I\’m enthused about Meego, too, but I\’m writing this on a netbook that I bought with Ubuntu pre-installed, so the situation isn\’t *quite* as dire as you imply. Try http://system76.com (mine is the Starling model), or http://zareason.com, or http://dell.com/ubuntu.

Also, you have a typo on page 2 – instead of Meego having custom applications for the applications, you probably mean custom *icons* for the applications. It is indeed a nice feature.

Otherwise, though, this is the best review of Meego I\’ve seen yet. Thanks!

Cheers,
Chris

I think you meant \”icon\” somewhere there.

My ex girlfriend recently lost her job, her son bearshared her machine to death and now she had to have a military base of operations from which to fire off salvos of resumes across the career DMZ.

Since I still lover her, I went on down to her place and low and behold, she had one of those \”pre-installed\” machines – and an inoperabple one at that – no original disks for WinXP, MS Office, etc., so I sat back, and pondered for a moment while she and my daughter watched TVO\’d cableTV shows downstairs.

Well I said, screw this. Like Felix always did, I merely whupped out my magic bag of trix and installed Slackware 13.0, OOo (That\’s geek for OpenOffice), configured her user ID to default to XFCE and tossed in a couple of my fave custom build packages from SlackBuilds, and finally got her Java and MIME all warm and fuzzy for Firefox, including my \’essential\’ plugins for Firefox, Thunderbird, and Chrome (Yes, Chrome is for Slackware, not Chromium like in other distros – kewl eh?).

The next day, when she woke up I showed her all of her data (tax returns for her and her clients, family photos, etc.) that I had migrated, and explained to her that from now on, she would be using Firefox instead of Internet Exploder, coz that latter sux.

I also explained that she would be using Thunderbird, instead of MS Outlook, coz pst files suk.

She grudgingly relented (What choice did she have?) a few days later she called and said how much kewler Firefox and TB were than IE and MS Outlook, at which point I started talking her through some of the really kewl installed extensions for those two, plus some of the finer points of Chrome.

Well I thought that was it, but then about two weeks later….

I get a call from her asking me what Operating System I installed on her machine, and also, she finally noticed that OOo was not in fact MS Office, (at this point I was ROFLMAOPMP).

It never occured to me to tell her anything about the OS, or that it was indeed UNIX that I had installed on her aging machine that was suddenly so much faster than ever before.

For the past several weeks, she had been telling all of her friends that I had installed the new Windows 7 along with the latest and greatest MS Office – until someone came over to her house and told her what Slackware Linux was LOL!

Now, I didn\’t intend to deceive her, I just made point an click the way it was before for her and she naturally assumed I had installed Office 2010 and Windows 7.

If the machine worked the same way it did before, then why was it important to go out of my way to explain that she\’s now running UNIX instead of MS Windows?

Once she calmed down, it occured to her that she\’s never going back to Windows, except for when a Windows box is provided as her desktop PC at work.

Why would she? It\’s free, faster, stable as all getup, and dang it if Xfce doesn\’t look really kewl!

(NOTE: YMMV)

Bottom line is, what\’s the difference between a Windows and a Meego installed machine? Nothing except ten minutes of familiarization, and a few hours of customizing your desktop – as in any new PC!!!

Handing someone a netbook that is ready to go with Meego and merely saying, \”Here\’s your new totally kewl netbook dude!\”, is a way to bring back the assimilated from the Borg Collective w/o them even realizing it.

Great work, great article, but now it\’s about time for us to be a little bit arrogant – now isn\’t it?

Kindest regards,

Bradley D. Thornton
http://NorthTech.US

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