RM Asus MiniBook laptop for £199 (BBC micro)
- Thread starter HAL9000
- Start date
drag0n said:
Quite. I've got a spare desk in what is going to be my study/computer room. The title of this thread has inspired me to ask my dad to bring me my old BBC Micro. Got all the bits and bobs, and a various BBC Basic textboks from bakc in the day.
It'll look the shit, but I doubt I'll do much with it
I've got some money put aside for it already. Look for a Debian or BLAG BBC model B soon!Radar said:TIme to see how small I can make a gentoo installation. 512Mb RAM and a 4Gb drive eh ?The wifi and bluetooth chipset must be supportable under linux, as must the modem.
Sounds very interesting
It's supposed to ship with suse, but I'd hope there wouldn't be a problem with a quick wipe and reinstall.
untethered
For industry & decency
Bear in mind that the so-called $100 laptop (XO) goes on public sale on 12 November:
http://www.xogiving.org/
The deal is that you pay $399. You get a laptop and one gets donated to a child in a developing country.
The OS is a heavily-customised Red Hat Linux for educational use, but I'm sure as soon as it's on open sale someone will knock together an ISO that's useful for general use.
http://www.xogiving.org/
The deal is that you pay $399. You get a laptop and one gets donated to a child in a developing country.
The OS is a heavily-customised Red Hat Linux for educational use, but I'm sure as soon as it's on open sale someone will knock together an ISO that's useful for general use.
There is no connection with the BBC B which was made by Acorn Computers best known to a later generation for developing the RISC chip and Research Machines (RM).
They were competitors as suppliers to schools in the days when the BBC B was popular because of its programming lanquage BBC Basic which allowed structured programming. The first school networks ran BBC Bs. They were popular because the programs they ran cost about £30 or so for a word processor or spreadsheet and were installed on ROMs so that the tiny memory was not used up. Schools in those days did not have the budget for Microsoft prices.
When RM came onto the school scene in a big way was with their PC clones which were cheaper than other makes for a short time. Lots of schools went with RM and later installed RM networks. Soon the price of PCs dropped with the arrival of lots of other clones and RM proved to be an expensive option but somehow RM had established contracts with RM and also had worked on educational software as part of their sales pitch. Schools somehow became locked into RM. People outside of education have no time for RM.
I think this new laptop has already been pipped to the post by the so called "$100" laptop mentioned earlier. In any case if it doesn't have a full sized keyboard it will be of no use for touch typists.
They were competitors as suppliers to schools in the days when the BBC B was popular because of its programming lanquage BBC Basic which allowed structured programming. The first school networks ran BBC Bs. They were popular because the programs they ran cost about £30 or so for a word processor or spreadsheet and were installed on ROMs so that the tiny memory was not used up. Schools in those days did not have the budget for Microsoft prices.
When RM came onto the school scene in a big way was with their PC clones which were cheaper than other makes for a short time. Lots of schools went with RM and later installed RM networks. Soon the price of PCs dropped with the arrival of lots of other clones and RM proved to be an expensive option but somehow RM had established contracts with RM and also had worked on educational software as part of their sales pitch. Schools somehow became locked into RM. People outside of education have no time for RM.
I think this new laptop has already been pipped to the post by the so called "$100" laptop mentioned earlier. In any case if it doesn't have a full sized keyboard it will be of no use for touch typists.
untethered
For industry & decency
There's a full write-up in the Guardian today:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2007/oct/18/news
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2007/oct/18/news
No, my guess is that those who want to get a bit of street cred might go for the 'appliance' version with the geeky sounding Linux with Firefox and Open Office just because it is 'alternative'. Why would they want XP when Vista is now the current MS OS?
ChrisFilter
Like a boss.
Posssibly quite useful... nothing stays constant, linux will have it's day in the sun. Even just knowing that there are alternatives is useful. I get your point though.
gnoriac
lowly seer
gabi said:
Regrettably I do see it as about brand names and marketing, it's what sells computers. How many people actually need vista? A linux box will do most if not all of the stuff people need a computer for, perfectly easily. Similarly, even under windows, most consumers will go for MS Office whereas they can save shitloads of money with OpenOffice.
Moreover, if any of these kids want to actually go into computing, knowledge of linux won't be useful, it'll be invaluable. The majority of webservers are linux boxes for example.
Counter-apologies for snapping back at you (I'm actually a bit ashamed of myself).
gnoriac said:
I take it you work in IT yourself?
Most of the kids using the computers wont go into IT though. I'd love it if the world switched to using linux but i cant see any sign of it on the horizon. The worlds full of lazy fucking idiots who'll accept what they're given (ie windows). There aint no way to change that!
when i was at school i remember my teacher was evangelical about Acorn. she claimed that within a generation the world would all be using it, given its obvious superiority to both mac and pc... Do u remember Acorn?
cybertect
It's grim up north (London)
gabi said:I take it you work in IT yourself?
Most of the kids using the computers wont go into IT though. I'd love it if the world switched to using linux but i cant see any sign of it on the horizon. The worlds full of lazy fucking idiots who'll accept what they're given (ie windows). There aint no way to change that!
I think the point is that with Linux you're getting a grounding in the basic principles of computing. Gnome or KDE are perfectly viable GUI environments that share a lot in common with Windows, Mac OS and anything else that uses Windows, Icons, Mouse and a Pointer.
Open Office's word processor works very similarly to MS Word or 95% of other WP apps out there. Web sites like Google work the same whatever platform you're using.
Where I think a lot of people who suggest that kids should use Windows exclusively at school go wrong is that, IMO, IT curricula at school shouldn't be about training children to use Windows XP, Office 2007 or even Mac OS X 10.4 or some flavour of Ubuntu. It should be a grounding in the general principles of computing, so they can understand what happens when they save a file to disk or print a document.
Inevitably, if it's more aimed at learning the specific features of one program or operating system "because that's what they'll use when they go out to work" their knowledge will become rapidly out of date when the next version ships. That kind of training is best done in the workplace. IT education at school should have much wider goals, whether or not a pupil is going to pursue a career in IT. Linux actually provides quite a nice playground for everything from the basics of using a computer right up to full-blown programming where required.
It's a similar principle to many other subjects. Learning History isn't just about knowing that the Battle of Hastings was in 1066, that Nelson defeated the French at Trafalgar or that Zog I was King of Albania between 1928 and 1939. The accumulation of facts is probably the least important thing to take away from a History course. It's about developing your critical faculties, weighing up evidence from different sources and creating a well-structured response to a question.
Spot on !! It's the difference between education and vocational training.cybertect said:
My Mum, back home in Ireland, has just started a 4 week beginners course. I was a bit worried they'd dive straight into windows, which could have been confusing as my mum hasn't run windows for months (since I upgraded the laptop to gentoo for performance reasons and ease of remote maintenance)
Luckily they've kept it pretty general, the basic components in a PC, what an OS does, that sort of thing; and my Mum knows enough to realise if they start talking about outlook, its email (evolution) and that internet explorer becomes firefox on her PC. They showed them the windows games
so I had to install the kdegames pack yesterday so she could have solitaire too 
It's also doing wonders for her confidence on the PC, she even ventured onto the aer lingus web site a couple of days ago to get updated itinerary details for a flight of hers that was changed after booking. She even remembered to put my email address in rather than hers as I had made the original booking <dead chuffed>
Anyone can get their heads around linux, at least at the level of the home user. And its a great excuse to stop the kids hogging the PC while gaming
untethered
For industry & decency
cybertect said:
Nice idea, but that's not how it works in practice.
Most people aren't interested in learning computing theory and even those that are will find it easiest to work from practical experience towards that theory, not the other way around.
Core concepts like files, folders, hierarchical file systems exist in all OSes but the implementation of these is much closer between different versions of the same OS than between OSes.
So there really is little point teaching people to use a system that there's a 95% chance they're not going to use either at home or in the workplace. Should they need to, people will adapt. But why make the majority go through the extra effort of doing so?
The other factor is applications. This is the real battleground between OSes. Some very good cross-platform apps are available, Firefox and OpenOffice probably being the most notable. But beyond that, people will spend a lot of time developing skills in specific apps. Some of these will be transferable to a degree but many of them will not. Again, why make people go to the trouble of learning an apps that's only available on Linux or MacOS when they can just learn the Windows equivalent that they're far more likely to actually use elsewhere?
I believe that remotely-hosted apps and data will put paid to the OS wars before long. We're already 25% of the way there. But until then, the OS and the desktop apps you use really do matter.
(And before anyone asks, I've run Linux as my primary desktop OS for more years than I can remember now.)
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