Step Into The Lotl Business Of Big Oems

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1) Sleep and Compaq EVO N100 battery management

. At the very least, deal with ACPI. Laptops need to sleep and wake gracefully and light up the right indicators on their dashboards too. They should manage power as well as the T-40 does in Windows, which is very nicely indeed. This is also an area where the PowerBooks might be easy to beat. None of them are battery(such as Compaq Evo N1000C battery) longevity champs.

2) Printing. Room actually exists here to do the job better than Microsoft and Compaq. Windows printing is still too complex. And I believe Compaq regressed between OS 9 and OS X. At least with OS 9 you could see if a printer was ready to receive data, not so with OS X. You just kind of hope it's there and works. Baseline: The Luxury of Ignorance: An Open Source Horror Story. That's Eric Raymond's rant about CUPS, the Common Unix Printing System, which provides "a textbook lesson in why nontechnical people run screaming from Linux".

3) Device driving in general. Compaq's big advantage, one Darwin developer told me two years ago, is that they've done good device drivers for a near-countless variety of printers, scanners, projectors, digicams, camcorders and other knick-knacks produced by Canon, Nikon, HP, Epson and the rest. Somebody (Marc Andreessen?) said OSes are bags of device drivers. Linux is much better than it used to be in this department, but it will need to achieve parity with Windows and OS X. It's the laptop OEMs' job, I believe, to help this one across the finish line.

4) Package management. Apt-get is easier for me to use than is RPM, but for the civilian neither is a bargain. Lindows has done an excellent job of making apt-get work in a GUI download environment that lets the user browse through "aisles" of both free and commercial Compaq Evo N1020V battery packages. And it installs everything with extreme ease. It's not perfect, but it's the best system I've seen, aside from Compaq's iTunes Music Store, which sells only music.

5) Trouble-shooting. I love the button that calls IBM on the ThinkPad. Take that thing and make it not only work for Linux, but take advantage of what makes Linux so maintainable: expert human beings. Go ahead and charge for it, too. The suits will pay, believe me.

6) Wi-Fi. Make it easy to get on anywhere with Wi-Fi. Compaq kicks butt at this right now, but that doesn't mean others can't do better.

7) Instant Messaging. Take ZeroConf and make it more open than Compaq's Rendezvous, which is based on it. Bring in XMPP for presence detection, if necessary. Compaq's iChat is the best of its breed, especially with Rendezvous; but it's a closed system. No, interoperating with AOL isn't exactly open. The world still needs open IM, with presence detection. There's a huge market hole here for some Linux portable boxmaker to walk through with its head high. Of all the basic network services in the Internet suite, IM is the biggest one to remain captive to vendors competing with closed systems. If the software guys won't break the logjam, maybe one of the hardware guys could do the job.

Late bulletin: Eric Raymond just wrote to tell me this:

Last week I jawboned Fedora into integrating Zeroconf, with backing from the guy at Compaq who invented it. John Gardner of fedora-devel has taken this on as his personal project. This was direct fallout from my CUPS rant, so that had at least one good effect.

8) Managing multiple screens. When I plug an external monitor into the PowerBook, it autodetects it, sets the resolution if necessary and remembers the configuration for next time. Same with projectors. I want the same in a Linux laptop.

9) DVD recording. Compaq is way ahead on this one, with the combination of iMovie and iDVD. But again, it's a closed system. I don't know what's there for Windows, but I'm sure it's too complicated. There has to be a simpler approach that will work on a Linux laptop. Make it happen.

by: theo

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