Nearly every UMPC sold today comes with two options: Linux or Windows. Windows is all pretty much the same. It is almost always the standard Windows interface with no UMPC-specific customization. The Linux, on the other hand, tends to fit into two categories. Some are similar to Windows, in that the interface is that of a standard Linux distro and not customized for the UMPC form-factor, while others are highly locked down and highly customized for UMPCs. The problem is that at one end of the spectrum you have something highly customizable that you can do a lot with, but the interface is less than ideal. On the other end, you have something with a good interface, but very locked down potential. Ubuntu’s Netbook Remix is the best of both worlds. And it is about to get a chance to shine on Dell’s upcoming UMPC.

Ars Technica has just reported that Dell’s new UMPC will run, for the Linux option, Ubuntu. While it is not confirmed, this means that it is very likely they will choose the Netbook Remix. Assuming this is the case, it will be Linux’s, and Ubuntu’s, first chance to really shine on a UMPC.

Up till now, Linux’s UMPC advantages have mostly been Windows’s disadvantages - speed, security, and cost. This is simply not the case with Ubuntu’s Netbook Remix. It has a slick, smart user interface combined with all the power of (and the option of using) the standard interface.

If Dell and Canonical handle this well, Dell’s name and marketing combined with Canonical’s software stand to take Linux a step furthur into the mainstream. I just hope they include Compiz.

A while back I wrote about some of the best early pieces of artwork for Ubuntu Intrepid Ibex. Any Ubuntu fans will surely be interested to know what has happened since then, so here is an updated top 5 favorite pieces of artwork proposed for Intrepid.

1. This theme takes out many of the browns that people complain about while keeping the basic orange-y color that distinguishes Ubuntu. Additionally, it adds black highlights, in the form of panels, and has an attractive placement of the Ubuntu logo.
   Wiki Page
2. While this theme does not appear to fit the Ubuntu color scheme very well as is, with a good orange background, it could fit in quite well. While bits of it (mostly the browser part) look at little bit Mac-ish, those parts are subtle and the overall theme looks great.
   Wiki Page
3. While it changes the standard colors slightly, this background provides a simple gradient across most of it, with an Ibex decoration in the corner. After Hardy Heron, I am a big fan of including the animal the release is named after into the design, which this wall paper does very well.
   Wiki Page
4. While Ubuntu’s startup process is fine right now, adding an artistic touch would really make it stand out. Several ideas have been proposed (see Wiki link), but this is the most creative of them.
   Wiki Page
5. This sort of modern and clean login screen might work well with theme #2 (see above). Although I am not sure that I like the background or that exact color of yellow, this concept shows promise, particularly if it were integrated somehow with some of the developments in the login screen world.
   Wiki Page

Brilliant Brainstorms is a weekly summary of some of the best/most interesting brainstorms from the Ubuntu Brainstorm site.

It is very easy to make a window take up the entire screen, but what if you to have a similar shortcut for putting it in a certain place on the screen, say the left half. Regions would solve this problem. (I submitted this idea.)

There may already be a way to resize Wubi installs, but it needs to be easy. If Wubi is going to be a way of letting people wade into Ubuntu slowly, it needs to be possible to slowly grow the size of your install and, eventually, transition to a regular install.

As netbooks grow in popularity, it is important to make it easy for users to switch their OSs. Right now, this can be challenging, due to the lack of CD drives. All that has to be done is provide an easy way to make a LiveUSB drive or LiveSD card.

I am not at all convinced that touch-screen is the future of desktop computing, but there are starting to be some touch-screen machines out there, so ensuring that Ubuntu supports them well could be important, if they catch on.

Musix GNU+Linux is, according to its website, “a 100% free multimedia operating system intended for music production, graphic design, audio and video edition, and all kind of tasks.” This means that there are more audio and video applications included, at least on the DVD version, that you have probably ever heard of.

Upon booting the live DVD and logging in (no password on the non-root account), a fairly standard KDE (3.5, not 4) interface is presented. Apart from the massive list of applications, which include, in addition to all the audio and video stuff, a fair number of other applications, there were a couple of little things I liked a lot.

First, like NimbleX, Musix has an icon for connecting to a wireless network on the desktop. I like this, since connecting to a WiFi is usually one of the first things someone wants to do. Unfortunately, though, Musix did not recognize my wireless card.

Second, instead of just using one desktop, you can switch between desktops. I don’t mean workspaces, which you have too, but different desktops. There is a default one, then an audio one, a video one, and others. On, for example, the audio one there is a picture of some old radio and icons for all the audio-related applications.

Other than these differences, Musix is a pretty standard distribution, but a good choice if you want audio and video applications at your fingertips. Additionally, Musix is 100% free (as in freedom), so, if that matters to you, that is an added bonus.

Probably 90% of the Linux distros out there are supposed to be newbie friendly. You also see a few distros, such as Gentoo or Slackware, designed for advanced users. But you rarely see a distro for “intermediate users.” Frugalware is one of those few distros. According to the Frugalware site, Frugalware is “a general purpose linux distribution, designed for intermediate users (who are not afraid of text mode).”

Upon booting up the live CD, you are greeted by a nice terminal. No graphical interface. Quite unusual in modern distros. Accompanying that, though, was a helpful explanation of what to do, which is important since you need to know the username and password and because you have to use the command xstart, not startx, to get into any sort of GUI.

Once you login and type “xstart” you are taken into a familiar KDE 3.5 environment. Despite the almost total lack of Frugalware branding, the theme used is quite nice.

Since part of Frugalware’s philosophy is to not mess with upstream applications, you are unlikely to discover many changes from a default KDE setup plus added applications.

The most recent stable release of Frugalware came in March of this year when 0.8 (Kalgan) was released. The next stable release, 0.9 (Solaria), is expected in September, but you can, of course, always check out the development releases.

If you are finding some of the more popular distros too newbie-friendly and you want a geekier distro, without going all the way to Gentoo, you might want to check out Frugalware.

One thing many of us would like to know, I am sure, is how many people out there use Linux? The usual numbers, those from Net Applications, would indicate that less than 1% of people use Linux. More recently, though, there have been some more optimistic numbers. Canonical is claiming that 11% of businesses use Ubuntu. (If that is the case, just imagine how many use Red Hat or Suse.) Gartner says that Linux’s market share is 4%, putting it about even with the Mac. And Context says that almost 3% of PCs sold in the UK have Linux pre-installed.

While none of those numbers are huge, they mean the difference between Linux and Mac OS X being about equal and Linux being a speck of dust in the sea. The fundamental problem is that it is really, really hard to know how what the marketshare of Linux, or any open-source software, is. After all, one download might never be used, or only be used for a short time, and another might be used to install Linux onto 100 computers.

In addition to the standard market share numbers I mentioned above, there are at least two others projects trying to determine how many Linux users there are.

The first is the Linux counter. Their idea is to get people to visit the website and register as a Linux user. Obviously, this has some flaws in that anyone can register many times and most people will not bother to register.

The second project is the Open Source Census. The idea is similar, except that you download an application. This presumably gives them better control over double submissions, but it cannot be perfect and it is still voluntary.

Short of every Linux distro calling home, which I hope will never happen, there may never be a way to know how many Linux users there are. Perhaps the downloads of some cross-platform application would give a rough idea, but that application would have to be something that a Linux user, a Mac user, and a Windows user would want equally. If anyone has a better idea, I would love to hear it.

More and more companies are starting to sell computers with some sort of “instant on” Linux. It started with Asus, and now HP and Dell have jumped on, too. While these sorts of things at currently being marketed as a small convenience feature, it seems to me that they are the future - and, thus, a big potential for Linux.

As it stands now, a few people will begin to get these instant on Linux distros. Of these people, some will ignore it, but others will start to use it some amount of the time. As the instant on environments get more advanced and more widespread, a greater precentage of the people who get them will start to use them, and for a greater amount of time. Logically, if you extend this trend, pretty much everyone is using an instant on environment for almost everything they do. Unfortunately, with the current situation, this may not happen.

In order for instant on environments to meet the needs of more people for more of what they do, the instant on environments have to get more flexible. At first, this may just mean adding more applications, something that will almost certainly happen in time. There gets to a point, though, where even more flexibility is needed. This is where the problem is.

Instant on environments are currently viewed as a small convienence feature - not a full-time OS. This may mean that the current players will be slow to see the need for the ability to install new applications, or interact with the rest of the hardware, and so on. For this reason, it may be nessessary for another software maker to come in and take it to the next level. This could be an independent company, a Linux distro (such as Ubuntu), or really anything, but if instant on is going to evolve into a full-time OS, it needs someone who has a vested interest in making that happen, not just getting the same few features on lots of computers.

As a follow up to yesterday’s posts, I thought I would mention some problems I had with Dell’s website while trying to compare prices of Windows and Linux models. While website glitches might not seem like a big deal, when they add up, they give a really bad impression of the website and company.

The first problem I noticed is that pages will sometimes just not load. Reloading the page usually fixes this, but it is still annoying.

The second and more serious problem that I noticed is that most products have an option to add them to your wishlist, which is a handy way of comparing the specs of two machines, but a few replace that with an option to add the product to your saved items. The problem is, your saved items and your wishlist are two completely different lists! That means that I can easily compare most products, unless one of those products happens to be a “saved items” product.

Finally, it seems that Dell is constantly changing the products listed on the Ubuntu page. You may remember that a while ago I noticed that the number of computers available with Ubuntu had dropped from 4 to 2, but it returned the next day. Well, it happened again. Yesterday, there were five computers available with Ubuntu; today there are four.

In my opinion, if Dell wants their Ubuntu machines to sell, they need to quit hiding them away on some unknown part of their site, offer all (or most - some exceptions for mobile wireless and stuff which may not be supported are OK) of the configuration items of the Windows versions, and stop changing their offerings every time you turn around.

One of the many benefits of buying Linux preinstalled on a PC is that there is no crapware. One common piece of crapware is a 30-day free trial of some antivirus suit, which is not even needed on Linux. This, however, led to an interesting quote on Dell’s website. Below is a screen-shot:

Almost certainly a mistake... I hope.

This is a screenshot from the Dell site, comparing a Windows (left) and Linux (right) machine. The red highlighting was added to point out the flaw.

Not only does Dell say the Ubuntu machine comes with “No Security,” but they also say it has “No Productivity Software (pre-installed).” Ever heard of OpenOffice?

I suspect (and hope) that this is a mistake that will soon be corrected.

In cases where computers are available pre-installed with either Linux or Windows, it is almost always the case that either (a) the Linux one is slightly less expensive or (b) the Windows one is actually less expensive, so you might as well just buy the Windows version and install Linux. Apparently, this is not always the case. While comparing the prices for some Dell computers, I discovered that on some Dell notebooks, it is cheaper to buy the Ubuntu version and a retail copy of Vista than to buy Vista pre-installed.

Since Dell has recently added several new models to the Ubuntu line, I decided to do price comparisons between the Linux and Windows models. I tried to get the systems as close as possible, but in a few cases there are very minor differences. All prices listed below are how much cheaper the Ubuntu model is:

• Inspiron 530 (Desktop) - Ubuntu is $80 cheaper.
• Inspiron 1525 (Notebook) - Ubuntu and Windows are equal price.
• Studio 15 (Notebook) - Ubuntu is $100 cheaper.
• XPS M1330 (Notebook) - Ubuntu is $350 cheaper.
• XPS M1530 (Notebook) - Ubuntu is $350 cheaper.

That means that on the two XPS models listed there, it is cheaper to buy the Ubuntu version and pick up a retail copy of Vista Home Premium (or, better yet, don’t) for $220 from Newegg. Wow.

Update 1 - It seems that Dell has pulled the XPS M1530 from the Ubuntu page.

Update 2 - For anyone who wants to confirm the numbers, here is what you need to know:

• You have to go to dell.com/ubuntu to find the Ubuntu machines. Then, you can search for the Windows counterparts.
• The default configuration of the Windows and Ubuntu machines is not the same, so you have to click on “customize” and go through each option, making sure that the machines have equal specs. If there are multiple choices that work, I choose the less expensive option. If you cannot match the specs exactly, get as close as you can.

Yes, there are a few cases where you cannot match the hardware exactly. The wireless cards seem to be the biggest issue. In one case I could not match the exact model of wireless card, in another one card was N and the other was G. There was also one case where both machines had the same amount of RAM, but one machine had it spread across two chips, while the other only had one chip. Finally, in one case, the clock speeds of the processors was off by about .1 GHz. So, yes there were a couple of issues, but all of them are really small and highly unlikely to cause any difference in performance.