 Yeah, it's not here. So this is about OpenSUSE on netbooks. As you can see, it apparently takes a little bit longer. Yeah, it's one of those new cool machines. Probably everybody has one with him. Yes, okay, so you all know what this is about. The new interesting stuff that Intel brought us, or at least they claim to have that. So, oh yeah. It is slower. Okay, so I introduced myself first. I'm Stefan Seifried, working at the desktop team, or at the team mobile devices at SUSE in Nuremberg. And there I'm working with all sorts of machines, among others, with the netbooks. And we are trying to get those going, if possible, out of the box without any major hackery involved. But yeah, we'll see how this is working out. And we're basically doing all kinds of mobile stuff from netbooks onward. So we are not doing much embedded stuff for phones, or so we are the PC guys still. Okay, so let's start. The talk has three parts. First part is a little bit of short overview over the hardware. Actually not that interesting. Part two is the software. There are also, again, two parts. There are kernel drivers and stuff, and there's the user interface part. And the thing that I consider the interesting part of this talk is the tips and tricks and the daily usage. What are the, because in the end, installation is usually pretty easy, and but it's, in my opinion, those machines are more than just a smaller notebook or a cheaper notebook. But they are apparently, I have the opinion that you need a little bit of different usage pattern for those. And I try to share what I have found out over the last year. And actually I was using small machines all the time before. They had not 10 inch screens, but 12 inch screens. But many of the experience is similar. So let's start with the hardware. What's so special about those netbooks? Those are usually pretty small and lightweight devices. As far as I know, actually Intel forbids the manufacturers to put in a larger display than 10 inch if they want to use the Atom processor, the cheap one. So all those machines usually have less than 10 inch display. They have a low power consumption if you compare it with other PC laptops. They have a small screen and keyboard. The hardware is fairly uniform because most of them today have the Intel Atom processor and an Intel graphics chip. And there are some with a wire processor and wire chip, but they are not very common. And yeah, they are also not that well supported. Let's say it that way. Some models, for example, this one, have a pretty low storage capacity because it has a built-in flash device which only has eight gigabytes. And this can be challenging. They are also the triple EPCs. I think they had four gigabytes of stuff. And so, of course, that's not really a problem. And this is more than 10th of the capacity for my first hard drive, but it's still for today's standards, it's not much. You need to look into that. What are the problems with this hardware? Yeah, and there we are again. It's the low storage capacity of some models. And something that I'm experiencing pretty painfully all the time is that especially those flash devices, even though they were so to us as to be faster, more reliable, consuming less power, there are at least the cheap ones that are built into the netbooks are very slow. They have a decent read and write rate, but as soon as you do an app sync, something goes awfully wrong, and yes, please come in. Something goes awfully wrong and they take very long time. For example, if you install packages, it's really a pain in the ass because the RPM database does an app sync on it all the time. Then actually, even though they all look the same from the first look at the hardware, it's not as uniform as you think. You cannot imagine what strange kind of wireless LAN devices you find on these things because almost every business notebook you get out there today has an Intel graphics, Intel processor, and has an Intel wireless LAN. And those usually just work. They may not work perfectly, they may have some issues, but you basically never get one that just does not work at all. Those devices, there's apparently the possibility to save 50 cent by buying some strange wireless chipset from some unknown Taiwanese vendor who's brought us the RGL 8139 LAN cards or the infamous Broadcom chipset. The very reverse engineer driver exists, but it actually does not work that well all the time. So there are hardware problems, especially in the wireless area, which is a pity because especially on those machines, wireless is even, for my opinion, is even more important than on a desktop. For me, I don't really care about wireless. If I have a desktop and if I have a cable, I use that cable, I won't use wireless because it's still faster. And on a normal notebook, most of the time it works. So wireless is even more important and you have to choose the hardware carefully to get it actually going out, talk more about this. And then the machines are small, they have small batteries, which also means even though they need not as much power as a big machine, you still didn't, sometimes don't get a much longer battery life or sometimes even a shorter battery life. So going for six or seven hours is today possible with netbooks and even more, but those are usually some machines with a pretty big battery or a bulky battery, or those are what I call the high-end netbooks. They are also a little bit more expensive. Probably you get what you pay for there too. Then we come already to the software because in the end the hardware is not really that interesting from a Linux distributors point of view because it just works. The processor is not really different from an old Pentium 3, as far as I can tell, so the kernel does not need special adaptations. Driver stuff that needed to get in for a chipset is already long in mainline, so there's no real problem. Apart from some device drivers, we'll talk about that. Or as anybody had a different experience, I said, okay, I had a machine that did not boot at all and I needed some special Linux patch. I haven't seen this for quite some time, so. The hardware, it's there and it's working and so, yeah, can move on to the software. So, yeah, as I told, wireless LAN drivers are often problematic. We have a nice hit list of, actually, I asked my colleague who's doing the wireless stuff and I asked him, okay, what should I recommend? What chipsets should I recommend? And he said, okay, spare those S. There's only actually only one chipset that is sold in the netbooks that you can actually recommend and that's right now the Atheros chipset because that's the only one that has a driver that's working pretty well. I said, okay, but I have seen other netbooks also work so there must be something that, yeah, okay. After Atheros, there comes nothing, nothing, nothing and nothing and then there's rallying which have some out-of-tree driver. They're actually working on it but it's not really going upstream and it's a little bit, you need a lot of tweaking but if it works, if you get it running, then it works. I said, okay, but this can't be everything. There must be more drivers around. There's my hardware that, yeah, then comes nothing, nothing, nothing and then there comes real tech and Broadcom. Broadcom is especially funny because there is a binary only driver on the Broadcom side, which is of course very funny because you have all the, if you like this sort of fun whenever you change the control revision you have to check if the module still works and if it still compiles and it's actually not what I consider fun and there's also a reverse engineer driver but it's good enough that it detects the card and it sometimes work but it's, as far as I know it doesn't do encryption very well and it's not very well but it's really funny about Broadcom and something which I say, okay, go tell this people what you think about them is if you go to the Broadcom website you really get a strong warning to please remove all this community driver stuff. I think it's in parenthesis community drivers I said, okay, yeah, you know, this is what they're thinking about us. Should we buy their hardware? I'm not sure. So actually if you want a machine probably it's possible to get those all going but it's with a different levels of pain and of time you need to invest to get your machine running, to get your wireless going. So in my opinion it's pretty important to check out before you buy the machines they're all pretty similar you get them all with similar display sizes they have different keyboards and stuff but that's actually they're all pretty small too small to touch type so check out if there's hardware that's well supported if there's an ateros card in there I'd say go for it. There is no network known to me actually the chips with an Intel chipset I was wondering why they are but probably they are just costing two dollars more or something like that and that's yeah, just too much. I've heard rumors about a special Intel netbook wireless LAN chipset coming up but I have not seen it and so I cannot recommend it now. There's other stuff in these machines than wireless LAN for example in this Acer this is an S-Pi or one, it's the flash model A110 I think one of the first Acer's I think the card readers they need some tweaking there's you need a special module flag to force the PCI Express hot plug driver which is interesting I never knew that card readers were PCI Express hot plug and there's no other PCI Express slot no Express card but these are stuff that you need to get sometimes to get those going but it's in the end it's the same as with other relatively new hardware you need some special things there are yeah, how do I phrase that without insulting anybody some interesting bias workarounds that you need and those are from those type that I usually have only seen from the very cheap consumer class notebooks that you get at the big food discounts or stuff like that so where again sometimes I have the impression on those netbooks the bios is the same as the hardware sometimes so they oh it would cost five cents more to fix this bug but we have a patched kernel where it runs anyway with the Linux distribution we ship or it runs with Windows XP so we ship it anyway and depending on the vendor it might be hard getting a fixed bios so for example this card reader stuff with the PCI Express hot plug module the kernel developers are arguing if it's a kernel bug or if it's a bios bug for you as a user yeah it doesn't really help in the end this all is not really different from a normal machine from a normal I say that from a normal consumer class notebook they often have similar problems the hardware is the cost efficient type the bios is the cost efficient type and you have to do some stuff to get it going it's even you get those from vendors where they know how to write the proper buyers because they have business class notebooks that just work out of the box but yeah it's probably a different part of the corporation who is doing this so the one part of the corporation has the good buyers, riders and the others have the bad ones I don't know how it works okay any questions to drivers or stuff or any experience you want to share if you had a netbook and had a really hard time getting it going anyone? yeah the new rallying just works for some stupid reason okay so is it now in the staging tree or is it the new driver that you get from the no it was on the website always you had to download yourself and now there is just a default module included in the installation so I don't know where that module comes from okay so yeah of course rallying are actually not the very bad guys because they apparently have some problem working with kernel developers and well all of you who ever had to deal with kernel developers I can sometimes understand why people have problems working with those it's not always easy if there's a corporation and says okay we are doing a driver and then there come a herd of kernel developers and say yeah you're doing this wrong you're doing that wrong there's a wide space issue I don't like your ugly defines and says okay we are not really targeting inclusion in the kernel we're just going for you can download it off our site and sooner or later somebody will also clean up this driver and so if rallying is now working better very good so in this case I'd recommend a Theros and rallying okay yes so what about the camera you are going to speak about camera driver camera built-in in the netbook and I actually did not try but most of them are standard usb cameras of course there's surely one or the other one who is non-standard needs a special driver but generally usb cameras are more and more going for the there's a universal video module he needs to pull it up the bison cam that everyone has that was from as is from really old laptops that's now in everything and only two six twenty eights it's included so now to recompile everything okay so that's just because two six twenty eight was already out so they could have backpotted it but they don't do that so yeah but in that with the next kernel when factory goes to the new kernel of in the general distributions all that I'm talking here is actually not really open to the specific because it's the same for every distribution so when the distributions get the new kernel then you get a driver and what's good about this machine is actually that they are sold in pretty huge quantities so there's some some incentive for many developers to actually work on those many people who basically stuff like reverse engineering webcam protocols so you need somebody who really has a need to you don't do this for fun if if you don't have the hardware for yourself so that's they're sold in huge quantities and they're actually cheap enough that people say okay it's not fully supported but it's cheap I'll buy it and I'll try what I can do and so we're getting pretty good driver development I guess that will also happen to the wireless LAN drivers I'm just a little bit pissed off that it's the situation is not really getting better after years are not that much better so there are a few chipsets you can recommend and still there are year after year a few you can't and but in the end it's not really different from a normal machine for the user interface there's actually I'm advocating to try out new stuff if you I'm I'm a hardcore KDE user normally but on the network actually said okay let's try something different because KDE 4 in the default configuration has a pretty huge for for the small resolution pretty huge window decoration and a big panel and stuff and actually I think it's it's time with such a new machine to try out different stuff using and generally I'm using a lightweight desktop like I don't know XFCE or a very lightly configured KDE or GNOME or whatever is a good idea on such a machine because they are generally fast enough for almost everything you can even run open office on those that's they have enough memory they usually come with today with one gigabyte I think that this one still has 512 but it was one of the first that we that we bought and usually they have one gigabyte and more so you have enough and the processors are also fast enough it's not a problem but generally on a small machine using small applications is might get you better performance and more satisfaction when there's application generally the on this machine the screen with is usually not an idea I have to admit that I'm a chicken I switch to 800 times 600 for presentation because otherwise we with the white screen we would have probably have black bars left and right and I didn't have time to sort it out some but the generally the screen with is 1,024 or bigger on most machines save the small old EPC triple E which had I think 800 times 480 yeah which is very small but that those new ones all have 1,024 times 600 or 576 the new ones apparently because the bigger panels are no longer available they are sold out so they had to resort to 1629 and the screen with is not a problem screen height actually is and there is stuff that needs to be fixed in the application I have found one I just a short demo because it was so funny in the actually in the ocular KDE fewer than I was trying to set up stuff and there's where's the OK button it's gone there's nothing there's no K button so for me that's no problem I know I can hit alt and and shift it up and so I can hit OK and cancel and no there's no the next thing there's no way to resize it okay you just resized that no no somebody decided that this dialogue has to be at least 600 pixels high so you have no way to resize that and this something that I'm not sure if this for example would need to change in the also in the toolkits why is there no no flag I can say okay I can resize this dialogue and it gets a scroll bar here and without the the application program having to know that but that there's maybe a global flag something stuff like that will happen I think on the desktop another thing that I this dialogue is extremely funny because I can show all those all those pain that you have if you do it to full screen it's not going to get any more useful for me as I I'm I've never done any qt programming or KDE or any GUI programming at all why can't it just arrange this stuff side by side if I put it on full screen it's the the screen is almost double as wide as it's high so there would obviously there would be enough space to put this buttons there but there are not so this is those are issues with applications I hope and I think that they will be fixed because all those applications need to get also more more portable towards small machines mobile phones nobody wants to program everything by everything new so they want to have a just a maybe a small layer on top that I like the maybe the KDE the KDE for plasmoid stuff already which has a I don't know the word some kind of context sensitivity if you pull a plasmoid into the apple into the into the task bar it behaves it displays differently does still does the same thing but you can for example put the photo view into the task bar and there it's a button which which shows you all the contents of the photo and no longer a no longer a and I like that that's the normal desktop photo anyway before I'm discussing here that's the people are knowing and working on the issues and if you find such a dialogue like I found now I did not already file a bug but but this is a bug in the end and file a bug report if you find it on open Susie file a bug report for it because you might sometimes you might need to argue with the developer why this is needed but if nobody tells the people that this is needed they won't fix it unless they start using netbooks by themselves but probably not as the main development machine so those are those are uh... application box that need to be fixed and that this is something that you that's the that's the duty of the users to report the box we can try to fix them as the developers but the users need to report them some some stuff I think I find by myself but yeah we need back reports now comes the interesting part because that's what I found out sorry one more one more question concerning user interfaces it appears to me that almost every distro or even every vendor invents his know his own starting uh... application launcher so sometimes you have very big buttons uh... uh... on some translucent uh... uh... windows uh... overlaid over your KDE or GNOME uh... desktops and their other approaches what do you think there will be some kind of consolidation in the future or do we have to deal with all the different approaches well there's always actually the last question was what is the open-susi approach uh... I don't know I hope we will get some consolidation on the other hand there will need to be some consolidation it's just a waste of resources when everybody does the same thing over again on the other hand you cannot restrict developers because they do what they want anyway and if they think it's a good idea they will try it and so you will always see uh... variations on on a theme with this stuff then there's in every all the not all but many of the larger distributions have a company behind it that has a marketing department that says L we need something to differentiate believe me we try them that differentiation with the with the number of buttons you have on the screen or with the color of is not a good differentiation but they need to learn that and yeah it's so I fear we have to live with that for a few more years but in the end the best solution will win out the more stuff that is actually tried and to try to find out what's what's useful what's what's uh... what's really what the users actually can use what what's good for them that this is the thing that will prevail that's the one that will be see five years from now so there will always be that this is the open source world the program projects forked and and rejoined all the time and it's actually a good thing and yeah that the question is do we really need to one more application launch or don't we do I wouldn't but there's you can't fight everything then we come to the to the tips and tricks and let's start with preparing your installation some of those men i'm assuming of course everybody wants to install open susie on his brand new shiny netbook so but also if you want to install something else if there is another Linux installed already i would actually recommend to create an image of the installation if possible or tar it up completely just make a backup of it or if it's known that the rescue cd that is shipped with it will actually work then yeah this is fine but actually creating an image today is not really expensive if you write it to a new speed disk and that's always good to have a way to go back and because there is often with the preshipped installations there is a hacked colonel they have some strange colonel module or there is a you need to find the option that's needed for the PCI express hot block module to get the card reader going creating an image allows you to restore the original state backing up atc basically is where most of the configuration probably stored and this allows you also to find out how did they configure special stuff apart if there's an if they have a special colonel patch you're out of luck you won't find this in atc and also not in the image usually then explore the original installation they often have put some work into it to making it usable for non-geek normal users because those machines are actually so to normal people with linux on them so they're not yeah they're they're not solely target on geeks but also on on mom and dad basically you can sometimes get this on the food disc counters in germany those machines so they have done something to make this this linux a little bit more usable and tried out of course often this is in some annoying stuff for the advanced users but there might be one or the other night thing in there try it out explore it and maybe write it down what was good so if you later see okay i have now this open suce or fedora or debian or buntu or whatever in it and this is cool everything is working fine but this one button was really a good idea then in the case of open suce create a feature request because or or if it's just a small thing create a bug report an enhancement bug report because i'm looking at some of those machines but i can look on all of them actually for me most of the time when we get a new one yeah we create the image but then we have to get going to get susie running on it i don't have time to spend a day or two exploring the original installation i tried to but i often i just can't so this is stuff which i think it's important to the community at large to make the products better because often if aser sells this machine with it there's also i'm not sure what the desktop was that was on it but it there is as i knew there was a an application it had seven or eight buttons big buttons an application launcher that normal people could launch their office firefox email program and it had some some custom internet connection tool i think the the image was made shortly before network manager had all the features that it did something by themselves and it's i think it's important to check out somebody was paid to do this and it was probably not done totally wrong so you can at least look at it and steal from them but if they if they don't release the source code to you you can at least look okay we can do something similar or maybe something better that's important also if you later need to get the hardware going the machine the installation you have on the machine when it shipped is already running so lspci ls usb ls mod all this stuff it can't hurt to save it on an usb stick and have it later if everything works out of the box you don't need it but they also have lost nothing the first try with a live cd or a live usb's medium assumption that probably a good idea to see if it's working at all or if it's maybe in that special case of hardware maybe ubuntu works better so try before you install then the installation as such is not really interesting it just installs you need probably a usb cd rom or usb bootable usb stick and install by our network but it's not really different to normal hardware you just install on those machines those are big enough you don't need any special tricks that the installer can work to have enough memory to have fast enough fast enough processors the only thing you might need to do a minimal installation or something which is probably a good idea to not fill up the four gigabyte of flash completely in the beginning yeah sorry do all of the recent netbooks support booting by via usb? yeah I have not seen one that doesn't they all have recent bios and you can boot them from almost everything you can usb cd rom, usb just a bootable usb installation you can get one on the suzibus made with suzibus studio so they boot from that just fine okay and is there some support in to open suzibus to provide a usb memory image? I think but I'm not sure I think there already is one or at least it's it's easily createable with kivi for example yeah I think the cd image is still just a boot image and then you put you hope your network card is already detected and then it does a network installation yeah but if you don't have a that's what supported at the moment yeah but there's also I think there are also there were usb stick images around but I I always create my own if I need one to be honest I'm not sure what's distributed no of course not yeah of course I I think with every new distribution that we roll there will be new ways to to install the stuff so the more this is actually a reason the more those machines become more common they don't have an optical drive people don't have usb cd ROMs or usb dvd ROMs ready all the time so providing a usb stick image that you can just put spoke I'm not the product manager but there's something something useful yeah I will we will hand this on so during everyday usage there are some totally different problems for example you if you have installed normally the machine if you are unlucky the machine gets detected with its ten inch screen and every application suddenly has relatively huge funds on the small display because with a ten inch screen you have a very a relatively high dpi number dots per inch so the the applications make bigger funds so that you can read them which is a good idea if you have a 22 inch and a 19 inch monitor to have a similar this similar font sizes but on this small machine actually you want smaller font sizes so what do you do you go through every application change the font size from ten to eight or something like that which is actually not funny you go to cheat you cheat with the dpi settings either by entering a slightly bigger screen size in socks too doing this since years I'm having a as a regular machine a 12 inch sub-notebook and this has always had a 14 inch screen so it sucks that it has a little bit a slightly smaller dpi rating giving it smaller funds and because I'm I'm nearer to the monitor anyway I can get more information on it and still read it or there's the XR and R dpi switch where you can on the fly switch the dpi setting of the of the currently attached monitor and but it's only works for newly started programs I can demo it later if there's still time it's really funny then there's stuff like many people will probably not use this as the primary machine they would have this as a secondary machine so there's an issue of synchronizing your data you have to are when you're on the road or you're locked into a into a hotspot or downloading stuff you don't probably don't want to download again at home try unison unison is a graphical it's basically a two-way arcing for who already knows unison okay unison is basically a two-way arcing tool with a graphical conflict resolve for very nice should try it not only on netbooks but it's good you want to have your emails on more than one machine while reading them from the local mail spool is probably the old geek way but not the best one anymore so be prepared to try out new ways stuff like imap is pretty usable since a few years and actually with most old-style mail client you can still use it so this is something that if you use a central repository for a mails with imap you have the flags or you never have a mail that was already read as marked as unread on the other machine before and stuff like that works very well that's something I always had my local mail spool because it's just easier to grab but finally when I had more than one machine in an everyday usage as which to imap for example sharing the complete home might be problematic because there is just too much settings of the desktops in there it's would be nice if it would work but it doesn't you totally fuck up your KDE or your GNOME settings if you do that there's just too much stuff that's dependent on the resolution that they actually save in there yeah and to be honest I've given up filing bugs against the stuff because basically most of those bugs were closed as yeah this is not really a strange use case you are telling us here and nobody is using NFS home anymore because it's actually the same use case so sharing the complete home might not be the best idea create a directory where you have the data you need on all machines and synchronize that with unison that's what I do and this works very well when you're on the road and you find out that you need to install a few more packages if there's enough enough space on your machine having an ISO image of the latest OpenSUSE DVD or at least the CDs is very handy because you can just install additional packages without going to find where have I my USB CD-ROM or without having network connectivity this is basically yeah this is especially true because you don't have usually don't have optical drives in those machines generally saving saving resources using KDE4 and then Firefox for browsing the web and Thunderbird for reading your email is probably not the best solution on a small machine because you have the Firefox libraries twice or the Mozilla libraries twice once for Thunderbird once for Firefox and you have the whole KDE4 so trying to stick to one desktop environment in this case is probably giving you a better experience that's generally the same when we're working with older machines I recommend to use either GNOME or KDE but maybe not conqueror from within GNOME or Firefox from within KDE if you can avoid it there's always the web page that doesn't work in conqueror yeah this the last point is today not really an issue because there are no 64-bit netbooks yet as far as I know but they will come and if you have less than say 2 gigabytes of RAM there is not really a big advantage in using a 64-bit machine if you're a developer and you know you need a 64-bit environment okay then go for it but on a normal end-users machine probably actually 32-bit usually the flash plugin works much better in 32-bit so it's a often and and you 64-bit not only means that you can address more memory but every pointer is double the length and you just you need a considerable higher amount of memory without the machine doing anything the kernel needs more memory so today that's not an issue but in the near future that probably will be if you have more than four gigabytes of RAM of course 64-bit is the way or even more than two gigabytes than 64-bit is the way to go but until then not really so what have you left basically that's what I wanted to tell her yeah exactly because time for questions do you have any project with LXDE LXD is a network desktop environment and are there any plans that you do anything with LXDE maybe have a USB streak with OpenSusie and LXD on top any ideas I only did a short evaluation of it and as far as I know there are no official plans but there's always the possibility to create a product in the build service and I didn't have the time until now to look closer into it and I'm I hope that people in the desktop department will look into it but it's actually a good feature request maybe I don't know if anyone's here interested in forming a project or talking about a project maybe we can meet in a few minutes outside of the door yeah yeah anyone interested in LXDE desktop environment with OpenSusie yeah you can do okay one moment for me one of the most interesting things about the new networks is that it's giving Linux to people who beforehand would never have seen it certainly that's the experience I have among friends and family and so on but I was wondering if you'd seen any figures in the number of people who take you're happy with the standard install or actually do move on to if you like a more developed or you know what it wouldn't do or OpenSusie is something I got do you have you seen any figures of the people who stay with the lin pus for example on the on the answer I have not seen any figures I actually don't know it but we have very huge number of bug reports for the netbooks and there are also lots of requests for for enhancement and stuff and so I think there are quite some people who say no this is not the basically they are used to the distribution they want to use the distribution also on a netbook it's probably more the geek type who wants to to replace the mom and dad will probably just stay with the installed one yeah but I have don't have numbers sorry what's your experience with the USB CD drives because I used the KDE live CD from Seuss and then my CD drive is too slow so the kernel loses it and then tries to refine it and then in the meantime it gives a time out so I can never boot a live CD what's your experience with that I've had never a problem but this is probably it's device dependent and so for me they always worked I had different ones USB CD burner DVD burners and small portable ones and they also at home I have just an old CD drive in a converter case and for me they all worked so it might be bad luck or or a bug that's just never triggered for me of course that's yeah okay I see time is up so I'll be available at the booth later or in front of the door so we can get