A place where we, senior staff from BBC Future Media teams will talk about issues raised by you about the technology behind bbc.co.uk, our mobile services and the BBC's presence on the internet. ...
Over the last two decades, I have used every flavour of Windows and Mac OS , but 'til now had never used a Linux desktop. My only encounter with Linux has been flashing my wifi access point with dd-wrt firmware (which is great, btw) - but that is obviously not the same thing! George Wright recently convinced me to take home a laptop with Fedora9 installed. Would it be possible to easily connect to wpa2-protected wifi? Will it recognize my digital camera - and if so, how easy will it be to manage my pictures? How good will the web browsing experience be given the various plugins one needs to make today's websites work? Lots of questions; time to find out for myself... To my surprise, I found the experience pretty good. Connecting to my home network was easy and web browsing worked fine using Firefox . I tried BBC iPlayer streaming using Flash and that worked fine too. Getting pictures of the kids transferred was not a problem. I did have some issues with connecting to my network-attached storage, but that is probably my lack of knowledge. While I think the user experience has some way to go in order to catch up with commercial operating systems, the basic functionality is there. The one thing I was surprised about was the performance, or lack thereof. I would have expected the operating system to squeeze everything out of the dual processor laptop. Perhaps the issue would be addressed by new updates which were available, but I could not ...
Anytime
Over the last two decades, I have used every flavour of Windows and Mac OS , but 'til now had never used a Linux desktop. My only encounter with Linux has been flashing my wifi access point with dd-wrt firmware (which is great, btw) - but that is obviously not the same thing! George Wright recently convinced me to take home a laptop with Fedora9 installed. Would it be possible to easily connect to wpa2-protected wifi? Will it recognize my digital camera - and if so, how easy will it be to manage my pictures? How good will the web browsing experience be given the various plugins one needs to make today's websites work? Lots of questions; time to find out for myself... To my surprise, I found the experience pretty good. Connecting to my home network was easy and web browsing worked fine using Firefox . I tried BBC iPlayer streaming using Flash and that worked fine too. Getting pictures of the kids transferred was not a problem. I did have some issues with connecting to my network-attached storage, but that is probably my lack of knowledge. While I think the user experience has some way to go in order to catch up with commercial operating systems, the basic functionality is there. The one thing I was surprised about was the performance, or lack thereof. I would have expected the operating system to squeeze everything out of the dual processor laptop. Perhaps the issue would be addressed by new updates which were available, but I could not ...