Yesterday I said that after I played with KDE 4 I would write an article about it. Now that I have downloaded and installed both the OpenSUSE CD with KDE 4 and the Kubuntu CD with KDE 4, I have decided that I cannot write anything that resembles a review of it. That is not because there is some horrible problem with KDE 4, though.

A Linux distro is made of many parts and the desktop enviroment is only one of them. Without the other parts, KDE is nothing but code. Right now, KDE 4 has been put onto a couple distros in a few hours with a remaster. That is useful for playing with some of the features, but I don’t feel like I can judge KDE 4, a project that took so much developer effort, when very little time has been spent making sure it is well integrated with the other software that makes up a distro. I am not criticising anyone or anything, I just don’t want to review KDE 4 until a major distro has released a stable, supported version of their distro with KDE 4.

KDE 4 is finally here! The KDE team announced the release of the final version of KDE 4. KDE 4 incorporates many major changes over KDE 3.5 and has received so much attention in the Linux community that it is almost hard to believe it is really here. After numerous delays, though, KDE 4 really is here.

While I am writing this, another computer is working away installing the OpenSUSE KDE 4 Live CD, so I can try it out. While I was waiting for the install to finish, I noticed that the CNet blog Underexposed covered the launch of KDE 4. It is great that KDE is getting some attention from the mainstream tech media, but the title of the post amused me. This is the title:

“KDE 4 gives Linux some Mac, Windows flavor”

I am sure that is intended to be a compliment, but I suspect not everyone would view it that way. Don’t take that as a criticism of the post itself, I just think it underscores the different perspectives of the technology world.

I was really glad to see that KDE got mainstream tech coverage. The work the developers put in certainly merits the attention it is getting. Although Linux gets nowhere near the amount of coverage that Windows and Mac do, that is slowly changing through huge announcements like this one, companies making deals to distribute Linux on their computers, and other news worthy events.

Although I have not used KDE 4 yet myself, I do plan to do some coverage of the new features/art/etc. soon. Instead of a review, though, I am going to do a comparison of KDE 4 and GNOME to see which one *I* want to run on my desktop in the future. That will be published later tonight or (more likely) on Saturday.

OLPC’s CTO left OLPC to create a new for-profit company with an initial goal of creating a $75 commercial laptop that uses many of the same technologies that the XO laptop uses, according to Slashdot. Here is a question for you:

How Much Does a $75 Laptop from OLPC’s CTO Cost?

If history really does repete itself, the answer is not $75, but $150. Frankly, it seems highly implausable that after the OLPC project failed to make a $100 laptop, the OLPC CTO thinks she can make a $75 dollar laptop.

Although that is perhaps the funniest part of this story, there is a real story here.

Although OLPC tried selling XOs here in the US, they don’t seem interested in selling the XOs to people in developed countries. (This really shows that they are about the children who they are helping, not the money they could be making.) This is where this new company, Pixel Qi, comes in. Pixel Qi intends to bring a $75 (or $150) laptop to the market in developed countries that will incorperate many of the innovations of the XO, such as the sunlight-readable screens. It will be interesting to see what this company produces. (My guess is still a $150 laptop. :-))

Sprint has been really pushing their WiMAX program (called XOHM) after the Eee PC WiMAX announcement and we finally have some details on how the pricing will work out. No, we still have no idea how much it will cost, but we do know how Sprint plans to charge for WiMAX usage. According to Reuters, Sprint’s CTO has said that they will offer plans ranging from daily pricing to more standard longer term plans or the cost of the WiMAX can be included in the device. Also, while there is no word on how much the plans will cost, Sprint’s CTO said this:

“People will be excited about our rates. They won’t be ecstatic about them because we’re not going to give it away.”

Unfortunately, much as I would like to believe that means nothing, that almost certainly means its going to be expensive.

So based on what we know, the question is what pricing scheme will the Eee PC use. Personally,
considering we already know that the price is not going to be cheap, I don’t think Sprint and Asus would do a one time fee. There is nothing to prevent someone from, say, downloading movies or something, so Sprint could loose a lot of money on a one-time fee deal. That eliminates the one-time fee, so I think it is most probable that the WiMAX on the Eee will be plan based service. Sprint also said that the devices would not be subsidised, so hopefully there will be no required long term contract. Now the only question that remains is just how much will the WiMAX really cost?

Additional details of the new Eee PCs with larger screens have surfaced. It seems that Asus did one thing right and one thing wrong. First, what they did right:

The new larger screen Eee PCs will still have the same size case, according to Gizmodo. One of the Eee PCs main advantages is size. If the new Eee PC’s cases were significantly larger than they are now, that advantage would be lost to more mainstream laptops and larger UMPC. Unfortunately, Asus didn’t do everything right.

The new Eee PCs with larger screens will not have a higher resolution (again, according to Gizmodo.) That’s right, the resolution will not change, you will just get a blown-up picture of what you would get on a 7″ Eee PC. I can’t claim to know how much more it would cost to get a higher resolution screen, but it cannot be that much. Just making the picture larger will satisfy anyone who thought the text was too small, but I highly doubt just making the text bigger is going to satisfy the majority of users buying the Eee PC.

The press conference started and Asus wasted no time. The WiMAX enabled Eee PC that I talked about earlier is real! (According to Engadget, who is/was live blogging the event.) Here are the big announcements

• There will be an Eee PC with WiMAX (Sorry, just had to say that again.)
• WiMAX will be rolled out this year and roll out will continue in future years.
• Base price for WiMAX enabled notebooks is going to be $999, but thats not what the Eee with WiMAX will cost (does that mean that the Eee will cost more than other WiMAX notebooks???)
• New Eee PC models will be introduced with 8 and 9 (well, 8.9 technically) inch screens

Thats all we know so far, but thats still a lot of news for one press conference.

Of course, WiMAX is a perfect companion for the Eee PC because of the Eee’s portability, but the pricing is yet to be announced, which could seriously hurt the appeal of a WiMAX Eee PC. On the other hand, with the new models with bigger screen sizes, many people may be willing to pay more for an Eee PC, since they can use it for more standard laptop tasks. In fact, the bigger screens might even be the more important part of this announcement.

Right now, the news looks great for Linux, but there was one worry-some slide that Engadget posted. One of the bullet points suggests that Asus may start to offer Windows on the Eee. Still, the disadvantages of Windows on the Eee PC that I have discussed before (cost, limited resources) should deter consumers from choosing Windows over Linux. In the end, as long as offering Windows has no effect on the Linux side of the Eee, I really can’t complain.

An interesting piece of news from Asus’s press conference is that the Eee PC is their “most successful product ever,” according to Engadget. This is potentially huge news for Linux on two levels.

First, Asus is no small company. While they may not be well known to many people, if you have ever been in the market for a new motherboard, you know the name Asus. For a company of this size, saying a product is the most successful product ever is no small statement. Granted, motherboards are rarely “successful,” but they sell other products too. Hopefully, the huge success of the Eee PC will cause Asus to try using Linux on more devices. It already appears that they are open to this, since they have put a technology called Splashtop (or ExpressGate), which is a fast-booting Linux system, on some of their motherboards, but this success should make them even more anxious to try out Linux on more devices.

(Note: I am sure someone is going to say “but it was the hardware that made the Eee PC sell.” That may be true, but do you think that Windows would run as well as Linux on a device with such limited resources? Also, without Linux, the price would have been higher.)

Second, the buzz the Asus Eee PC will (or at least should) get for announcing a WiMAX equipped model and being called the most successful product ever by Asus should help it to sell even more units. See the first point again.

Before CES started (technically it starts tomorrow, but it might as well just start today considering the number of product announcements), I talked about a new UMPC from E-Lead that looked like it could improve on many of the problems with the Eee PC, but there were almost no details. Now, the details have arrived from Pocketables and the Noahpad website. Just from a quick glance at the details of this new Noahpad I can tell that E-Lead looked at all the problems with the Eee PC and tried to fix them. I say tried because I am skeptical about how well many of their solutions will work, but at least they tried.

One of the biggest complains about the Eee PC is the small keyboard. The Noahpad features two big trackpads that are also supposed to be able to mimic the feel of buttons. This is supposed to make typing easier because the keyboard is split into two parts (the two trackpads) so there is more space. In addition, the Noahpad can be opened all the way so that it looks like a tablet with the keys on the back and the screen on the front. In this configuration, a layover appears on the screen of the keys so that you can type even without looking at the keyboard. (This is really hard to explain, but this picture and this picture from the Pocketables website make it much easier to understand.)

Another frequent complaint about the Eee PC is the small screen. While the Noahpad has the same size screen (7″), they claim that their 7″ screen works like a 10″ screen. That sounds complicated, but the idea is really quite simple. On your 7″ screen, you see part of what you would see on a 10″ screen and you just scroll around with the over sized trackpads. Once again, this is hard to explain, so I am just going to quote from the Noahpad site:

“Noahpad UMPC uses the virtual screen technology to display portions of the standard 10¨ window on its 7¨ screen while maintaining the resolution of 1024X768 pixels. With the unique touchpad controller, users can easily move the window around on the screen, effectively expanding the viewing area from 7¨ to 10¨ .”

The Noahpad does not just attempt to fix problems with the Eee PC, though. The Noahpad is also designed to be able to preform the functions of a digital photo frame or car GPS navigation system. Unfortunately, the Noahpad does not have built-in GPS, so you need an external GPS reciever. In addition to all this, the Noahpad uses some sort of external battery to provide 10 hours of battery life.

The Noahpad certainly sounds cool, but it still remains to be seen if the features, such as the combination trackpad and keyboard, really work as they are supposed to. Also, there is no price point yet. Mobile Whack is claiming the price will be in the range of the Eee PC, but I can’t verify that. Still, this new UMPC certainly looks cool.

Urgent notice to all Windows users: Due to the security problems of Windows, you now need to purchase a Linux computer in order to keep the viruses and spyware off your existing Windows PC.

Yes, its true, a security company called Yoggie just announced a USB device that plugs into a Windows computer to keep it safe from viruses. The device, which looks like a big USB flash drive is really an entire computer that runs Linux. The idea is that you plug this thing in to your computer and its 13 applications will keep your computer safe without using up the resources of your current computer. The problem is, when an operating system gets to the point where you need another computer running a more secure operating system to keep the original computer from getting stuffed with viruses and spyware, it might be a good idea to think about just using that more secure operating system, in this case Linux.

Seriously, there has to come a point when Windows users are going to look at the resources they are throwing away and the viruses they are getting and say this is enough! At that point, Linux must be ready to provide an easy-to-use, secure, bloat-free desktop. Luckily, Linux already has all that.

CES is almost certainly the biggest tech show of the year for most people. Places like CNet provide so much coverage that it makes you wonder if there is anything there they did not cover. If you want to know the Linux news from CES, though, it becomes a little more complicated. While CES is not focused on Linux, at such a big show, there is going to be plenty of Linux news, so the question is, how do you get the up-to-the-minute Linux news from CES?

After a lot of searching, I found three Linux news sites that have said they will be covering CES this year or have covered it in past years.

• Phoronix has said they will be covering CES
• Linux Today covered CES previously
• Linux World also covered CES before
• Linux Journal covered CES last year and looks like they will be doing so again

Although it is often hard to know what to expect at CES, this year we know that a few Linux-related things will be happening:

• Asus, Intel, and Sprint will make a WiMAX announcement related to the Eee PC
• OpenMoko will be showing off their new Neo FreeRunner
• Everex will launch gOS 2.0
• E-Lead will have an Eee PC competitor with a unique input device

If all that still is not enough or you just want to know what is going on in the rest of the tech world at CES, CNet and Engadget will both be covering CES from a more general perspective.

And of course, I am sure there will be plenty of CES news right here at Linux Loop.