Recently in Steven Rosenberg Category

I ran my first Linux live CD in January 2007. I've been using free, open-source operating systems on my personal machines for much of my work for the past two years, more intensively in the last year.

And right here, right now, with a collection of old and dying hardware, my main laptop being a 2002/03-era Toshiba Satellite 1100-S101, I've moved from OpenBSD 4.4 to Ubuntus 8.04-9.10 and now to Debian Lenny, and things now are going better than I ever thought they would.

For this moment anyway, I have X working great, sound works through my USB Headphone Set sub-$3 module, I have all the multimedia functionality I need through Debian Multimedia, I'm about to update a few key apps, including Firefox/Iceweasel with Backports (see the wiki, too), and I've found more than a few apps that I really like and rely on.

I've grown very accustomed to and reliant on GNOME. I use Gedit, the Epiphany browser when possible (it's quicker than Iceweasel/Firefox), and my "killer app" for Web photo-editing is Gthumb, which is one of the few FOSS apps that preserves and edits the critical IPTC data in JPEGs that all of the photographers I work with (and all the outside suppliers of images I use) use to caption their images.

I have OpenOffice when I need it, which isn't often.

I use Rhythmbox for music, Gpodder for podcasts, Icedove/Thunderbird with Iceowl/Lightning for mail and calendar, gFTP, Pidgin and Audacity. I have Java and Flash. I use LogMeIn to control Windows desktops remotely when needed.

Did I mention that everything (just about) works?

It's a great thing, and the speed I'm getting in Debian makes Windows, if hadn't wiped it from the Toshiba's 20 GB hard drive, something I don't really need.

At this point I'm worried about the future of this 2002/03 laptop, principally its Intel video. Xorg has not been kind to Intel video over these past few years. Thus far I need to use the VESA driver to get Debian Sid (via Sidux) or Ubuntu Lucid to run.

That's acceptable, but I'd still like to get the Intel driver to work. Hell, this is Intel video; you'd think there would be a working Intel driver for it in the Xorg world as implemented in Linux and the BSDs.

But I do have the VESA solution ready, and between Debian Lenny, Squeeze and Ubuntu Lucid, I have a future upgrade path already in place, even as I hold onto Lenny with both hands due to the fact that I've already done all of the setup and tweaking and have everything working as well as ever.

How's your Linux or BSD machine running these days? Let me know either in the comments or via e-mail at steven (dot) rosenberg (at) dailynews (dot) com.

As an experiment, I decided to bring my Evolutionary Computing presentation on making the journey into free, open-source software — a slide show originally created in OpenOffice Impress 2.4 — into Google Docs, which happens to have a presentation app in addition to the better-known Docs and Spreadsheets components.

I revised the presentation — taking some things out, adding others and providing some updates on what I'm doing — and output it as a PDF.

Download that PDF for your reading pleasure by clicking on the image above or the link below:

Evolutionary Computing (revised July 2009)

Interesting note: I believe that no previous entry on this blog has been filed under so many categories. (And I've been considering dumping Categories entirely and just using tags ...)

With the recent redesign/reconfiguration of the Los Angeles Daily News, my weekly Tech Talk column has moved along with the Saturday Business page to the A section of the paper. Find it today on Page A12.

In the Saturday, Feb. 27 Tech Talk column, I overcome a false start and finally fix my ailing Maytag gas clothes dryer.

While Authorized Appliance of Reseda, Calif., was once again instrumental in helping me figure out how to complete the repair, I did find a new appliance-repair Web site, Fixitnow.com - Samurai Appliance Repair Man, that is better than anything I've seen up to now.

Aside from being a most excellent resource on how to fix your broken major appliances, Fixitnow.com is a great example of how to fully use WordPress as both a blogging platform AND general Web site using the Pages function. I'm very much interested in doing this. It's a great way to break out of the blog post, blog post, blog post mold and showcase some more "timeless" content on your site. Like I did here.

Image at right: This image comes from the very same kind of Maytag dryer that I have. (Thanks the Ask Me Help Desk for the image — and a very helpful forum.) The two white plugs with wires protruding from them are plugged into the dryer's two coils, which control the gas valve (the thing they're bolted onto). I replaced the coils (remove both plugs, unscrew bracket, lift coils, replace with new ones, replace bracket, replace plugs) and the dryer now works great.

This blog and my weekly print column don't cross paths much, but it's time to change that and help readers tap the resources I write about in the Saturday edition of the Daily News (Page 2 of the Faith section, where Business currently lives, as well as the aforementioned online home.)

The Saturday, Feb. 7 column is about self-publishing, ideally with no cost to you, both in traditional printed books as well as in electronic form on Amazon's Kindle e-reader.

Links mentioned in the column:

• "Books Gone Wild: The Digital Age Reshapes Literature," Time magazine, Jan. 21, 2009
• Self-publishing with Amazon.com
• CreateSpace — on-demand publishing (for free!!) through Amazon.com
• The definitely not-free BookSurge from Amazon
• Self-publishing company iUniverse
• Amazon's Kindle electronic reader

Come to the Jan. 27 meeting of TUGNET — The User's Group Network — and hear me speak to whoever shows up.

My topic: Evolutionary computing: Making the leap to free, open-source
applications and operating systems.

What I'll be trying to do is bring the worlds of this blog, which explores the inner reaches of my own geekiness, with that of my print column, Tech Talk, which is aimed at a more general audience.

Both the blog and column draw heavily on my own experience, and I wouldn't have gotten wherever it is I am now if I worried about what I didn't know. I've said on many an occasion that I'm hear to learn and to demystify the process of wading into the technological waters.

Enough of that. What I'll be talking about is my own journey from a garden-variety user of proprietary software to one who aims to use free and open-source solutions wherever possible.

While I burned and ran my first Linux live CD in January 2007, I first got my feet wet in the world of Unix way back in the 1980s through a free on-campus account at UC Santa Cruz, where average (read: non-technically inclined) students were encouraged to use Unix to write and print out (on a bona fide networked laser printer ... and this was right around the time Apple released its original LaserWriter at a cost of $6,995) our essays and anything else we did for our classes.

At TUGNET, I'll talk about the advantages of using free, open-source applications in proprietary environments like Windows and Mac OS and how that makes it all the easier to make the transition to FOSS operating systems that include a few hundred active Linux distributions and four key BSD projects.

I'll be providing tech tips, as well as book and Web-site recommendations on how to learn more about free software, and I'll talk about why I'm using OpenBSD these days more than Linux (and why that could always change because I'm a major proponent of choosing and freely changing both hardware and software to best do the task at hand).

I'd like to thank TUGNET president Marian Radcliffe for inviting me.

And dear reader (as I weakly invoke Jane Austen), I hope to see you there.

For those of you who don't know, I've been writing a weekly tech column for the Los Angeles Daily News. It's usually available on the Technology page, where I've archived as many past columns as I've been able to find in the system.

This week's column is Stealing is still stealing. It's about the ethics of proprietary software. Is it OK to steal non-free software? How does free, open-source software factor into this ethical stew? It's nothing I haven't covered in this blog before, but it is a bit more up-to-the-minute as far as where I'm at goes:

Microsoft charges what it does because that's what the corporate market is willing to pay. And if the average guy sitting at home can pay hundreds of dollars for software, they'll take his money, too.

To a company like Microsoft, they'd prefer that home users steal its software and become familiar with it rather than use anything else. That way, when those same people go to work, they'll demand their bosses pay for the programs they know.