I installed Windows XP on my Kohjinsha yesterday, finally gave up on Ubuntu. That’s after I’d gotten almost everything working on it though, the thing that made me switch was the poor performance of Flash.
Yes, Flash.
I’m no fan of Flash based websites, but I do enjoy watching YouTube videos, playing Dofus, and enjoy the niceties some people actually do with the platform. Flash isn’t only annoying preloading intros, you know.
And it didn’t perform well on Ubuntu, something I remembered since last time I ran the OS, which is a while ago so I figured Adobe had gotten their act together. That was a no, then.
Flash performance under Linux is a serious issue for the adoption rate, and certainly another problem with going opensouce OS. I want to be able to surf all sites, even sites having Flash ads, which can lag pretty hard should the ads be poorly constructed. That’s one of the main issues of course, the quality of some Flash elements and applications out there, but since it can work pretty well under Windows and OS X, then it should under a strong Linux distribution as Ubuntu as well.
Getting the Kohjinsha to perform as I wanted to under Windows XP wasn’t as easy as I’d expected though, but there were drivers to download at least. Nothing more than keyboard and touchpad worked out of the box, so luckily I could download the necessary drivers (at approximately 11 kB/s, total 48 MB or something). The only thing left to get to behave a bit better is WLAN, which isn’t enabled per default, which makes things a bit quirky. Same problem under Ubuntu, where I even had to install a separate program to even get it to connect to a WPA network. Still, I must say, without doing anything I got a lot more things working right away under Ubuntu. Problem is, the things that didn’t work wasn’t so easy to fix as under Windows XP.
Oh, and I’d say that Ubuntu was a tad faster than XP, although I really can’t back that up. It booted faster at least, but other than that, I guess it depends on what you’re doing.
I’ll do a more serious post about the Kohjinsha later on, with photos and perhaps a video. Right now, I’ve got way too much to handle on the private side, so you’ll have to wait. I can tell you one thing though: It’s a really cool little toy for sure!
Yeah - it always depends on what you do. I have a dual boot setup on my laptom (a Dell Inspiron). For most work I do, I am on Ubuntu. But there are times, like when I want to use Photoshop, or do some video editing for the tutorials I post at my blog, when I grudgingly shift to Windows.
now that kohjinsha under ubuntu is soon ready it is a little deception. But you are free, Xp must be a lot faster than vista, did you put the tablet edition ?
Also do you use official or gnash (the free one)?
Vyoma, if you’ve goot the beef in your laptop, you could give virtualization a go. VMware works great, but it’s probably a bit much for your computer if you’ve got too little RAM when it comes to video editing and big time Photoshop files.
Shiruban, I put the standard XP on it, had a XP Professional lying around. It’s a lot faster than Vista.
I’m not sure what gnash is?
I’ve tried who knows how many Linux distros on my SH8 and they ALL have issues. There’s always something that’s peculiar to each distro that means I can never get everything working on my SH8. My favourite distro for the SH8 is Puppy Linux. I can even get it going wtih Compiz Fuzion, but can’t get the touch-screen working. Ubuntu Mobile looks very interesting though. That’s about to be released when 8.04 comes out. Also, there are Ubuntu drivers for the Touchscreen via the Penmount website. Did you manage to get your touchscreen going? If so, how? Thanks. I’ve only just stumbled upon your site, so if you have blogged about this, I apologise. I’ll have a deeper look now.
Badcam, I did indeed get the touchscreen working under Ubuntu, using the PenMount driver and following the instructions in this thread. The important thing is to turn off all visual stuff when doing the calibration, then it works like a charm. The only thing I didn’t get working properly under Ubuntu was screen rotation and the webcam, and 1Seg TV of course but since I’m not in Japan that doesn’t matter. The Compiz Fusion stuff that Ubuntu ships with nowadays worked like a charm out of the box.
As I said in the post, the main reason I switched to XP was the poor Flash performance under Linux, something I thought would’ve been remedied by now. Other than that, I’d say that Ubuntu was niftier than XP on my Kohjinsha. I’ll probably give Ubuntu Mobile a go when it’s out, but that’s not until June or something like that.
And welcome to my blog!