At Betavine my job as cantered around Linux. In the past few months the question of Linux Netbooks being ready for mass market has been discussed in circles around the business. Being an advocate I've always been pro-Linux. However I decided to conduct an experiment of my own! I broke down a number of functions that your typical user might want to do on a Netbook, and see if my children could do this without guidance. And this is what happened!

The computers used were an out the box ASUS EeePC.

1) Start the computer and connect to wifi.

-This should be easy, and I think that many children now are familiar with connecting to a wifi network and what it is.
-They had no problem with this. Already familiar with a task bar, and an icon which indicates a radio signal they were both able to open up the dialogue and find the 'sky net' network. (By the way, let your children pick a name for your Wifi network and in tests 8 of 10 children pick the word 'sky net'!!!!). They were connected and everything was fine so far!

2) Start a web browser and browse to their favourite site.

-Again this should be an easy task and sure enough both identified the firefox logo, started the application and were off.

3) Write a short doc on any word processor that they can find.

-This caused a bit of confusion. One headed straight to Google-docs, and soon realised this was not what they expected. After a little play with the tabs, both hit the documents tab and found something that looked like word, smelt like word, worked like word, and felt like word. Children being children, never question and just do! They both had a couple of lines written and closed the Open Office word processor.

4) Copy a file from the computer to any other medium.

-I got a bit of a surprise here. I expected a few questions around micro SD cards etc... They have seen this type of device in my camera and phone but not really being used in a computer, would they search for a slot? Question what it was? Ask for help in what to stick in this slot once the found it? No on every count! One of them ran into their bedroom room pulled out a USB memory stick from their computer, rammed it into the USB slot and started searching for a file explorer application! Within a few seconds the 'Removable Drive' window opened and they selected open file explorer!
The ASUS shows a window which looks very much like MS Windows file explorer, with My Eee PC directory-> My Documents -> Z-Pen. So it was zero pain here for having to learn and understand the /home/user/ file structure of Linux. The quickly copied the test. Open office also saved it as 'test.doc' so again there would be no pain in opening it in Windows Word.

5) Do a very simple spread sheet of the 2 times table.

-This test was done by the older of the two, as the youngest did not know what a spreadsheet was!

Again clear sign posting on the tabbed menu meant the oldest child opened the application named 'spreadsheets' (surprise surprise!). Things were going well. The child opened something that looked like excel, smelt like excel, felt like excel, and behaved like excel! We blow me over with a feather, in his mind it must be 'excel'.... I'm wondering at this point of weather an adult would have headed straight to a 'start' button, or tried searching for something called 'excel' and then given up???


6) Send an IM to me who was now logged on in another room.

-Skype was opened in a jiffy, and in came an IM from the oldest 'this is easy daddy'.... Try telling that to your mother I thought!


7) Open up a picture that I'd put onto a directory on the file system of them on holiday.

-This took a little longer. Children don't class opening up pictures in some graphical editor as 'Play' and this was where the app was! Several minutes were wasted in looking at the 'internet' tab, and the 'work' tab before boredom set it and they both decided to look in the other tabs. Photo manager was soon identified as a possible solution to their problem and the picture was dully opened! Job done!


8) Play some music, and copy a sound snip to be used on another computer and play it.

-The ipod was plugged straight in, Amarok started and allowed playing of the ipod music. This was going much easier than I thought. The youngest found the 'sound recorder' and a sound snip was taken and saved to the z-pen. The app did understand files saved in the WAV format, but I could see that the file was saved as 'test' and no file extension! Windows was not going to identify that as something that could play, and the icon used for the file would not display the typical 'speaker' either!
My suspicions were correct. Our first failure! Upon trying to play the file they were both searching for the speaker icon which identified it as an audio track!

9) Play some video from YouTube.

-Now I was sure this was going to fail. Both my kids were very familiar with using YouTube, so I thought they would know what to do, but I also knew that firefox would display a window about needing a plug-in to play video. On this I was pleasantly surprised, the firefox browser comes installed on the Asus with the plug-in pre-installed! No install pain!

10) Get connected via a Vodafone Mobile Connect card.

-I had taken the liberty of removing the software I had been testing for the previous months! I had to know what they would do when presented with a problem of getting the device working.
After sticking the card in there was a tense period of waiting by the children.... They were now both expecting a pop-up to say a device had been detected (like with the USB memory stick.) ... No joy, it was the Huawei E172, which does not attach as a storage device. The oldest thought he had it cracked:
"I'll open up the file manager, go to the device look for setup.exe and install the software!"
No joy, the device does not show in file manager, and setup.exe would not work anyway even if it did!
A reboot was talked about, discussed then executed (after all this is what you do on a windows machine!... :-) ...) Still no joy!
I suggest looking for the software on the internet with Google. Ok so I cheated, but wanted this to work! The first search was for Vodafone connect card'... Time wasted on this about 8 minutes (In child time that's equal to 2 1/2 hours!) ... The second search was Vodafone usb software' .... Another 8 minutes... The third search was Vodafone help usb datacard' ....
Result! :-).... Up came the following on the second hit:

vodafone forum

A search of the forums and the kids found this...

form post 1

forum post 2
forum post 3

At this point they really were stuck, but they got very very close! They could have used the Network manage straight out the box, but reading items like 'connect with 3g/hsdpa' finally had two small faces looking up at me with a sorry look of failure on the face!
'What's HSDPA Daddy?'
Oh God, why oh why do we keep on making the same mistake!!!!!

So what did betavine learn from this? Linux in many ways is very close to what I call prime time! Installation of software and packages is still not the same as with Windows, and can be perceived as 'difficult' to the new comer. Now I know a lot of purists and the like will shout that the package management system is just fine. But it's no use sticking your head in the sand and hoping the problem will go away. Windows is the defacto standard! For people to start using Linux as a serious competitor to Windows several things have to happen in my mind:
1) Software developers who build applications for Linux should not assume the users has any technical knowledge about computers, and nor should they! The user only wants to use the app or function that the computer exposes!
2) For processes that have to be different due to the Linux architecture, the user has to be given wizards clearly describing everything and/or what must be done differently to get the result they want.

I also believe that companies wishing to do business in this new Operating System will have to embark on a re-think on some of their strategies. It's going to be harder in dealing with support issues at a global level, why? Because there are no dominant players in this market! Hence multi-nationals companies will not be able to hand off this work and declare 'make it so!' They will need to get dirty with many smaller companies to get the results they want. It's not easy and will produce a few headaches, but I think the potential for larger profit margins and working in the Open Source community vastly out-weight the effort.

Regards, Nicholas Herriot

Well it's the first time I've blogged about news that I'm creating myself! But I'm sure all the ASUS EeePC users out there will be happy to know that the new Vodafone Mobile Connect driver will be available via the Betavine repository by tomorrow around 12:00 noon. We have completed our testing of the software against a number of USB cards, and the Asus EeePC 700. This will enable the support of the following new devices:

• MC950D
• K3520
• E3715

I've seen several rather exasperated users trying to get there K3520 cards working! And getting that horrid error message:
"Your device is not properly registered......". The device I'm using now with the new software is the K3520.... So it works!

However in true 'beta' style there are some limitations! Due to the way installation happens new datacard support does not appear (shown in properties dialogue box) unless you remove the '/.vmc2 ' directory from your home directory. On the ASUS that's the directory

>/home/user.

So before upgrading open up a terminal window depressing the key's 'ALT' + 'CTRL' + 't' at the same time. From your >/home/user directory remove your hidden /.vmc2 directory using:

>rm -r .vmc2

Use your synaptic package manager to upgrade or install to the new software. If you can't remember how to do that go here to find out.

Things I've not got round to testing yet is accessing the micro-SD card slot on the K3520.

Going forward we plan on a number of small changes to the Mobile Connect Card to improve it's usability, and bespoke builds for ACER Aspire one, and Dell mini running Ubuntu.

As usual, drop a line if you have an opinion. We would also like to know interest in Dell compared to Acer, so if you do have a preference to which should be done first, again drop a line!

September 2008 will be a key mile stone for Betavine. We have now had over 200,000 downloads of the basic drivers designed to work with Linux distributions such as Debian, Fedora and more. For something that was ment to be a side line activitey, it really is a huge success story for Betavine which went live in Feb 2007.

However this story does not stop here, Betavine are seeing a growing demand for Ultra Mobile PC's (UMPC) and connectivity tools for those devices. With this increase we are also experiencing exponential growth in Data across the network! Betavine have been very proactive and just 4 months ago released a specific driver for the ASUS UMPC. We created a mini repository to allow our users to easily download and install the software using the software package management system built into the device.
When this went live it accounted for less than 1% of monthly downloads. Ultra mobile now account for 8% of monthly downloads. The sector is seeing growth amongst competitors too. ASUS being the first, then the Acer ASPIRE one, and now Dell Inspiron mini 9, which will be directly supported by Vodafone. It looks like 3G now has a killer app! To be more specific, several things have had to happen for this to occur in my opinion:

Flat data tariffs. Enabling people to browse without fear of ramping up enormous bills;

HSDPA connections enabling high download speeds comparable with Broadband ISP's;

Introduction of cheap Netbook like PC's. Bringing the price of this type of device within the grasp of anyone;

The price of the OS and standard packages becomes less than 15% of the total bill of materials; and

Small cheap and unobtrusive USB datacards that can easily give any computer 3G capabilities.


I see this segment of our site increasing in the next 6 months. Our plans are to include more drivers for different cards and not just our Huawei devices. We are also looking at supporting different devices and allowing users to easily add the software to their systems. Going forward, Betavine will be looking at help pages, sync tools between UMPC and mobile, information and guides, forums, support, engagement with Open Source projects and much more!

If you would like to get involved in anything specific or see something that you think Betavine should get involved in please let me know.

That's not a typo - it looks like Apple's AppStore really is a FatStore when it comes to profit!
Apple's AppStore has been live for just over a month and some of the statistics coming from the online widget shop is staggering! Recent news claim there have been over 60 million downloads of applications from the store. Indicating that there is several downloads for each device that are in the hands of customers! Apple say the site generates over $1 million per day in sales of paid-for software. Doing the maths, this could crack the $1/2 billion mark within a year given that Apple meet sales projections on 3G I-phones. And on that topic - projections for the 3G I-phone - Apple hope to shift over 4.5 million units in the first quarter. That's double what they wanted to achieve for the 2G I-phone.

The stats on applications is also impressive:
Over 1500 applications;
Prices ranging from $9.99 -to- $0.99;

A quote from Bill Jobs says "Who knows, maybe it will be a $1bn marketplace at some point in time. I've never seen anything like this in my career for software."

For me what makes it more amazing is that Apple have managed to encourage thousands of talented software developers to learn their flavour of 'C', the quirks of their device, the SDK's and limitations, research, build, test and develop for their particular piece of hardware. Brilliant! A well executed and delivered proposition. Although in the beginning Apple seemed to be keeping their device closed to software developers. The platform is still proprietary and under Apples control. Apple now have a close relationship between the user and them, really pushing the mobile operator right into the background, merely providing the capability to use the network.

However Apple really need to be careful of how it handles it's reputation in the developer web world. Developers can easily decide to back the real openness of Linux. Current grumblings of how apple maintain tight control on it's app store, with even some applications being 'zapped' (removed) from peoples handsets not due to stability, or viral issues. But to how an app has undercut a proposition in selling a particular product. The 'BoxOffice' app allowed users to look for and buy movie tickets, thus undercutting a ticket service provided by AT&T, a Mobile Operator selling the iPhone!

Unfortunately for developers wanting to jump ship to something that provides the appeal of the iPhone there is nothing much available at the moment.



FreeRunner from the OpenMoko people do provide a totally open piece of hardware, and some of the same features which made the iPhone successful. The device does seem to be losing the race though, with no 3G and needing an injection of money and support. Probably the biggest threat to iPhones dominance will be from Android and HTC's greatly anticipated 'Android supporting' device. The only other possible contender to Apples dominance in this new market will be from LiMo. However sadly I've seen very little thought or engagement to the greater developer community in this respect. LiMo preferring to deal directly with large companies and operators to ensure their technology gets into users hands. A bit of a failing in my mind considering Apple are on track to easily generate $ 1/3 billion in sales in software downloads alone! Looking at Apples Developer portal in terms of quality, thought and execution it's no surprize!

I guess the biggest learn for companies looking in at the Apple AppStore is to build your technology in such a way that tries to 'include' rather than 'exclude' talent. That still seems to be the biggest plus point that the Linux operating system has be it on PC, Ultra Mobile or Mobile devices.

As always you can feedback comments and let me know your views and thoughts on the subject by hitting reply.

It was in May the last time I blogged about Ultra Mobile PC's (UMPC). In that blog I spoke about how we at Betavine were planning on supporting the installation of the Linux driver for the tiny ASUS Eee UMPC to enable the USB Connect cards to work properly. In that time we have managed to take live a debian based repository with a be-spoke ASUS Linux driver. Hence our users can now easily install the driver for their tiny machines. I've watched closely how successful this has been. To our surprise at Betavine the uptake in the first 3 months is higher than when the original Linux Drivers went live last year!

In this area of the market ASUS has been king for almost a year. Now other manufacturers are hot on their heels trying to get a cut of the business. ACER have now brought out the ACER ONE laptop . A UMPC that competes directly with the ASUS 700, and ASUS 900. However looking at sites like DABS the lead time on the device is still about 4 weeks. On this particular site they have 10 flavours, 6 of which are Linux based and 4 Windows based. It looks like Linux has finally made it into the hands of what I class 'Joe Blog' users. People who want to use a computer for a particular task, not care too much what is the underlying operating system and more about it's ease of use.

What has really astonished me is that we (Betavine) are already fielding questions on a forum thread started by users trying to get the USB data cards working on this particular make of machine! The words 'HOT' and 'CAKES' spring to mind! What I believe we are starting to see is a real paradigm shift in the PC market. A disruptive technology! It looks like there are a lot of people who like the idea of having a computer the size of a small pad, robust enough to drop in a bag, light enough to carry anywhere and can easily be connected to the WEB. The pinch point of the device will also bring it into the hands of children and teenagers, a market segment you would not normally expect to own such a machine. I also believe this is going to affect the bigger well known brands in what they can charge for their expensive range of machines which typically have the much smaller form factor. It's also going to tie this type of computer users more closely with their 'Mobile Network Provider' (Maybe Betavine can coin a new acronym.... MNP!). After all, there is no point in having an Ultra Mobile PC, that's not 'Ultra Connected'.