I’ve been experimenting with Linux distributions on the Acer Aspire ZG5 after ending up with a pretty pink, slightly broken one from the girlfriend. Well, some fixification later and it almost works, although there are a few keys on the keyboard that don’t work. I tried the built in Linspire linux that it came with, and while this certainly worked well and was reasonably easy to use it was a bit…. well, crap. The problem was that Acer had bought, made or tweaked this Linspire operating system, and then left it. No skype, no flash player, an ancient copy of firefox. Nothing modern, secure or usable. Or in my mind, acceptable. Years ago this would have been a problem. I can remember a never ending stream of internet capable phones, Amstrad emailers and Web TV boxes which fell by the wayside and vanished mainly because the manufacturers traditional MO of “build, then sell” didn’t match the changing and evolving nature of the web. So why’s this different?

Several things. First, the open source movement has given rise to many web rendering engines that are all reasonably well featured and capable and are usable by any manufacturer looking to use such functionality. Second, the progress of the web development has changed. Personally, I think a large part of this is now the fact that microsoft is much less dominant than it was in the web market, meaning that the old way of coding websites by designers that didn’t care was to use MS products, and if the resulting site didn’t work in Internet Explorer, who cares. Nowadays Firefox and Safari users are considered too valuable as consumers to just ignore and the number of non microsoft browsers and devices is huge. A swathe of webkit based smart phones and security concerns pretty much decided that ActiveX was on it’s way out, and the iPad and iPhone have at least made site designers rethink just how much they NEED their site to be coded in flash. Speed of progress might be down, but the platform independent nature of the web is definitely up!

Finally, the devices themselves are different. Gone are the days where everything was unique. Hardware today is often all rather similar, differing in build quality, price and design, but sharing many common components. This gives us another thing the open source folks brought us…. choice. And it was this choice I was deciding upon. What exactly to put on this little netbook that wasn’t quite so appallingly dull.

This search brought me to Meego, the ex intel, ex Nokia linux based operating system for phones and tablets. I wanted something that was current, with a reasonable guarantee opf updates and support. I didn’t want to be reinstalling in a few weeks just to get a new browser. Meego seemed like just the ticket, so I downloaded the image, made a USB stick and booted up….

What I found inside was a very pleasant operating environment. It was clearly netbook orientated, with huge buttons on a toolbar denoting the different sections. It was bright, it was reasonably simple, it seemed good. It had all it’s power saving features, the browser had a modern enough copy of chromium WITH flash support, plus I could get at the terminal if I needed. There were plenty of configuration options, everything seemed to do just what it should, and sound and wireless were all detected fine. I’ve used Meego for a few months on it on and off, mostly just for net access, nothing more. For this purpose, it is perfect. It works, it’s simple, it does it’s job. It needed no extra setup or configuration and that is great. If you just need something simple for the web, I can’t recommend this system enough as the first place you should check.

I am however looking at installing something else on this system. Why? you might ask. Well, my reasons are thrice. It can be a bit quirky. Nothing major, just little things not drawn here and there, which a restart always cures, but enough to irritate me no end. The second is that there is a distinct lack of extra software outside of the official repositories, and this is an issue for someone that likes to fiddle. That send the official software sources do have a lot of software available, but that brings me to the third problem… the updater would constantget stuck on me, pausing in the middle with a nice little pause icon in the bottom left, and then either never actually resume, or qhen it did, download things and then quit before they did the updating bit. Nokia/intel need to get that crappy updating system sorted out as a priority. The bugs I can deal with, they’ll be fixed by some future update. Not being able to get those updates though? That’s more serious.

So, all in all, for an easy, simple web platform, meego is perfect. Facebook integration, built in messenger, even chatting on facebook alongside msn, with a modern and flash capable browser to boot, Meego gets so much right. For a geek though, there’s an impression I won’t be able to get it to go much further than this, so stay tunes to see what I install next.