has the ability to run any operating system, including Mac OS X (with some hacking of course).
For the last year, the Mini has run both Leopard and Windows 7. I found performance of Windows 7 on the Dell Mini 9 rather sluggish. Leopard was speedy but buggy at times. I figured it was time to turn to Ubuntu for a third opinion.
Ubuntu 9.10 Screen Shot
Ubuntu 9.10, code named “Karmic Koala” is due to be released on October 29th. I decided to take the latest Alpha build (Alpha 6) for a test spin. In addition, since I was installing this on a netbook, I decided to install the “Netbook Remix” version of Ubuntu.
Since Dell Mini 9 does not have an optical drive, I downloaded the ISO while Windows 7 was still installed, and used the UNetBootin utility to create a Ubuntu installer on a USB flash drive.
Once booted from the USB drive, installation took about 30 minutes to finish. As usual with any flavor of Linux, there is always a driver or two missing, and in my case, it was the Broadcom 43xx wireless card that was installed in the Mini 9. Thankfully, all I had to do was connect to the Internet via Ethernet, and, run the Hardware Drivers utility, and it scanned for and found a driver for my wireless card. It took another reboot to get the wireless card activated and connected to my network. All the other devices were found correctly, including the webcam and bluetooth.
So far, despite it’s “alpha” state, Ubuntu 9.10 is pretty stable. I enjoy the Netbook Remix interface, which uses the GNOME desktop environment, plus two other tools, Maximus Window Management, and Netbook Launcher, that produces an interface optimized for a small screen.
Linux still isn’t for everyone – yet each version I install makes significant improvements in areas that would prevent a beginner or novice from using Linux on their computer. I still find the most complicated aspect of the setup installing applications. For example, if I want to run Chromium, which is the development version of Google Chrome, it’s a one click download and install on Mac OS X and Windows. On Ubuntu, however, I needed to do a Google search to find the correct software repository to add into Ubuntu, and then install it using some commands in the terminal. In addition, some software isn’t available to be installed from a repository at all, and instead needs to be installed manually from a .deb package (Songbird in this instance). These are still the types of things that are limiting a widespread adoption of Linux in general.
I found that the Ubuntu 9.10 Netbook Remix has provided me with the longest battery life so far, compared to Windows 7 and Mac OS X Leopard, on this Dell Mini 9. I’m at about 3 hours so far, which is great considering the small battery installed. I never managed to get past two and a half on OS X or Windows 7, although rumor has it that Mac OS X 10.5.7+ greatly improved battery performance on some Atom based computers.
Most noticeable is the speed. The folks at Ubuntu have clearly optimized this for low-end hardware, such as the 1.6 GHz Atom processor. The interface is snappy, and browsing is fast. After installing Chromium, browsing became even faster. The only disappointing aspect of browsing is the performance of the Flash plug-in on video based sites, such as Hulu. Flash performance is dismal in Chromium, with lots of stuttering and frame loss when watching videos full screen. Performance is slightly better in Firefox, but not by much. There are a combination of issues at work here though, including poor hardware acceleration of Intel video drivers on Linux, and the fact that Flash performs poorly on any platform other than Windows. At this point, getting reliable video playback in Flash require a NVidia or ATI GPU and a dual core CPU, to make up for the shortcomings of software.
Overall, I’m very pleased with Ubuntu 9.10 Alpha 6, and I expect to keep it installed on the Dell Mini in for the foreseeable future. I can’t wait for the final release and I encourage any readers of this review to try it out, especially if they have an old PC or NetBook hanging around.
Quick Review: Safari 4 Public Beta.
Feb 26th
For you web browser fans out there, Apple released a public beta of Safari 4 earlier this week. I downloaded it earlier this evening, and, so far I’m pretty impressed. The user interface has been refined, and “Cover Flow” has been added to the browser in several areas.
Opening "Top Sites" page in Safari.
The first noticeable difference in the user interface is that tabs are now located above the location and search bars. This is different than in past versions where they were located below.
Also new is a “Top Sites” view that is displayed when you first open the browser, and by default, when you open a new tab. This “Top Sites” view uses your history to keep track of 12 sites you visit the most. As your web history changes, what you see on the page will change over time. In addition, you can pin certain pages permanently to “Top Sites” by clicking on the “edit” button on the bottom left. You can search your history on this page as well. A “Top Sites” button has been added to the right of the bookmarks button in the toolbar of Safari for easy access to this page.
Speed is dramatically improved in this version of Safari as well. The Web Kit rendering engine has been optimized, along with the introduction of a new JavaScript engine called Nitro. I did find Safari 4 very snappy on some difficult to render pages like ESPN.com. Your mileage may vary depending on how the site your visiting is coded, but Apple’s benchmarks state that Safari renders pages marginally faster than Firefox 3 and dramatically faster than IE7.
Also new is the use of coverflow as you scroll through your history and bookmarks. Thumbnails of pages are generated as you browse, and then are visually represented as you “scroll” through your bookmarks and history. This is is the fourth major area Apple has implemented CoverFlow into. Recently it was added to iLife’ 09, and has been in iTunes and the Mac OS X 10.5 finder for a couple of years.
Windows users will find that Safari now uses native widgets and font rendering engines in Vista and XP. This was a big complaint for most users on Windows, since Safari 3 used its own widgets and font rendering engines, which sometimes caused visual glitches when using the browser.
Overall I think this is a solid release. If Safari is your primary browser, I wouldn’t recommend installing it yet. There’s still some bugs to iron out- I was not even able to use it to post to WordPress due to a glitch in creating links in WordPress edit post tool. In addition, some plug-ins will most likely stop working with Safari 4. Issues with the third party programs 1Password and Growl notifications have already been reported. However, for general browsing it works fine, and as I said above, is very fast. Safari 4 comes with an uninstaller in case you do need to revert back to version 3.2.1.
Finally, if you don’t like the layout of the tabs located over the location bar, there is a simple fix for this on Mac OS X. Quit Safari, and then open the Terminal application and type in the following:
defaults write com.apple.Safari DebugSafari4TabBarIsOnTop -bool FALSE (courtesy of MacOSXHints.com)
If you would like to revert back to the new tabs layout, type the above in again with Safari closed, but change the FALSE to TRUE.
Overall I think this is a very polished initial preview, and many of the new features caught users by surprise. Safari is based on the open source Web Kit web rendering engine, and nightly builds of it are available at webkit.org for use. Even though these bleeding edge builds were available, the new layout and Cover Flow features were not available until the release of the Safari 4 Public Beta. I’m pretty sure we won’t see any new features in the final version of Safari 4, but there’s definitely room for improvement in page rendering. Who knows, we may see even more speed and optimization improvements by the time this thing is final!