No novice is going to dip their toes in the water with distros like pure Debian or Gentoo. It can't be beyond Windows users to find their way around without the equivalent of Sat Nav Many geeks/power users think it has gone too far in making concessions to first time users of GNU/Linux in terms of emphasizing the GUI and burying the command line but they know that if Windows users are ever to jump ship the plunge has to be as easy and painless as possible. Mark Shuttleworth and Canonical have bent over backwards to make it easy to use. A number of questions immediately spring to mind: first, these machines came with Ubuntu, a version of GNU/Linux that, whatever else you say about it, couldn't be more user friendly to free software novices. It wasn't what they were used to, apparently. 'Unfamiliar' and 'confusing' were two of the words used and 'an issue of consumer understanding'. The main problem as reported seems to be that once purchasers got their netbooks home and started exploring the pre-installed GNU/Linux they couldn't cope with it. Carphone Warehouse have denied this but the rumours persisted and at any rate I only saw Windows netbooks (and if you visit to their UK website you will search in vain for anything with GNU/Linux installed on it).

There were further reports that not only had the machines been returned by disgruntled customers but that Carphone Warehouse had actually recalled all machines running Ubuntu. This problem goes back to November when conflicting reports emerged that customers who purchased their WebBook as they called it, hosting Ubuntu on an Elonex white machine, were reported as returning them in numbers up to 20%. What when wrong? I decided to investigate. I approached a sales person to ask about a GNU/Linux option on the Elonex and was informed that they no longer stocked them. Their website also advertised the Asus EeePC with Windows XP too. There was only one netbook on display and it was advertised as running Windows XP.

Unlike the last time I crossed their threshold (November) I noticed that their Ubuntu netbook display had vanished. I was browsing around my local Carphone Warehouse shop last week.

Elonex Webbook Install Windows