I am impressed. Very, very impressed.

I mentioned last week that I had loaded Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy Heron) on my older "test" laptop, a Fujitsu-Siemens Lifebook S2110. This hardly seemed like a "fair test" to me, because it is a laptop (I have not had good experiences with Linux on laptops before), and especially because it has an AMD Turion 64 CPU (I would prefer to be "conservative" and stick to Intel-based systems for this kind of test). I was surprised to find that Ubuntu loaded very quickly (less than an hour), and seemed to run just fine, so I decided to continue working with it, testing various parts of it, to see how far they have come. After a week, I would say that the answer is that they have come a long, long way!

It appeared to have recognized almost all of the hardware in the laptop, and had loaded and configured drivers for it. Of course, the display, keyboard and mouse worked; the ethernet worked, and was correctly configured for DHCP; the USB ports worked - when I plugged in a USB disk it was recognized and mounted, and when I plugged in a USB mouse (Logitech VX Nano) it was recognized and worked immediately. I found the hardware management window, and according to that, there were only a few "problems" - the built-in softmodem required a proprietary driver which had not been loaded automatically, the Atheros WiFi adapter also required one, but it had been loaded (don't ask me what the difference was), and the ATI display adapter had a proprietary driver available, but it seemed to be running just fine on whatever stock Ubuntu driver it had loaded.

I made a few checks and installations to get my "normal environment" installed. Ubuntu came with Firefox 2.0.0.14 installed, but I decided to upgrade that to Firefox 3 RC1. It also had "Evolution Mail" installed, but I have no desire to have to learn yet another mail client, and to have to switch back and forth from that to Thunderbird on my Windows laptop, so I just downloaded and installed Thunderbird, no problem. Both of those went so easily that I decided to add Opera to the mix; their 9.5 beta 2 release installed and works just fine, and of course includes my favorite feature, "Speed Dial".

Ubuntu has Open Office installed, so I transferred a few of my MS Office files, and they opened just fine - there were some formatting differences and such, but nothing more than is typical when changing versions of MS Office. I installed Gizmo5, and it came right up; unfortunately ooVoo and SightSpeed don't have Linux versions, and I'm not anxious to install the Skype rubbish, so that can wait. This was starting to look pretty good!

Next I wanted to see if the WiFi connection would work with my home network. After a couple of false starts, because I was trying to make it much more complicated than it needed to be, I discovered the System/Administration/Network window, where I was able to enter the SSID and WPA2 key, and the connection came right up! You could have knocked me down with a feather! Now it was getting seriously interesting, I decided that I needed to see exactly what I could or could net get going for my daily work... wouldn't it be nice if I could just use this Ubuntu laptop instead of Windows?

I installed the latest Citrix Presentation Server Client, and it not only went very smoothly and works just fine, it actually works better than the same software on my Windows laptop. That one has a nasty habit of spontaneously disconnecting, while the Linux version stays solid as a rock all day long. So I have now moved that part of my work to the Ubuntu system permanently.

Next I installed Kermit, because I needed access to the serial port to configure some network terminal servers. By then I had reached the point that I was no longer surprised that it installed and worked just fine. As long as I had that installed, I might as well check the modem, so I activated the proprietary driver (Ubuntu made me feel very guilty about doing that), and it worked just fine as well.

Since I am doing a lot of work on that system now, I decided that I needed a decent keyboard. I dragged out an old Microsoft Natural keyboard, with a PS/2 connection... shut down, plugged in, boot up... and the blasted thing worked! Not only that, but when I pressed the volume up/down buttons, Ubuntu changed the speaker volume! Good heavens! So now I have it running, with the port replicator connected, the laptop keyboard and touchpad work, a USB mouse works, and a PS/2 keyboard works.

I am now at the point that if I could get my Swisscom Unlimited Data card (Sierra Wireless AirCard 880) to work, I would switch over to Ubuntu completely, and only use the Windows laptop in the rare cases where I needed something specific. I'm not giving up hope on that yet, either, I have seen several articles on the net claiming that people have gotten that working.

jw 30/5/2008

Skype has supposedly installed an update to their "Community", the mangled version of their "User Forums". Although there is a long list of supposed "bug fixes" and "imiprovements", I personally don't see any difference in the web pages. They are still difficult to read, difficult to navigate, difficult to search, and impossible to understand. Things have become so desperate that their own "Super Users" have started posting tips about how to access some of the features of the old "User Forums".

Skype continues to do in the forums the same as they do with their program - do nothing at all, or as little as possible, hype it to the max, and publicly congratulate themselves on how hard they work and how much they care about their "beloved users".

It would pay much more in the long term if they took some of this tremendous effort they keep talking about, and put it into real customer support.

I have to start this by saying I have no idea how any of this information compares to mobile data availability and speed anywhere else in the world. My intention here is just to relate what is happening in Switzerland, and hope that it might be indicative of other places.

I have mentioned previously that I have a Swisscom OEM cellular data card, which is actually a Sierra Wireless 880 with Swisscom stickers on it. Swisscom released a new PC software update for it this week, what they call their "Unlimited Data Manager" package. So I downloaded and installed it, and took the opportunity to test the speed again.

The last time I tested it, I got approximately 800 kbps upload and download, although the UDM software reported that it was an HSDPA connection. Since this was obviously not HSDPA, I suspected at the time that the software simply didn't know about HSPA, or didn't know how to report it, and that now seems to have been the case. The new software reports an HSPA connection when I am sitting in my office.

The really good news, though, is that both Visualware and Speakeasy report the upload and download speeds both to be 1.1Mbps! That is by far the best I have seen yet, and at those speeds video chat is easy. Visualware also reports that the quality of the connections is good enough to support VoIP.

I'll be testing this a bit more during my commutes over the next few days.

jw 27/5/2008

When I have written previously about the Skype "Community" (formerly the Skype User Forums), I was only speculating that their objective in the reorganization was to drive Skype users away. Now there is more concrete proof of this, in the blog of their "Head of Forum Operations", who expresses satisfaction that since the reorganization there are "fewer posts and less new topics" than before. Well, if that is the measure of success, then it is clear what the objective was!

In the same blog is this gem about problem reporting: "Skype has an excellent ticket system". I wonder what twisted version of reality these people are experiencing? First, the Skype problem reporting ticket system is difficult and tedious, to be kind, but more importantly, the objective of the system should be solving the problems, and as far as I can tell they have no system for doing that whatsoever! As I have said previously, desperate Skype users, who have absolutely no access to Customer Support, and now have essentially lost the Skype User Forums as a source of support. have started posting pleas for help to the "Independent" Skype Journal comments. This one, from the past weekend, is one of my all-time favorites:

...
now images cannot be displayed. I a message that says `error image cannot be displayed because it contains errors`
...

It is a sad state of affairs.

jw 26/5/2008

Another good announcement from Gizmo5 this week. They have added the ability to have two-way SMS chats. It has been possible to send SMS messages from Gizmo fro quite some time; what's new in this is that the SMS recipient can send an SMS reply, and it shows up in the Gizmo5 text chat window! Not only can this be very handy, but the price is very good as well - generally lower than the local carrier charges per message. Here in Switzerland, for example, Swisscom charges 20 cents per message, while Gizmo5 charges 12 cents!