Robert Pogson

The Register has a review of small cheap ARMed PCs. They give brief reviews of

People love small cheap computers and there’s something for everyone in the list from rock-bottom price for students to quite serviceable general-purpose PCs. Since there are no moving parts some of these should provide years of service at a price much less than typical x86 PCs. Power consumption is typically a few watts so battery-power, solar/wind, or human-generated power should all work. Small size mean they can fit almost anywhere. The smallest is the size of a USB thumb-drive.

Most of them run GNU/Linux and some come with a complete distro on SD card. Some even come with a case…

Best and the Rest: ARM Mini PCs • reghardware.

• 2012-05-01 Interview with Mark Shuttleworth:“Is there any OEM interest in Ubuntu 12.04?

  12.04 will ship on PC’s / laptops from all the major brands, in different parts of the world – so yes.”

• 2012-05-07 Chris Kenyon, Canonical’s VP Sales and Business Development according to Phoronix:
  “- Eight to ten million units shipped last year world-wide.

  - Canonical will be opening their first Beijing office this year (their Taipei office right now handles most of their Asian operations since 2008).

  - Last year Ubuntu shipped on 7.5 billion dollars (presumably USD) worth of hardware.

  - Next year they expect to more than double these numbers to 18 million units world-wide, or what Chris says would be 5% of PCs shipping world-wide would be with Ubuntu Linux. “

That’s more than a toe-hold on the OEM-mountain. The retail mountain will soon be conquered. Going to China is huge. Going to all major OEMs is huge. This is the deal with Dell in 2007 compounded with interest.

I expect the growth to continue and other major distros will get in on the action. While Canonical has actual salesmen and has opened many doors, other OEMs which account for nearly half of all PCs shipped may well choose other distros to make their own. No matter where those machines will ship, many millions of ordinary people will get to experience GNU/Linux and have choice in desktop OS. ~1% unit share is a receding illusion.

• 2002: IBM signs Linux deal with Germany.Germany’s Interior Minister, Otto Schilly, said the move would help cut costs and improve security in the nation’s computer networks.

  “We are raising computer security by avoiding a monoculture, and we are lowering dependence on a single supplier,”

• 2002 – Munich studied 5 alternative IT systems and in 2004, decided to go with GNU/Linux + OpenOffice.org and web applications.
• 2008 – “The Foreign Ministry is migrating all of its 11.000 desktops to GNU/Linux and other open source applications. According to Schuster, this has drastically reduced maintenance costs in comparison with other ministries. “The Foreign Ministry is running desktops in many far away and some very difficult locations. Yet we invest only one thousand euro per desktop per year. That is far lower than other ministries, that on average invest more than 3000 euro per desktop per year.“
• 2011 – The Foreign Ministry announces they will be going back to that other OS after years of using GNU/Linux…
• 2011 – after using GNU/Linux desktops for ten years and increasing numbers of PCs in use tenfold, the city of Scwabish Hall, has a lot of satisfied users. (article: Wikipedia – Schwabisch Hall) Even though Schwabisch Hall has only 37K residents, the 400 PCs running GNU/Linux in the government don’t get counted because NetApplications shows only 1.68% GNU/Linux in the state of Baden-Wurttemberg (10million). They show no data for Schwabisch Hall.
• 2011 – Gummersbach: ‘Open source desktops much easier to manage’“Easier management is one of the main reasons for the German city of Gummersbach to switch its almost 350 PCs to the open source operating system GNU/Linux, a move that began already four years ago. One of the IT administrators, Dirk Hennrichs: “Our Linux desktops need close to zero maintenance, making them light years easier to manage than their proprietary predecessor.”"
• 2012 – Munich expect to complete its migration.

Even though there have been some tribulations, it seems GNU/Linux use in government will continue to evolve in Germany. It’s certainly on the radar and the pros and cons have been weighed. There are even committees and accumulated knowledge on migration. I expect the advantages of GNU/Linux will cause continued growth in this area.

GNU/Linux distros that work on desktop PCs have been around for 15 years or so. They are polished and effective. Still, some people think there’s no real advantage over the MacOS or that other OS, but I disagree:

1. Cost: $free licences are just the tip of the iceberg in savings. Re-using code is efficient so the cost of production of the software is much less than non-free software. Having all your compatibility issues dealt with by the up-stream packagers is even larger. Instead of you having to hunt down drivers, updates for individual applications, security updates, upgrades to new versions, the package managers of many distros like Debian GNU/Linux allow you to update one machine by a simple command:apt-get update;apt-get upgrade. That’s all there is to it. You get the latest driver, kernel, applications, security updates/patches, bug-fixes for documentation, applications, services and the OS. Have a 1000 machines? No problem. Continue reading ’7 Reason Why Linux Flies on the Desktop’

Well, their pharmacy may sell more medical tablets, but in tablets of the computing kind, it’s a blow-out. On their best-selling list, there’s nothing but Android/Linux in the top six. An iPad 2 is in 7th spot, and Walmart.com has 89 items for sale that are tablets. The score?

So, */Linux has lots of space on “virtual shelves”, 69% at Walmart.com and people are loving small cheap computers. We know iPads are selling well. Apple told us so. At Walmart.com, Android/Linux tablets are selling better by a wide margin.

I have a notebook PC that I was using in the North. I got it from my son who moved on to something better but it has 2 gB RAM and 1.6gHz Core 2 CPU. The thing I really hate about it is the sucky hard drive:
“hdparm -tT /dev/sda

/dev/sda:
Timing cached reads: 1792 MB in 2.00 seconds = 896.43 MB/sec
Timing buffered disk reads: 118 MB in 3.01 seconds = 39.19 MB/sec”

That may be reasonable in the notebook world but it’s not what I want for storage. The last place I worked has RAID 1 SCSI (4X) shared around the lab. Even old Beast has RAID 1 SATA II (3X).“hdparm -tT /dev/sda

/dev/sda:
Timing cached reads: 3392 MB in 2.00 seconds = 1695.96 MB/sec
Timing buffered disk reads: 236 MB in 3.01 seconds = 78.40 MB/sec”

…but “the little woman” noticed that it was sitting unused on a shelf. I mainly trot it out for its SD card reader these days, or for visitors. She wants it for the women in the family to use when they are mobile and wanting more than a smart phone. So, I began to reconfigure it. I took out all my services like DHCP, HTTP, TFTP, etc. and added all kinds of multimedia applications. One young lady is taking a course in multimedia so can use lots of razzle-dazzle. I added blender, vlc, audacity, FreeMind etc. to my usual ffmpeg, sox, gimp and imagemagick. I took out the databases and Debian GNU/Linux repositories. I doubt they will use those, except to file images… Maybe I will put LAMP + Gallery back in…

I did some major surgery with a change from GNOME to XFCE4 and populated the “panel” with stuff I thought they would like, including xfce4-weather-plugin.

Things left to do: set up wicd for their multiple wireless connections. For some reason it’s not working and I used wpa_supplicant which works fine for a single connection…

It would have been faster just to re-install, but I enjoy the tinkering and just used APT. No effort is too great to please the ladies in my life.