Packetfury.net

I've been using a Netbook now for over a month, so now is a good time to write something on what's happened, what I'm getting out of it, and what I want.

I began with the original Acer Aspire One series, but now I'm using a D150 with a bigger screen. That changed everything for me.

A netbook is not a concentrate of power. A netbook is a lightweight machine, not only in kilos but also in raw computing power. This system is a 1.6GHz machine, which for my travel needs is perfect. I was under the impression that these systems were good enough for emails and web browsing, but you can actually get much, much more out of it.

Thursday morning, 8h30. I'm on the train. My trusty Aspire One D150 goes everywhere with me, and now I even leave my "big" laptop at home. In 15 minutes, I'll be at the Rennes station, time to jump on a bus and go to work. My laptop bag is now much lighter, as I don't have a heavy laptop, and I don't even have a charger. The 6 cell battery gives me around 7 hours of battery life. I left the office yesterday, and I was using the netbook on the train home, I've used it at home to read emails, and it is on again this morning. I still have 51% of the battery left, and it's showing over 3 hours of life.

The machine is running Linux. It comes with Windows XP ULCPC installed, but since my job consists of installing Linux on practically everything, that's what I did. I haven't tested XP on this system, so I will not go into the eternal "Linux is better than Windows" debate. You have the freedom to choose. I chose Ubuntu 9.04. It allowed me to make a very light system by installing only what I wanted, and deactivation the services I didn't neet. Don't get me wrong, you can probably do something like that with Windows, but I'm not a Windows engineer. The last time I used Windows was when I was "forced" into beta-testing Windows XP for Packard Bell, and before that I stopped using Windows when Windows 95 came out. The very same day, actually.

So here we are in the era of "Just enough". This machine has "Just enough" power for me. It is light, cheap, and discrete enough to come with me everywhere I go. When I'm on a train, I don't need all the power I have at home, and the strange part is that I didn't even believe it in the beginning. It took a while to stop bringing my laptop with me, even if the reduced battery life means that I can't use it on the train. It is too big, too powerful, and the battery life is just horrible now. It wasn't so before I got to know the Aspire One.

A few years ago I had one of the early generation Netbooks, a Toshiba Portégé 2000. What seduced me was the battery life, more than any other detail, that is what I wanted. The Portégé 2000 came with a Pentium M, the lowest power chip available at the time, and with the extended battery, I could squeeze 8 hours out of it. I can remember taking a longhaul flight from Singapore to Paris, and watching a Dell user next to me with some enourmous system smile. My laptop was ridiculous compared to his, and 2 hours later he smiled and took out a second battery, giving him another 2 hours of life. His machine was empty after 2 batteries, where as mine was still at 50% power. The amount of power that draws a machine can be more or less a reflection of the amount of CPU cycles, but do we really need all that? I don't need a 3GHz machine to read emails, I don't need 8Gb of RAM to surf the web and keep up to date. That is where Netbooks come in. That is also where "Just enough" computing comes in.

Originally, I wanted a machine to read emails and surf. Now I'm doing just that, but I'm also finding out that with some lightweight software, I can to a lot more. I'm developing on this machine, both in C and Python, and the IDEs work just fine. However, World of Warcraft stays on the more powerful laptop, and that isn't going to change any time soon.

Here we are in Rennes, and my 3G D150 is showing 48% of battery life.  That's with s creen brightness up high, a permanent 3G connection, listening to mp3s and writing my blog. Yep, I love these machines. We are back to lightweight, and lightweight is what my job has been all about. Embedded systems. Having 3GHz and 8Gb of RAM is no excuse to do anything for no reason...