Olaf’s Thoughts About Development

At EKON 13, last week in Darnstadt, Germany, Software & Support Verlag gave away Netbook computers for free to attendees who booked “all-inclusive” package. This Netbook is not just a simple Netbook like you see in many stores these days, but there is an interesting concept behind:

Intellibook

The hardware is not that important, it’s the software: at www.intellibook.de you can download an Intellibook application. This Adobe Air based application serves as an online access point to all publications S&S ever released (and made digitally available yet).

This Intellibook offer is not free of course, but there are a couple of different subscription models, that allow you to get access to articles that interest you – or just everything. It basically depends on your budget. Intellibook subscriptions come as add-on to your existing paper-based subscription, or can be purchased separately.

At www.intellibook.de they will soon add a store where you will be able to order subscriptions, currently they offer the Intellibook version of their .NET Magazine subscription for an additional 1,40€ / month. More subscription models are to be announced soon. Below is what I have in my subscription box currently:

Intellibook has of course a full text search button, so you can search the whole library of digital content of S&S. The full text search engine still needs some improvements, as it obviously does not find all words I tried. Very nice is that the content is delivered as PDF (which will be displayed right away in that Adoby Air application). Standard PDF has the advantage that you can save it and read offline – on any device that handles PDF.

Depending on the subscription you purchase, you will even receive an Intellibook Netbook computer for free. In that case it comes with Ubuntu and that Intellibook software pre-installed. As the software is Adobe Air based, you can also install Windows on the Netbook (you have to buy a Windows license though). If you want the Netbook separately, then you can purchase it for 199€ (+VAT)

My personal experience with Unbuntu on the Netbook wasn’t that good though. It installed absolutely seamlessly (they gave me “naked” Netbook for review), which was kind of impressive. For me as Windows user, Ubuntu (even though it looks nice) unveiled all these “Linux symptoms” I really do not like. Error messages that only experts do understand, printers that are complicated to install, Firefox shows weird behaviors etc

So I decided to install Windows 7 – remember Adoby Air is cross-platform – Win 7 installed easily as well, at least on the first look. The problem was, that the wireless driver did not work. I downloaded the very latest version from RealTek’s website, but no go. Win7 said it’s working, but it did not see any of my networks. The wired lan driver was not detected by Win7, but it worked after manually installing the driver. Without wireless access a Netbook isn’t really fun.

So I decided to try Win XP (no, I won’t try Vista): It installed without error message, but it needed the driver CD that came in the box. After all of that was installed XP came up – and even had the wireless drivers working. So for now my favorite is Intellibook/XP

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 6th, 2009 at 11:49 and is filed under Miscellaneous. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.