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  • Andrew 1:00 AM on May 30, 2006 Permalink
    Tags: , Linux   

    Living with Linux: Installing Apps 

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    (Detail of Adept, the KDE package manager. Click here or on the image above to see the entire window…)

    Upon my first successful install of Ubuntu my first task was to get the Flash Player working in Firefox—those YouTube videos don’t play themselves, ya know!

    I was a little dismayed to find the following instructions at UbuntuGuide.org:

    sudo apt-get install flashplayer-mozilla

    My biggest fear of Linux was staring me right in the face—that I wouldn’t be able to do much without hammering out a bunch of command-line instructions in a terminal window. How could this be, when everything else on my KDE Desktop seemed so user-friendly?

    Thankfully, a little poking around revealed a program called Adept. This “package manager” performs three critical tasks for a Linux installation:

    1. It keeps track of all the software installed on your system;
    2. It connects directly to repositories of downloadable applications and upgrades;
    3. It will install those apps and upgrades keeping in mind the stuff you’ve already got.

    I used Adept to get my system software up to date and to install the default Kubuntu games package. It’s not quite as convenient as a Mac or Windows automatic software updater, but it does give the user more control over the process.

    Now you can still go out into the wild and download whatever you like off the web, but unlike Mac or Windows it is most certainly not a drag and drop affair. As an example I tried to install the new Linux version of Google’s Picasa. I downloaded a package with a clickable Debian installer, but opening it brought up an error that a critical system component was missing.

    My only other choice was to go back to the command-line, as per Google’s instructions:

    If that doesn’t work, save the file in the /tmp directory, then open a terminal window and install with a command like

    $ sudo dpkg -i /tmp/picasa_2.2.2820-5_i386.deb

    or

    $ su

    1. dpkg -i /tmp/picasa_2.2.2820-5_i386.deb
    1. exit

    • … And that didn’t work either.

 

  • Andrew 5:00 PM on May 25, 2006 Permalink
    Tags: , Linux   

    Living with Linux: Ubuntu with a ‘K’ 

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    (The KDE Desktop, as seen from the Konqueror start page…)

    For anyone playing along at home, here’s a quick recap of my Linux adventures this past week…

    The overwhelming brown-ness of Ubuntu started to get to me after only a few days. I know that Ubuntu is billed as “Linux for Humans” and all, but all those earth-tones seemed a bit out of place on the virtual desktop of a computer screen.

    A little Googling informed me that Ubuntu uses what’s called the Gnome desktop environment, which works fine and well, but for a design snob like myself is a little sparse in its implementation. Lo and behold, there is another desktop evironment for Linux (actually there are several) called KDE—chock-full of beautiful on-screen fonts, bouncing icons and flashy window effects. So it was with great anticipation that I once again wiped clean the hard drive of my mighty Inspiron and loaded up Kubuntu, or Ubuntu with the KDE desktop.

    Actually I took the opportunity of a clean install to first try out OpenSUSE, the most popular Linux distro with KDE. But after 5 CDs I couldn’t get the damn OS to properly configure my WiFi card, so Kubuntu it was.

    At the heart of KDE is Konqueror a combination file and web browser much like Internet Explorer, but without the nasty ActiveX. The Mac OS would do well to learn from these hybrid browsers; the “Finder” is a mere file browser after all—why not just build Safari into that? Then you could go “on Safari” for that lost Word document or email attachment someone sent you months ago and now you can’t find ‘er—oh, now I get it.

    Anyway, now that I’ve settled on a distro I can get down to work and see what the latest Linux can really do. Stay tuned…

     

  • Andrew 1:57 PM on May 20, 2006 Permalink
    Tags: Linux   

    Living with Linux: Distro Distractions 

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    (No, that’s not the new black MacBook… It’s the mighty Dell Inspiron 7500 kindly donated for my adventures in Linux.)

    It’s only now, after my second install of Ubuntu, that I can appreciate what a user-friendly Linux distro it is. I had installed for the first time without a WiFi card present, and—big surprise—when I slapped the card in the next day I found that my networking options were, as the kids say, ”borked”.

    For the record, the message I was getting was ”SIOCGIFFLAGS error: No such device”. I have no idea either… And after patiently waiting for help on UbuntuForums.org I realized that I could probably fix things myself if I just reinstalled with the WiFi card present.

    Of course, wiping a hard drive clean and starting anew presented an opportunity to try out some other Linux distros as well. Some casual Googling informed me that Slackware was supposedly a great choice for older machines, so on my Mac I downloaded burned the four install CDs via BitTorrent. But the install process proved so daunting that I instead turned to the most popular Linux distro, Fedora.

    After more than two hours of installing and configuring I was all ready to boot up into Fedora when I got the same networking error that I had in my previous install of Ubuntu, so I slid in my single Ubuntu installer CD and half an hour later was back up and running with no apparent networking issues. The computer successfully synched with the Ubuntu clock server, and upon log-in I was immediately presented with a list of software that needed updating. I hit “OK”, and after a quick reboot had an optimized Linux OS ready to go!

    It’s an interesting coincidence that this Dell laptop has roughly the same specs as my old iMac. also in the above photo. In my usage thus far, Ubuntu seems just a tick faster than Mac OS X Jaguar on that machine…

     

    • Chris 10:02 AM on May 23, 2006 Permalink | Reply

      Ok so here’s the deal. I’m going to have to buy a new computer in the next year or two. I’m not one of those upgrade constantly guys; I keep my computers till I really can’t use them any more. I’m thinking of going for a laptop, now I’m a PC guy now, how would you convince me to go Mac? Any links would be ok too. I just want to cover all my bases before I invest for the long-term future.

    • Andrew Currie 10:33 AM on May 23, 2006 Permalink | Reply

      My favourite question… 8-)
      The single biggest reason to switch to Mac would be the complete and absolute lack of spyware and viruses available to infect it. A couple of months ago I installed a freeware anti-virus app just to be on the safe side, but quickly found that I had no need for it!

      You’ll definitely pay a premium for Mac hardware, but for design snobs like me the superior graphic, music and video apps, plus the general visual experience of using the computer are well worth it.

      But if you’d rather hold off I’m still betting that Apple will someday release a generic version of their OS which will run on any Intel box—then you can have the best of both worlds!

  • Andrew 11:42 AM on May 18, 2006 Permalink
    Tags: Linux   

    Living with Linux: The Ubuntu Filesystem 

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    You’re looking at a screen grab from the Ubuntu filesystem. Yeah, I can’t make heads or tails of it, either…

    I’m trying to make good on a New Year’s resolution to have a go at Linux, and an ancient Dell laptop kindly donated by Kathleen Howell and fiance Terry Irwin kind of forced the issue.

    The initial install went fine, but without internet access I was left to play Solitaire and the like until a refurbished WiFi PC card arrived from Future Shop. I got that up and running and I’m actually posting this via Linux, but beyond my web browser there is so much that I don’t understand. Stay tuned…

     

  • Andrew 5:33 PM on December 15, 2005 Permalink
    Tags: , Linux,   

    Mac vs. Windows… And Maybe Linux Too! 

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    (Read this Wikipedia entry or load up this very long FARK.com page if you are confused by the above…)

    Just like last December I’ve had to get a new hard drive for my PowerBook, and its battery—which currently holds about a 7-minute charge—is probably due for a replacement as well. Anybody who knows me has had to endure my Macintosh zealotry on at least one occasion, yet if you peruse the Mac-related posts on this humble site you’ll see that I’ve had more than my share of issues with the platform.

    In my decade of Mac experience the software has gotten better and better, but the hardware has gotten steadily worse.

    Consider my recent history with Mac computers:

    • October, 1999 – iMac DVSE: FireWire not working out of the box.
    • January, 2001 – Power Mac G4: Unable to sleep out of the box.
    • May, 2001 – iBook: Built-in speakers busted out of the box.
    • December, 2003 – Powerbook: Dead pixels out of the box.
    • April, 2004 – Power Mac G5: Logic board not working out of the box.

    Not a great track record if you ask me…

    And yet, my few shares of Apple stock are still skyrocketing while folks everywhere are touting the touting the superiority of the Mac platform.

    My dream come true would be a release of Mac OS X that I could run on any machine I want. Sadly, even though Apple is switching to the Intel chip-set, we’ll likely not see a generic OS release until Steve Jobs finally decides to retire on a big bed of money from faithful fan-boys like myself.

    I’m waiting to see what gets announced at the MacWorld keynote in January. If it’s not a generic release of OS X for Intel or at least an iBook that can run Windows, I’m buying me a notebook with XP Pro. Give me some time with it, and I’ll be able to say with at least some certainty which platform, if any, is ultimately better, and for what. Oh, and if I have enough hard drive space left over I may even install Linux on a separate partition, just for kicks!
    8-)

     

    • Ed Miller 12:35 PM on December 19, 2005 Permalink | Reply

      AC:
      I’ve bought 3 new Macs since 1999 (a G4, G4 Powerbook, and a G5),and I haven’t had any serious technical problems like you’ve encountered. My first Mac was a 2nd hand 8600, and I did have some hardware problems with it that were fixable.
      I had problems with my G5 after an Apple firmware upgrade caused my Mac to stop recognizing my RAM, and eventually I found a solution by checking out the various forums and tech alert sites. I watch the Apple forums as well as a few others (MacAddict, DVX Users) for a few weeks prior to running patches now, just to avoid any problems until either a workaround or a followup patch appears (I haven’t upgraded to 10.4 yet, for instance, because the Final Cut community still prefers 10.3.9). I held off upgrading Final Cut to the current versions until some of the early glitches were resolved with patches. Still, once everything’s okay and installed, it runs without crashing or constant tweaking to make it work, like I’ve experienced with Wintel machines.
      On the other hand, if I were to compare Wintel performance for video versus what it was like in 1999 when I bought my firt Mac, I’d probably lean towards Wintel just becuase they’ve caught up in terms of processing speed and capability. If I weren’t doing video and just needed word processing, spreadsheets, music player, DVD player, and games, I’d say a Wintel machine is definitely the way to go just because you have a huge range of software available compared to the Mac.

      Ed

    • Andrew Currie 10:45 PM on December 19, 2005 Permalink | Reply

      Hi Ed,

      Maybe I’m one of those “bleeding edge” types, but I’m curious to see the type of real-world performance (and hopefully realibility) that I can get from one of those sub-$1000 notebooks.

      … And even more curious to try out the latest darling of the Linux set:

      http://www.ubuntu.com/

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