As before, the installation process was painless and everything works as it should (including wireless and broadband Internet). I can connect to my embedded broadband Internet provided by Orange with no trouble at all and everything is fast and whizzy.

To give you an idea of how much things are better, when Windows XP was on the 901, startup took at least 90 seconds (a minute and a half). Startup with Eeebuntu takes a mere 17 seconds. I now have a netbook that is usable within a much more reasonable time frame. Actually using Eeebuntu is wonderful compared to XP too. Even with four or five apps open I don’t experience the kind of slow-down that XP was exhibiting on the same hardware.

When you add the fact that Eeebuntu comes with OpenOffice and a bunch of other useful applications as part of the base install, it’s easy to see why I now feel my Netbook is useful again.

The only caveat is that there’s no webcam software included with Eeebuntu. This was quickly solved by opening up a terminal window once I was connected to the Internet and using apt-get to install Cheese. In case you need it, the command is:

sudo apt-get install cheese

Incidentally, this won’t work for any installation other than an Ubuntu-based distro.

The only other moan that I have about Eeebuntu is more a personal taste issue. I absolutely hate the Eeebuntu startup screen. I think it looks rather amateurish compared to some of the nicer distro startups that I’ve seen. I dare-say I’ll get around to replacing it with something more aethetically acceptable at some point. :-D

So – if you’ve got a netbook that runs like a dog, I advise you give a Netbook distro a go. They’re not all as pants as the Xandros distro that comes installed on Linux netbooks! ;)

I already liked Stephen Fry before I discovered he’s a fan of the Open source software movement. :-)

It does a number of tests by applying MooTools, JQuery, Prototype, YUI and Dojo to an HTML document and reports the total times of each library at the end.

Just out of curiosity I applied the test using Firefox 3 and IE6 (my employer’s browser of choice).

Take a look at the results:

The difference in the times is staggering! Firefox out-performs by at least 200% (and way more for some of the frameworks).

Here’s the kicker

Because many companies continue to use IE6 as their corporate browser (largely because their standard disk images use the default browser that comes with XP SP1) serious web developers are forced support IE6 to at least a minimal degree.

I don’t like IE6 – for personal projects such as this site, my support for IE6 really is a token gesture (but I still endeavour to make the site visible in IE6). Sadly for commercial projects when as wider range of browsers need to be supported to keep a client happy, a web-developer ignores IE6 at their peril.

Even the edit window in Wordpress doesn’t resize gracefully in IE6. Half of what I’m editing is hiddent behind other div containers and I don’t blame Wordpress for that. IE6 stinks.

According to W3School’s browser usage statistics, 14% of their visitors were using IE6 in May 2009. IE6 is like a bad cough that just won’t go away and I blame narrow-minded and lazy IT departments for its perpetuation. Get with the times, you Luddites.

Whilst I think this is great news, I’m also not naiive enough to ignore the fact that the supposed back-down is actually a slight shift in emphasis about who is going to store the actual data. The government still wants to know what emails you’ve been sending where, but it wants your ISP to store the data, not the government. Considering the UK government’s appalling record of ‘losing’ confidential data over the last year or so, that’s probably a good thing.

According to the Home Secretary Jacqui Smith, authorities will only be interested in the, “who, when, where and how” of the traffic data as opposed to the content. I remain sceptical about this statement. That might be the case now but I’m sure that once this legislation is passed and in force, content will be next target the Government’s move towards a Orwellian lack of data privacy.

Nothing to hide?

Whilst the majority of us think that it doesn’t matter because we have nothing to hide, we may be living with our heads in the sand. It was not that long back that the labour government were exposed for using Google Earth imaging to find new and interesting ways to increase council taxes. I wonder how disparate government authorities will abuse this increased insight into our personal lives?