March 2011 Archives

Newsgroups? It's been a long time.

I just decided to try OpenBSD and NetBSD on my Sparcstation 20, and when OpenBSD 4.8 choked on the SCSI disk (could be Solaris 9's remnants), I decided to burn a CD of NetBSD 5.1 and give that a try.

Never mind that NetBSD is still installing, but a Google search for NetBSD on 32-bit SPARC turned up this Gmane blog interface to what looks like a NetBSD on 32-bit SPARC newsgroup. Sweet!

I have a lot of respect for Bruce Byfleld as a writer about open source, and today he turns in an extremely positive review of Bodhi Linux. I'll have to forgive Bruce for misspelling Bodhi throughout (and hope the Linux Pro site fixes it in the near future).

Byfield focuses on the Enlightenment-running, Ubuntu-based new distribution's adherence to principles and focus on experienced users:

Bodhi starts with a small and well-defined set of priorities and carries them through consistently. This consistency makes it stand out from recent releases of most distributions, most of which try to be everything to every user, and, as a result often fail to distinguish themselves to any degree. You may not agree or care about what Bodhi's team think is important, but after twenty minutes of investigating the distribution, you can be in little doubt of what the project's priorities are.

Bodhi makes no attempt to appeal to absolute beginners. It assumes a basic familiarity with the free desktop, and probably it is older and more experienced users who would appreciate the distro's design principles.

What I like about Bodhi's philosophy is the lean installation, emphasis on quickness, reliance on the Ubuntu LTS as a base (setting itself up for a 2-year release cycle). Find the details here.

The Jeff Hoogland-led Bodhi Linux project has issued its first stable release, version 1.0.0.

Look for my interview with Jeff sometime later this week.

In the blog entry linked to above, Jeff explains the Bodhi release numbering system:

For those wondering about our version numbering scheme. The first number represents a major release, the center number represents a kernel update, and the third number presents a minor package update release. Bodhi 1.0.0 should be our final release until we have the 2.6.38 kernel ready to go -- so expect a Bodhi 1.1.0 disc some time towards the end of May. Our major release cycle is set to go from Ubuntu LTS to LTS, so a Bodhi 2.y.z should not be expected any time before the end of the summer of 2012.

A lot of people have recommended the SugarSync file-synchronization service as an alternative to Dropbox. SugarSync offers 5 GB for free (vs. 2 GB for Dropbox) and has more flexible pricing when you want more storage. SugarSync undercuts Dropbox on price, but I have no idea how well the services work in comparison, having only used Dropbox.

The big problem with SugarSync, for me anyway: No Linux client.

SugarSync users lament this fact in the service's forum, and SugarSync itself has announced that they have hired an outside developer to create a Linux client, namely Mark Willis.

I came across this Ubuntu Development Guide by Daniel Holback while looking through Planet Ubuntu.

It tells you all the things you need to do technically to get set up for development, as in creation and modification of packages for Ubuntu GNU/Linux.

That's what I like to see (and often do in Ubuntu): People helping other people get involved.

I present two views, those of Keir Thomas, who has done it, and Michael Lucas, who would rather not.

Today I learned of the existence of EXDE, a project aiming to keep GNOME 2 alive now that the project is bringing profound change to its desktop with GNOME 3.

It's much like Trinity, which aims to preserve the KDE 3 environment after that project's major shift into KDE 4.

Update: Only a few days after this post, the EXDE site pretty much came down — and the nascent project along with it. Why? I have no idea.

Now that I'm using Dropbox to keep my critical files synced between my Debian Squeeze-running laptop and Windows XP-running desktop, I thought I'd spend the day in XP to see how well things run. I have 1 GB of memory and a Pentium 4 at 3 GHz. Not a screaming rig to be sure, but not the worst either (depending on who you ask).

At any rate, I'm not getting a new box anytime soon, so it is what it is.

I decided to use the Google Chrome browser, and aside from that I had Thunderbird 3 (I just recently upgraded from 2.0.0.x; I definitely recommend the upgrade in Windows — I've been running v.3 in Debian for awhile now), LibreOffice (running well in XP) on occasion, plus smatterings of IrfanView, Notepad++, Adobe Reader (kill me now), Pidgin, Filezilla and a small bit of Gpodder. And a couple of light apps we use for content management on the print side ...

OK, that sounds a bit more hairy than I thought.

Jeff Waugh's blog has drawn a whole lot of heat in recent days for his analysis of how Ubuntu and GNOME got to where they are today regarding who did what when and how, etc.

That's a terrible explanation on my part. Just read the entries and the hundreds of comments for yourself.

Get to the entire five-part series starting here.

I stumbled across an entry from Richard A. Johnson's blog.

Richard works on KDE in Ubuntu and Debian. Aside from being a nicely done WordPress installation with Disqus comments, I found the following articles notable (in reverse chronological order):

• Researching new laptop
• Dropbox for KDE
• WordPress, Thematic, and WP-Paginate
• Linux and GMail Part III - Thunderbird
• My ZaReason Laptop

It's nice to see users recognize the power and utility of rsync for backups. Linux Grandma is among them.

I've been getting closer and closer to needing a Dropbox-like utility on my Linux, Windows and Mac machines (one of each, really).

I need access to a certain subset of my files on more than one computer. I could've gone with Ubuntu One, except that I'm not running Ubuntu (and the Windows client is in beta ... no Mac client as far as I know).

I heard about SugarSync, which offers a free 5 GB of space, but SugarSync doesn't offer a Linux client. They really try hard to avoid telling you that there's a free option, instead pushing the paid plans. I don't blame them. But I can't use them due to lack of a Linux client.

I could have used JungleDisk, and I may still explore that option.

But since I needed a "Dropbox-like" utility/service, why not just use Dropbox?

It always amazes me when things don't work out of the box in Linux — even in Debian, where it seems like more stuff works with less effort than ever.

However, I had to go outside of the Debian repositories to get our new Epson Perfection V330 scanner to work. But get it to work, I did.

In the past, I've had trouble getting our el-cheapo HP LaserJet 1020 printer to work not just with Linux but also with Mac OS X. Yep, it's not just Linux that has trouble.

Laptops are expensive. Laptops are made of cheap plastic. Laptops are hard to repair.

Ever break a laptop key? I've had plenty of them pop off, and I usually pop 'em right back on.

But this time I had a "loose" shift key on the Lenovo G555. It wouldn't stay put. It would woggle around and stop working.

What could I do? I could replace the entire keyboard. However, replacement laptop keyboards are generally expensive, and I try as hard as possible to avoid taking laptops apart because as hard as they are to crack open, they're harder to put back together.

I've been relying on Google Chrome in Windows XP/7 and Chromium in Debian Squeeze for much of my web needs because it's way faster, less memory-hungry and generally more pleasant than Firefox/Iceweasel.

But in the past few days I've run into a few problems.