Microsoft, Asus launch anti-Linuxbook campaign

what they did not mention

is "secure". They found a close-enough-in-some-sense word (Trusted) but they dared not say "secure".

Unbelievable!

Need some digging to find out why Xandros and Asus have fallen out. There must be some muck under the rug we don't know about.

The netbook and Linux concept was a marriage made in heaven. I just don't get it. Microsoft must've wedged up Asus bigtime for this. Was Asus on the financial ropes? Needs checking.

But, I can't understand this at all. The video shows a dad having to set up his son's privacy protection..The whole sodding point of these machines was to whip it out of your coat pocket, swich on - boot in seconds - find an access point - pub, home, Starbucks, PanOulu, whatever - and get your e-mails, find your bus timetable, etc. within a minute or so. Not piss about with admin. rights...

Does XP boot that quick? Doubt it.

Can I change from Xandros to XP free? Doubt it.

I suppose this change scuppers any upgrades to Xandros now....

Bollox

Incidentally, looks like the model they've chosen to mostly show is the early eee701 4G. I say 'early' - We've got two (bought 3 - one's in a Kenyan orphanage. "Buy three-Give One"). My g/f's later 8G model has a squirly Eee logo on the lid,not ASUS like mine, or in the video - presumably to show the ASUS name, which the later models won't. Later S/W - MUCH better than mine.

Unlikely to have bought Asus anyway...

but at least now it won't even be considered, with "them" up their back passage.

Investigation time!

I've read a lot about this and people are saying it's fake. Although in a few places, it's been said that Asus have admitted it is a genuine campaign. There is some discrepancy with the http://uk.asus.com and http://www.asus.co.uk sites, too. I don't know what to believe. El Reg, don't just write stuff without verification. Go right ahead and call them. We need proof of this.

It's about time ...

... that someone did us all a favour and nuked Redmond. Where's your mushroom cloud icon, El Reg?

On a slightly more serious note (but only slightly), if Microsoft has offered *any* kind of inducement to Asus, or if Asus has asked for any consideration from Microsoft in return, then isn't that behaviour illegal in the anti-competitive/anti-trust sense?

"Trusted" like a catholic priest babysitter.

After ASUS dared to defy Big Ballmer, looks like ASUS have been sent for a session in room 101. Now that they have been re-educated, they are producing this vomit inducing shite. (seriously, I am mashing chunks of carrot between the keys as I type)

Ahh well, the dream was nice while it lasted, buying a computer and only paying for the hardware and not an MS tax etc, etc.

Meh!

Talk is cheap.... what asus should do is load any new eeepc's with nvidia /ati hardware, so they can REALLY paint themselves into a corner.. (Proprietary drivers).

Never Mind

There's a whole lot of ARM stuff about to appear. lets see them get Win 7 on that

Falseness In Advertizing

So they cheat too. Not surprising. At least in the "Trusted" ad they show a full-screen view of the display that is twice the horizontal resolution of the EeePC (shown immediately afterwards as true resolution in the next cut)...

It's the little details that piss people off...

How Much Did MS Pay ASUS ?

Or give a considerable discount ? Monopoly leverage going on here I think by locking up the channel, anyone got Neelie Kroes phone number (and no I'm not looking for a date before the wags get there).

Skullduggery

Perhaps the monopolies commissions can look at WHY 90+% are now using XP; I tried and tried and tried to get an original 901 with Linux but failed; every retailer I could find was only selling the XP version, or claimed the Linux version was "sold out, waiting for new stock", which never arrived.

.

I dont want a 900, or a 904; in my book the 901 was the nearest thing to perfect for mobile/casual use, the SSD meant no worries about using it on the move and the huge battery life meant no worries about where the nearest power socket was.

The 1000 series may have a better keyboard, but it (like most of the others), is too big and heavy to slip in a pocket (assuming you have a pocket big enough!!), unless you REALLY need to use it while out and about.

Mines the one with the shop-lifting pocket ideally sized for a EeePC.

ammusing...

.. to see that they are demonstrating XP... the old familiar... not the massively unpopular Vista or the new 7...

I don't suppose they could carry on with the "trusted", "familiar", or "compatible" tags if they had show Vista or 7...

Ah well. I suppose the saddest thing about this is that Asus are involved. I have lots of their components and a Screen of theirs, and to be honest I'd rather hardware vendors kept out of the OS wars, as it doesn't really build trust when you see them getting into bed together in such a bitchy way.

P.S. The lady featured in the film is hot, so it does score on one level ;)

Simple linunx relatiation

...NO VIRUSES !!

My tuppence

"an unfamiliar environment or major compatibility issues." - reminds me of vista when it first came out.

However..., much as I hate MS, there are 2 key reasons I use windows on this eee, and 1 key reason I use linux (dual boot).

Pro windows:

Wireless config (linux just doesn't handle it as well)

Display scrolling - the driver allows the display to be bigger than the little screen.

Pro linux:

speed: boot time and browser rendering time (particularly flash/js-heavy sites)

Well, I love my little 701...

and running eeebuntu its a little stunner, but looks like next time I'll be shopping with someone other than Asus.

Windows and a spinny hard disk = FAIL IMHO for a netbook.

Much of this...

actually goes back it seems to the original Eee 701, and Asus discovering that over 75% of the linux versions it shipped were getting XP installed on them inside the first 3 months. One of the really stupid things about this was the reasoning behind it, the users were (a large majority of them anyhow) putting XP on them so they could install iTunes on the things (and yes, its a netbook, it shouldn't have it on it)...I dunno, theres a whole lovely glossy feeling of seeing Apple actually ending up being a reason to install Windows over Linux thats just bloody funny as hell hehe.

What else they did not mention

I hear if you put Linux on a netbook a kitten dies

transparent...

This is such an obviously biased web site I hope this backfires. I really do think that many people will see that M$ are actually scared of something, and wonder what they are scared off.

For me, i took the Pepsi challenge, I'd ordered tickets for a gig. and being the UK there was a postal strike, so the tickets didn't arrive. I got an email from the promoter saying that the email was may ticket, all i had to do was print it take it with me..

I'd just rebuilt 2 PCs, one with Ubuntu and one with XP, but had never connected up ther printer to either, and the gig was in 40 minutes, so i had to get a print out.

Connected printer to XP box.... waited, got a message saying something had happened to a USB port and it was going to look for drivers and stuff..... a few minuts later it still had no idea what had happened to the USB port and was asking me for help.. I wondered if Ubuntu would fare better as I was getting nowhere with XP.

Connected printer to Ubuntu box, got a message straight away saying "You have connected a HP 5250 Printer, please wait a moment". Then, literally a moment later i had the "device ready" message. 650 seconds later i was making my way out of the door with ticket in hand.

Now, I bought the XP box from eBay with a pre-installed XP for £45. and Ubuntu is free, although I did wait 3 weeks for the CD. (i could have downloaded it but decided to get the original disk for fun).... If i had paid full price for the PC and XP I would have immediately declared the purchase to be not fit for purpose. Ubuntu however, has been great with everything I've connected to it. It's occasionaly awkward, but nothing mind blowing. And it reads NTFS drives without a problem. Windows does not read anything else apart from FAT or NTFS without a big hoo har, and the last time I did try setting up XP to read ext3 it ruined the permissions on that drive and rendered it useless so I had to re-install it.

XP = £££ and is not great.

Ubuntu = Free and is wonderful

Conclusion, if Ubuntu was £££ i'd only be unhappy because the graphical layout looks like an amateur "My First PC" style... where as XP looks ace and is very slick looking, but is essentially shit for the money....

its better than windows

how about its betterthanwindows site, lol

showing linux and os-x

i had a eeepc 4g think it was, ok but small screen, the basic linux was ok, but used adavanced desktop, it was xandros, tried windows xp cut down version i had done, it was ok but after installing you had very little drive space left and the rez of the screen was not good you had to put a patch on to fix it, so you could get a good rez, without having to move the desktop around to find thing, then all the security had to be added, good worked ok if you did not really want to do anything with it apart from skype, msn, internet, maybe some form of basic word processing. the on board camera was ok but even with 20Mbps connection still not as good as the one in the video.

in the tried many other linux on it, then sold the thing.

Now have a samsung n10 it did have xp on it but now has dual boot linux and osx86.

much better.

I was just thinking all hype from asus making the first netbook and running linux, selling loads of them, all the money they made then from them with linux on, then sticking two fingers up and going to Micro$haft, what a bunch of w...kers, i will not be buying any more of there stuff, now it begs the question where they forced, did micro$haft, threaten with breach of copyright etc, some of the code for linux and didn't xandros and linpire join forces then jump into bed with micro$haft to stop all the copyright stuff, then didn't micro$haft start showing interest in the linux stuff claiming they owned some of the code, and started treating any one using linux.

or may be asus just thought we are not making as much money as we did at start, and loads are making windows netbooks maybe its time to move to it!

lets jump into be with micro$haft and stuff the linux lot, we have had what we wanted from them.

Embrace, Enhance, Extinguish

'Nuff said

("I am a Fairy. My name is Nuff".

Fair enough.)

</groan>

That's one short video

Cut together repeatedly...

And then put in a loop after you press play...

MS / Asus:

Familiar != better

Trusted != Good (we used to trust the banks)

Compatible isn't your game, never has been.

- Try reading my ext3 formatted SD cards on Windows...

- Try looking through just ubuntu's package management to see what "proprietary" devices are supported - and that's ignoring RedHat, SuSE et al.

I was hoping that the proliferation of netbooks would encourage the definition of some communications standards, and provide device manufacturers (e.g. nokia, garmin etc) to publish their interfaces (it's not as if I'm going to buy a device I can't talk to, or that talking to the device is useful without the physical device)

I guess this was inevitable really...

The ad is clearly anticompetitive as far as I'm concerned. But am I surprised? no, I think we've all come to expect this kind of thing from M$.

I must admit though that most of the population do have a tendency to "prefer" Windows as it's what they're used to and for the most part all they've ever used, plus of course gamers etc who unfortunately don't have much of a choice, I really hope that changes.

My daughter's 8 now and she's had an Edubuntu/Ubuntu based computer since she was 6, I figured she only really learns how to use Windows at school so I'd try and balance it out. With a little help she recently upgraded it to 9.04 herself with a clean install, setup everything how she likes it from compiz & desktop themes, to rearranging her menus and installing some extra packages & codecs. Give her the choice and she'd rather use Ubuntu every time.

Maybe they should just concentrate on getting schools to use it, we'd probably see a big shift in a very short space of time then :-)

apple?

@captain kangaroo

>> I really do think that many people will see that M$ are actually scared of something, and wonder what they are scared off.

Just what I was wondering too. Whether or not Apple jumps into this space, the threat of it may have worried Asus enough to seek a strong marketing partner.

I was happy

with my little Asus running Linux until they've told me it's shite.

Can I have my money back?

BTW, I sympathise with anyone who is forced to use an 'unfamiliar environment'. My wife is struggling at work.

She was fine until they 'upgraded' to Office 2007 - now she's pulling her hair out.

Hello 'Advertising Standards Authority'?

Have a quick look at the clip just after 3:25

I was unaware that running Windows (instead of Linux) was able to make your screen display at a considerably higher resolution that the actual native resolution of the device.

Astounding.

@Nick Askew

"We need to talk..."

(Only the "right" Nick Askew is liable to get that!)

Me? I'm seriously unimpressed with Asus's behaviour here (upon one of whose excellent full laptops, originally supplied with XP but now dual-booting with Ubuntu and almost never fired into XP, I'm typing this)...

Funny isn't it?

Of late the only real selling point MS can come up with is that their products are very common (note I didn't say popular).

Either we have this new campaign which hinges on the fact that if you are used to Windows you should stick with it. Or the "I'm a sheep^H^H^H^H^HPC"* campaign, which seems to hinge on the idea that you should copy everybody else. A curious idea really since it actually argues against other MS products. If they think you should use Windows because everybody else does, then surely that argues against buying, for example, a Zune since nobody else has got one.

The fact that they are completely out of advertising ideas fits like a thingy in one of those whatsits that they are completely out of product ideas too.

@Talk is cheap....

"Talk is cheap.... what asus should do is load any new eeepc's with nvidia /ati hardware, so they can REALLY paint themselves into a corner.. (Proprietary drivers)."

I'm not sure what point is being made here... Windows uses proprietary drivers for most everything, while to make proper use of your video card under Linux, you also must use a driver from the manufacturer. You don't pay anything for either one. What is the big deal?

Yes, (mostly) Windows is easier to use. If in some golden utopia in the future, the best things of both MS and Linux OSes could be combined, the world would be a better place. XP works pretty well with everything. (except security) Windows 7 needs much work before release. Ubuntu works perfectly with my wireless card--Win 7 claims it's working normally and doesn't have any connectivity. Wired networking is flaky too till you turn off IPv6 support. Ubuntu works great with my sound card and VLC and Amarok are great. Win 7 claims I have no speakers attached and both XP and Win 7 versions of Media player are bloated, semi-functional garbage. Ubuntu works great with my older scanner/printer/fax combo without installing anything. MS works when it feels like it. The list goes on and on...

Chairs in orbit

When Asus started getting successful with their 70x Eee range of 'legtops' running Linux I suspect there must've been a chair or two launched into orbit originating from the vicinity of Redmond.

Despite all the furore regarding Linux being dropped from 'legtops' in favour of Windows I can see why, I ditched the LInux on my Eee in favour of XP for several reasons; really didn't like the WIMP system as it felt 'alien', even FireFox's interface behaves silghtly differently on Linux compared to Windows. And furthermore if I wanted similar programs to what I use on Windows it would be a serious uphill task tracking down apps I liked and then finding they have their odd quirks, which would take up a lot of time needlessly, so I installed Windows which allowed me to seamlessly transfer menial jobs over to my Eee.

I'm tying this right now on my Eee because the PSU in my main PC recently popped a cap (fried capacitors stink!!)

Yes, I've been pussy-whipped by Microsoft I'm sad to say. If only they'd ported AmigaOS to X86 hardware... *sigh*

@Rich Harding

Hey that's my ring tone!!

I am slightly embarassed to have to admit that after clicking the 'Post Comment' button my IE7 crashed taking out all the other tabs too. At least Firefox would have realised when it restarted and offered to get those tabs back.

As I said it is all about familiarity and not necessarily the best tool for the job. Indeed I am certain many new features in commercial software are only there to keep ahead of the competition, including Linux.

Right I'll click 'Post Comment' again and see what happens.