Showing posts with label Linux. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Linux. Show all posts
I'm a little late in my reporting, but this year, in May, the International Space Station (ISS) dumped the last of it's laptop installations of the Windows XP operating system to go all Linux, and furthermore dropped Red Hat Linux in favour of Debian 6. According to the Linux Foundation, which provided two training courses geared specifically for the USA/NASA team’s needs.
What the Fu ... duntu!? I think maybe the baristas at the Waves Coffee House on West Broadway, at Spruce, are psychic. How else to explain this:
Fuduntu was a cool, Fedora-based Linux distro, which wrapped up it's development earlier this year. Here's one of my two posts about it's sudden, sad, demise. The hope was that the heart of Fuduntu would beat in the new Cloverleaf project, made up of a small group of former Fuduntu developers -- a really small group. In fact, the Cloverleaf effort has realistically scaled back from producing a full Linux distribution based on openSUSE, and refocused on contributing to the openSUSE project. It sounds like all the goodness they hoped to put in Cloverleaf, will, in the fullness of time, enrich openSUSE.
Fuduntu was a cool, Fedora-based Linux distro, which wrapped up it's development earlier this year. Here's one of my two posts about it's sudden, sad, demise. The hope was that the heart of Fuduntu would beat in the new Cloverleaf project, made up of a small group of former Fuduntu developers -- a really small group. In fact, the Cloverleaf effort has realistically scaled back from producing a full Linux distribution based on openSUSE, and refocused on contributing to the openSUSE project. It sounds like all the goodness they hoped to put in Cloverleaf, will, in the fullness of time, enrich openSUSE.
According to the aggregators over at Wikipedia the first version of the German Linux distribution S.u.S.E. ("Software und System-Entwicklung") was released, not as version 1.0, or 1.1, but as S.u.S.E Linux 4.2. The reason? It was an intentional reference to The Question -- you know, of Life, the Universe, and Everything, from Douglas Adams' five book trilogy Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. S.u.S.E.'s YaST package manager also started at version number, 0.42. I love an operating system with a sense of humour.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aboZctrHfK8
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aboZctrHfK8
[caption id="attachment_4203" align="alignnone" width="497"]
When I first saw the attractive Fuduntu cloverleaf logo, which embodied an "f" for Fedora, I suppose, I thought it also, evoked the Windows logo, and the Apple cloverleaf key.[/caption]
I've continued to gnaw away at why Funduntu turned out the lights; I'm like a none-too-bright dog -- and no, that's not a Puppy Linux crack. I love Puppy.
Of course Andrew Wyatt, and company would rightly say they've explained why, but I didn't quite get it (see above dog reference). So I've been reading, back to 2010, and forwards to just a few months ago. For better or worse, here's what I get: Fedora's a bit of a mess under the hood (and they didn't have enough mechanics), and the Fuduntu team wore their name like an albatross around their collective neck for nearly three years. The former explains rebasing on OpenSUSE, and the latter explains the new name for the new distribution.
When I first saw the attractive Fuduntu cloverleaf logo, which embodied an "f" for Fedora, I suppose, I thought it also, evoked the Windows logo, and the Apple cloverleaf key.[/caption]I've continued to gnaw away at why Funduntu turned out the lights; I'm like a none-too-bright dog -- and no, that's not a Puppy Linux crack. I love Puppy.
Of course Andrew Wyatt, and company would rightly say they've explained why, but I didn't quite get it (see above dog reference). So I've been reading, back to 2010, and forwards to just a few months ago. For better or worse, here's what I get: Fedora's a bit of a mess under the hood (and they didn't have enough mechanics), and the Fuduntu team wore their name like an albatross around their collective neck for nearly three years. The former explains rebasing on OpenSUSE, and the latter explains the new name for the new distribution.
A friend asked me to explain using BitTorrent, and like a lemming, here I go. ...
BitTorrent is a peer-to-peer (P2P) protocol which allows computer files to be shared anonymously between computers connected to the Internet. Its anonymous nature, and ability to handle really large files, has made it synonymous with file piracy. True, but all digital distribution channels have been, in their turn, exploited for file sharing/piracy, going back to before Bulletin Board Systems. I say it's the nature of the files which encourage sharing and piracy; digital files make nonsense of "ownership" because they can be given away, and kept at the same time.
I Found this HP Pavilion dv6000 in the garbage well over a year ago. I didn't have an AC adapter for it so I left it in my locker, then it went off with Toad, who said he had an adapter; he didn't, and I finally got it back about a month ago. Now I had an adapter so I played with it. The casing was very clean and unmarked. There was no internal hard drive, but it booted a variety of live media. I was pleased it booted Ubuntu with no problem, making it the first computer driven by an AMD proccessor to do so. It still had its wireless card, which was recognized by every distro I tried. It had a much faster proccessor, and about twice as much RAM, as my little Acer Aspire One 533 netbook.
The HP also had a standard ratio screen, unlike the Acer, who's 10.1-inch netbook screen (1024 x 600 resolution) was, height-wise, 40 pixels off standard ratio. I had found that a number of Linux applications, including GIMP, but mostly KDE applications, such as DigiKam, would draw windows 1024 x 640, and somewhat important buttons such as "Save," would be stuck down in the right-hand corner -- in that 40-pixels below the bottom of my Acer's screen.
The HP was more a tank-top than laptop, but I had a bike trailer.
I bought a 250 GB Apple Toshiba SATA laptop drive from another binner for $5, or $10 dollars. I cajoled Toad into helping me install it, which he did with the aid of an adapter doo-dad. In gratitude, I gave him a bag of $13-worth-of-nickels.
The six-cell battery didn't hold more than a ten-minute charge anymore. Research showed that brand-new it was only rated for two hours. Luckily I found Leading Age Computer, a store at Kingsway and Joyce, in the Collingwood neighbourhood of Vancouver, which was selling a twelve-cell battery for a mere $60.00, taxes in. This thing may weigh as much as my Acer, and it's twice the thickness of a six-cell, but it's giving me over four hours of charge.
I installed Ubuntu 12.04.1, because my experience with 12.10 on the Acer made me remember all the better qualities of 12.04. Now that it's installed I'm remembering that it's not without blemishes. But I know I can successfully un-install Unity from 12.04, which absolutely wasn't the case with 12.10.
The specs:
OS: Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, 32-bit
Memory: 2.9 GB
Processor: AMD Turion(tm) 64 X2 Mobile Technology TL-60 × 2
Graphics: Unknown (to Ubuntu)
Disk: 240 GB
True there is a vertical blue line (sometimes lines) that sits about two-inches in from the right side of the screen, but I knew that was there from the first distro I booted -- I'm told it has to do with the graphics card, which in this HP, is soldered in. Any ways, I believe HPs have poor build-quality by design, so any or all of it could go poof at any moment. So far though, I'm pretty pleased.
"I do like a lot about Ubuntu, but I find the same thing: too often when you are up against a roadblock, a google search shows that the answer is to bring up the terminal and type a string of random characters."
Posted by: Merlin, on Aug. 31st, 2012 to macobserver.com
In truth, when I took up with Ubuntu last year, I did so out of necessity more than just curiosity; I jumped at opensouce because it offered me a shooting-chance at meaningful computing on the kind of garbage computers I could get. I chose Ubuntu because of the readily available live CD; the comfortingly Mac-like aspects of the 12.04 desktop, and because it truly made a silk purse out of the sow's ear of a netbook I was using. It's fair to say that if my Macbook Pro had not been stolen, I wouldn't have had any incentive to switch to Linux; I was already tinkering with it in VirtualBox, and that's likely all I would have done.
So, after a year-and-some of daily Ubuntu use, have I been converted or would I run back to Apple if I could?
First-off; I'm grateful for Gnu Linux and Ubuntu, etc., for being there so i could have productive computing on obsolete hardware. I also believe in the goals of the FOSS movement; the results speak for themselves. A lot of Linux distros do a lot of things right. Ubuntu has had the (perhaps unintended) effect of making me much more comfortable with the Command Line Interface. So, no. I wouldn't exactly be running back to the Mac.
My dream computer at this point would be a well-built PC laptop with great build quality and hardware specs and it would triple-boot the unholy trinity of Windows, OS X, and some sort of Linux. There are still great programs unique to operating systems (Irfanview comes to mind). I think the hardware wars of the 1990s are over, and I think software won. If I'm surfing the Web, using Firefox, let's say, my user experience will likely be identical regardless of the platform. That's what counts these days.
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