It appears that a certain Mr Stephen Fry, a delightful chap you may have seen in ‘old media’, has decided that Linux is the way forward.
On closer examination of his personal blog post, it appears Mr Fry has obtained an EEEPC, the dinky little device from Asus. Unlike other palmtop-ish sized devices, the EEEPC is essentially a fully featured laptop complete with a 900Mhz Intel Celeron M and 512MB of ram viewed through a 800×480 resolution 7 inch screen. The storage is solid-state (flash based) and both RAM and storage are upgradeable.
Now, the reason Mr Fry is so het up about Linux is that the EEEPC runs a Xandros based software distrubtion and provides an easy-peasy apt or synaptic repository based software installation system. As I found out today when I made an ‘urgent’ reinstall of my Ubuntu desktop (hardware failure), synaptic can shave hours off a system build. My fully featured install consisting of Ubuntu and a huge set of office and design applications took just over an hour to install.
Mr Fry is so taken with the idea that he states:
I’ll just make the outrageous claim that your computer will be running some descendant of those two within the next five years and that your life will be better and happier as a result.
…and somehow I’m a bit inclined to believe him. Of course, I know that every year since 1997 has been hailed as the ‘year of linux on the desktop’ but I starting to think that everything is coming into place for that really to be the case. From Dell offering Ubuntu on their mainstream desktops and laptops through the EEEEEEEPC to low-power embedded devices offering a Linux based platform. Then there’s Microsoft who for reasons only known to themselves spent years developing a product, now known as Vista, which upon release was found to be one of the most pitiful operating systems ever seen.
I don’t think that Linux is going to just drop in your lap but I do think it might sneak up on you from behind 
Photo Credit: Red cc-by-3.0
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