Review

Contents 0.1 Display 0.2 Cables 0.3 Ports 0.4 Speakers 0.5 iSight HD 0.6 Gaming 0.7 Going Green 0.8 Before and After <li> <a href="#Share_this"><span class="toc_number toc_depth_1">1</span> Share this:</a> </li> With the increase in travel as of late I am finding myself tied more and more to the laptop. Despite an extensive home lab with KVM switches and dual monitors, there I would sit with my 11″ MacBook Air. Simplicity was the main reason I found. Transfer files, syncing something to a new machine, etc. just was much more hassle than I needed. I had what I will call the semi-dock with my Air in which I’d sit it on a stand and then run the myriad of wires to tie it into the home desk system. GONE! ...

It seems everyone is posting their review after a few days of working with the laptop. I decided to take a different perspective with the initial review. When I first started playing with ChromeOS betas a few months ago I came to the realization that this was not for me. Two things were apparent: This machine is to provide a cloud-based Thin Client. I live off servers around the world, not necessarily in the cloud. As a geek, the Walled Garden drives me crazy. “What do you mean I can’t install a SSH server?!?!?” My girlfriend on the other hand could care less about a SSH server. She finds the Mac Mini a little overwhelming at times and really just wants the internet. “Show me where the Safari icon is.” For that reason alone I found ChromeOS to be built for her. Instant On and just a web browser. ...

Real quick review of the desktop in pro’s and con’s Pro’s Installer is pretty and well laid out Theme extends across all 3 supported desktops (lxde, KDE, and GNOME) Administration utilities use native toolkits for each platform unlike YaST from SuSE Con’s Why wouldn’t you use network-manager rather than your cheesy control center tool I first used in Mandrake 6.1 or 7? The default KDM theme reminds me of the old Solaris days, doesn’t match the feel of the desktop GTK theme seems like a cut-n-paste from QT side and it isn’t pretty Beagle search rather than Tracker? Not starting a mono war here, but beagle is NO where near feature filled Seems to me that they took the bits and pieces from around the world and bundled it together. Problem is the bits they took were from the crappy bucket. Mandriva, I loved you back during the Red Hat vs. Mandrake days were you pushed the technology and ease of use for Linux. Now you just seem washed up.

The Good: Bringing it up to level of workstation/fusion virtual machine compatibility? Vix if you are into the innards of virtualization. The Bad: Wow I mean where do you start? Let me walk you through my install process. I upgraded from the original vmware server to beta on an Ubuntu Gutsy box. The install process was smooth as butter and worked like a champ. I expect the smoothness because VMware is the benchmark for easy installs on Linux (only behind Google for using the Loki Installer) and has always shown that. What I never expected was the actual usage of the software. Gone is your GUI console. Hold on to that for a minute. It is gone, totally non-existstent. The GUI was replaced by a Web interface using AJAX. It all feels very Web 2.0 which is great for when I log into Digg or Facebook (Ooohh Shinny!) but this is enterprise software. What makes the web interface unbearable is the speed. Has anyone used Yahoo! Mail beta AJAX interface? It has brought this quad-processor 4GiB RAM machine to its knees. That is how the VMware Web console feels. VMware! WAKE UP! Web interfaces are great and when you make it optional like you always have with WebUI packages. Optional, it only adds to the flexibility your company has given admins and architects everywhere. I understand the reasoning, web runs everywhere and gives you a lot of options for using thin clients and PDA’s. ...

I am done dealing with OpenSuSE 10.3. Before anyone starts I realize that it is a beta release candidate “blah blah blah.” I expect simple things to work without a hassle such as touchpads and wifi. Now laptops have always been the bane of Linux, but as of recently Ubuntu ran better than XP on this Sony TXN17p I have. In fact out of the box the hotkeys for sound Linus called Solaris a “buggy piece and backlight worked with no configuration. On OpenSuSE it shipped with none of that. While I expected this on 10.1 and MAYBE 10.2, to do this in 2007 is insane. Most people in this world now own laptops, not desktops. ACPI and Eject buttons should work out of the box. Not to mention this is a sony laptop and not jims computer shop or something. Sonypi and sony-laptop has been a staple of the Linux module kernels for at least 3 revs. SuSE I love(d) you! You were my first true Linux distro. I remember the 4.8 days of 12 CD’s and a manual that if thrown could break walls. Now you are a Novell puppet and not living up to the standards of your peers. Goodbye my love, I am off to the Cape of Good Hope!