Don's Weblog

April 24 is upon us and the official release of Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy Heron) will be available for download. I installed the release candidate a week ago on my desktop computer and have kept up with daily updates that number over 100. Yes, I'll wait a day or two for the rush to be over and then download a copy for archive and training purposes. The desktop will forever be Ubuntu and , by the way, I prefer GNOME over KDE. On to the laptop. As much as I dislike Vista, Windows does come in handy now and then. At the moment it is dual booting the beta of Hardy using the wubi method of installation. This was intended to be temporary from the start and very little software has been installed in the last month. The wubi installation will not tolerate a distribution upgrade. A lot of blogs fail to point this out. It is intended to be a trial. The installation will now be removed leaving at least 30GB for a permanent dual boot system. Should it be Hardy? Well, it might be. Ubuntu appears to be

About three years ago I was an early buyer of a Nokia 770. It is an "Internet Tablet." Now it is said "Never buy the first of anything" and to some extent this is true but the "Maemo" platform was very appealing. From the start the device could wirelessly connect to the internet, browse the web and fetch email. Some useful applications began to appear categorized into what you might expect... Games, Office, Multimedia and etc. Personally, although I downloaded a few games and office apps, I found the multimedia apps the most useful. This gadget is one heck of an mp3 player, and plays video clips as well. An app I am particulary fond of is FBReader. Yes, you can read ebooks in several popular formats. I have a reference book which is in .chm format. I was using a Firefox extension to read this volume but that extension stopped working when I upgraded to Firefox 3 (Ubuntu Hardy). Well, I could have done a downgrade to Firefox 2, but why not have the book in

Before abandoning Vista completely I decided to do a memory upgrade on my Toshiba laptop from 1GB to 2GB. Memory for this machine is pretty cheap right now and I had a few dollars left in my budget for entertainment. Replacing the memory chips was surprisingly easy. I did put on my reading glasses to see the tiny screws on the case. There was some improvement in performance but the machine was still far below my expectations. The next improvement would be to install Vista Service Pack 1. The installation went smoothly but took over an hour during which time the machine rebooted a number of times. Again a slight performance increase but not really impressive. The machine will now boot to a usable state fairly quickly but the start-up disk access continues for 5 minutes or more! What in the world is the OS doing for so long??? Indexing??? Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy Heron) had progressed from alpha versions to an installable beta version with a release scheduled for April 24. I had previously ins

Over a year ago I invested in an external USB drive, a Western Digital Passport, to be specific. The drive has proven to be incredibly useful. I guess a lot of people are in agreement. If you go to your local electronics store you will find the Passport and a whole bunch of competitors that weren't there a year ago! The external drive is a great place to store your backups of important files. If your main system crashes you can get your vital data back. Also, it's useful for temporary storage of large files like movie downloads and iso images of games and OS's. Similar to USB thumb drives, external drives are formatted in FAT32. This means they are cross platform. You plug them into your Windows, Mac or Linux box and all can see the files! My Linux box is much faster downloading movies. But it's pretty nice to watch them in my screen room on my laptop. No problem!! Circuit City had a sale on 2 GB thumb drives for $20. Yes, on $/GB comparison that might somewhat contrad

As reported earlier, VMWare Server is easy to install on Ubuntu and running Windows XP seems to work well. The question nagged me about running a virtual machine on my Vista laptop. There is no real necessity for this except to be able to demo a Linux system "on the road." Also as noted earlier, running a guest OS on top of Vista would probably be a pretty slow machine. But Linux has no where near the memory requirements of Vista so "slow" may not be much of a consideration. Also, I am seriously considering expanding the laptop memory from 1GB to 2GB. This would speed up Vista and leave plenty of memory for a guest OS. I attempted to install VMWare on the laptop. This did not go well. There were prerequisites including that Vista have SP! installed!! I had a copy of SP1 but was reluctant to install it because of all the Vista problems. Oh well, what the hell, if I hit a problem I'd get out of it like always. SP1 took a good hour to install with several reboots a

Despite the benefits of using Linux as your desktop, Windows remains and will continue to be the most widely used system for the next few years. Some popular software will run in the Linux WINE compatibility layer. My favourite money program, Ace Money, runs fine and even let's me have a desktop shortcut. Other necessary software, TurboTax for example, will not. There are two solutions, each having some merits. Solution One. Set up a dual boot machine. I tried this on my Vista laptop using the Wubi installer to install Ubuntu 7.04. This worked well except my Linux system had no sound. This was corrected by installing the ALSA sound drivers. I have read that folks downgrading their systems from Vista to XP also lose their sound. Fortunately, Microsoft offers a free patch for this. Although a dual boot machine is a good solution I am not sure that Wubi is the way to do it, When I attempted to upgrade 7.04 to 7.10, I trashed the system. I will be doing this again in a few weeks when t