Today is the 11th of August (just) and for a reason that escapes me this has been designated by the IBM/Lotus blogging community as “YellowDay”. In celebration of this event I thought I would test out some of the software mentioned in the recent announcement at the Linuxworld conference:
“IBM and leading Linux distributors Canonical/Ubuntu, Novell and Red Hat are planning to work together with their hardware partners to deliver Microsoft-free personal computing choices with Lotus Notes and Lotus Symphony in the <Dr Evil voice>one billion-unit</Dr Evil voice> desktop market worldwide by 2009.”
So far we are not one of the ‘hardware partners’ but for those curious about what the Lotus Symphony office suite looks like, here it is running on the webbook.
This is the wordprocessor:
and the spreadsheet:
and surprise surprise it does presentations too:
It wasn’t the easiest thing to install. In fact it took ages and I had to install it from the command line. The point of Symphony is that it is an office suite inside an Eclipse framework. If you don’t know or care what an Eclipse framework is then you probably don’t need Symphony and you are better off with the OpenOffice.org suite that comes with the webbook.
So there you have it, IBM’s “Microsoft-free personal computing choice”, running on the webbook.
Tip: Don’t eat yellow snow, even on YellowDay.
The webbook with Ubuntu Linux pre-installed has been available in-store for a few weeks now, but finally, in a very low-key way the Ubuntu models are creeping onto the 
in the URL bar when you visit a website. If it lights up then that means the website has what is called an “RSS feed”.
The webbook comes with the very very latest version of the Firefox web browser, version 3.0. This is a great broswer, but one of it’s fancy new features is a little less than helpful. Firefox can be put into “offline mode”, when in offline mode it won’t try to connect to websites, it will just display web pages stored in the cache. Pretty handy in principal, and this feature has been about for a while. The “great” new feature is that Firefox communicates with the network manager and can now detect when you are connected to the network with a wired or wifi connection. When you are not connected it automatically flips into offline mode. Still sounds like a good feature doesn’t it? Well the downside is that when you are connected to the internet on a 3G dongle (which is kind of the whole point of the webbook) Firefox has a chat with the network manager that goes a bit like this:
