Results tagged “SUSE” from CLICK

I did a column for the Los Angeles Daily News (and presumably all the other Los Angeles Newspaper Group business sections) that ran Saturday. I wrote about the HP Mini-Note, the low-priced Linux (or Windows) laptop, contrasting it with the high-priced Apple MacBook Air.

I had to cut the piece quite a bit for the print edition. Here is the full column:

Laptops get smaller -- and so do their prices

By Steven Rosenberg
Staff Writer

Did you hear the story about Steven Levy, the Newsweek technology writer who lost the MacBook Air that Apple loaned him? It's so small and thin, it got thrown out with the trash. He thinks.

It wouldn't be such big news if, besides being the techno-lust object of the fortnight, the MacBook Air didn't cost between $1,799 and $3,098.

In my world, that kind of money buys a decent used car, or a serves down payment on a new kidney. Not a computer, least of all a laptop.

Laptops are convenient -- I'm writing this on one right now -- but they're also extremely hard to repair or upgrade, easy to steal and easy to break. That's no recipe for dropping three large. Or even 1.8 large -- you feel me? (This is the part where I pause to reflect on whether I'm watching too many back-to-back episodes of "The Wire" on DVD).

Luckily the rest of the action in these "subnotebooks" is on the low end.

I'm talking about extremely small notebooks like the ASUS Eee PC and the Everex Cloudbook, as well as Intel's Classmate PC and the One Laptop Per Child XO computer that has grabbed plenty of news coverage as the computer aiming to revolutionize education in the Third World.

For me, the subnotebook only became real in the past week with Hewlett-Packard's announcement that it will offer the HP 2100 Mini-Note PC starting at $499 later this month.

The HP Mini-Note weighs about 2 1/2 pounds, features an 8.9-inch screen and -- most importantly -- a keyboard described as being 92 percent of full size, something those typing on the tiny ASUS Eee keyboard are bound to appreciate.

Primarily aimed at the education market, the HP Mini-Note features a sturdy aluminum case, specially durable keys, a mechanism that shuts down the hard drive during sudden movements -- like when it's being dropped -- plus built-in wireless and wired networking.

Did I forget to mention that it costs $499? One of the reasons that HP can hit such a low price point for the Mini-Note is that the base configuration, like that of the wildly popular ASUS Eee, comes with 512 megabytes of RAM, a 4 gigabyte solid-state flash drive and Novell's SUSE Linux operating system.

Linux helps the Mini-Note -- as it does the Eee and the Cloudbook -- in two ways. The machines run splendidly with 512 MB of RAM -- something Microsoft Vista cannot do. And Linux can generally be installed by hardware vendors for free, with no need to pay Microsoft for Windows. I'm not sure whether or not HP is paying Novell to use SUSE, but if they are, it has to be a token amount in comparison.

I'm not sure of the exact software mix on the Mini-Note, but most of today's Linux-equipped PCs either have a full office suite (usually OpenOffice) already installed or available at no cost with the clicking of a few buttons. And OpenOffice can do just about everything that Microsoft Office does. Free. Upgrades are free, too.

The HP Mini-Note is the perfect machine to get young students through high school or college. And spending around $500 can ease the minds of parents who cringe at the way kids -- as well as adults -- treat laptop computers.

One thing missing, though, is a CD/DVD drive. Not that the MacBook Air includes one either. For the Mini-Note, anyway, if you absolutely need a CD/DVD drive, USB-connectable models sell for $50 to $60. Again, with the Linux model, all your software is available over the Internet, so you may not need to read or burn discs.

Want a beefed-up Mini-Note? An extra $50 gives you double the memory and a traditional 120 GB hard disk drive. That's the model I'd recommend. Another $50 after that gives you either Windows Vista Home Basic or Windows XP Professional. If you're intent on Microsoft Windows and want no part of Linux, the choice is yours. But you won't get access to all those free applications, you will be plagued by Windows-targeted viruses, and Linux will run much better -- especially better than Vista.

At this writing, the top-of-the-line Mini-Note includes 2 GB of RAM, a bigger, longer-lasting battery and Bluetooth wireless connectivity. But remember, for $500 or $550, you get HP quality, Linux reliability and more coolness for your dollar than those Apple MacBook Air owners trying to keep their $1,800 baby from being thrown out with the old newspapers.

Steven Rosenberg writes about technology in a most frugal way at Click, http://insidesocal.com/click. Send comments and questions to steven.rosenberg@dailynews.com.

Microsoft didn't get where it is today by being stupid.

And they've got a plan. From the Novell deal over intellectual property in Linux to the company's less legalistic initiatives, Microsoft has its hands in the free, open-source software pie, and it wants to dig even deeper.

Here are a few things to keep an eye on:

• CNet blogger Matt Asay writes about open source in The Open Road from a decidedly business-friendly perspective. He's pretty cozy with Microsoft. And he's all over the Sun/MySQL story. So when it comes to FOSS and the huge corporations involved in it, Matt has a lot of info that we would all do well to keep track of. Again, his apparent closeness to Microsoft might rub you the wrong way, but Matt's perspective is a very important one -- to me, anyway. From Red Hat to Sun, Google, MySQL, IBM and more. I find him less biased and way more realistic than a lot of writers out there. He did work for Novell, and now he's an executive at Alfresco, a company that bills itself as "the open-source alternative for enterprise content management," and if the point doesn't get across, there's this from the Alfresco Web site: "Our goal is to not only provide an open source offering but to surpass commercial offerings such as Documentum or Microsoft® SharePoint® in terms of features, functionality and benefits to the user community." He may be cozy with the huge companies that have interests, positive or negative, in open source, but somebody's gotta be on the inside.
• O'Reilly has a Microsoft-sponsored open-source page called Port 25. It's yet another page we would all do well to keep track of.
• And in the "Microsoft is smart" category, the company, along with Novell, is starting to push Moonlight, an open-source version of MS' Silverlight technology. Silverlight is seen as a competitor to Adobe's Flash, and an open-source version of the software, even if it originates from Microsoft, could gain some significant traction ... or it could prompt Adobe to open-source Flash. (If open-source Flash clone Gnash would work for me, I'd say there's another Flash-killer in our midst, but I need to see an app that actually shows a damn YouTube video ... or anything else).

The average Linux geek isn't going to buy any of this, but Linux geeks in the proverbial basement aren't who this is aimed at.

Instead, Microsoft wants to reach the free-spending people in the enterprise who are now using a mix of proprietary and FOSS solutions. Those IT managers want everything to work better -- and especially to work better together -- and they want to keep people happy, both their users and the people who sign off on their budgets.

In other FOSS news, Microsoft is also pushing Novell's SUSE Linux pretty hard ... in China, as I learned in this Matt Asay post.

I don't think we're going to see an open-source version of Windows anytime soon, but you never know what's going to happen with Microsoft.

So Port 25 and Matt Asay's The Open Road -- both things I need to add to the blogroll.