Don's Weblog

Before discovering the capabilities of Linux I was a devoted Kim Komando listener. I still listen to Kim, her tips on cameras, mp3 players and other gadgets are quite helpful, but gosh can she can give an incredibly bad or biased answer on OS related questions. Today a caller lamented that he might have to drop Vista and return to XP to run his older Adobe products. Did Kim mention that these softwares run nicely under Linux with Wine? No, Linux is a bad word in Kim's Windows biased world. I haver heard her use the word except in one reference to a budget laptop with the comment "I don't want to go there." So what was her final answer to this fellow? "Well, return to XP if you must, but pay attention to Vista updates that might resolve your problems." If you continue to listen ro her comments you will undoubtedly hear recommendations on security software, and commercials for products like Registry Mechanic. Gawd, what a mess. The problem here is that this i

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

I don't surf the web without pen and paper at hand. The problem is that it doesn't take too long for the notes to pile up. Last year I played with Evernote (the last free version) and it was good. Now I needed something similar on my Linux machine. Hopefully something that would have an 'export' function so I could carry info between machines on a USB drive just like a pdf document. I found it. Go to www.tiddlywiki.com and follow the simple directions. There is no software to install. The application is coded in HTML and just by visiting the site you have already downloaded everything you need! Your next stop should be tiddlysnip.com where you will get a Firefox extension to enable web clipping directly into your Wiki. The application runs with your web browser and is platform independent. It works on Windows, Mac, Linux and whatever. It works "as is" but if you are comfortable with a little HTML and JavaScript you can do some amazing things with it. Just fo

Linux is great because of all the choices. Linux is confusing because of all the choices. When you booted your computer you saw a desktop. It's your gateway to everything you do on your machine. The unfortunate majority will see the Windows desktop. Now there's nothing wrong with the Windows desktop, in fact it's quite pretty and functional. It's what's beyond the gateway where the trouble starts. A minority will see the Mac desktop. Again, pretty and functional, but the controls, buttons and menus are located a bit differently so the Windows person using the Mac may hesitate a bit as he/she learns to get around. The really fortunate and enlightened Linux user has choices. Most Linux people will use either KDE or GNOME. Is one better than the other? No! Statistics show that KDE users outnumber GNOME users. Perhaps this is because KDE has a resemblance to Windows. Personally I prefer GNOME. But why not have the best of both worlds? A simple command installs the

Florida is a great place to be in March. The days are sunny and warm but seldom hot. There are a few cool nights but you just sleep in your robe or pajamas and, for the most part, your heating/AC system is simply turned off. The local outdoor sections at Lowe's, Home Depot, Wal-Mart and independent garden centers are brimming with flowers, seedlings and house plants. The bugs are not yet hatched, so your not swatting at insects and other vermin. The citrus fruit is well into season, but I am still picking and squeezing grapefruit off my tree. Up north I used to celebrate what I called "leaf day." This was a day in the Spring when the buds on trees sprouted into little leaves. It usually happened in late April. Here in Florida, we simply celebrate good weather year round. Yesterday (Leap Day) my boom box died. I bought this box about 2 years ago at a yard sale for $7. The CD player was a little flaky but otherwise it worked great. It carried the JVC brand name. It did not

I have never watched an entire showing of the Academy Awards. Really, who cares about actors patting themselves on the back for their job performance? There is absolutely no sense to it. The only real measure of a film's success is how much money dos it bring in at the box office. Now, I like a good movie. I watch a bunch on my computer including most of these Academy Award nominees. 3:10 To Yuma... A good Western. No Country For Old Men... I didn't understand the ending.. Juno... An award for a movie about a pregnant teenager??? Gotta wonder... Did that movie "Duplex" a couple of years ago win anything?? I have no idea but it was really funny. And I see there will be a new Indiana Jones movie. Now that is something to look forward to. Academy Awards are Bullshit. Videos are the Internet rage. Anyone with a camcorder or webcam can be a producer! You know, some of these are pretty good. Who sent me the video of the stripper doing a magic act?? That was a real gem. Did

You will all want to read the March issue of PC magazine. It has two excellent articles. The first is on currently available (and top rated) freeware. Why I think this listing is better than others is that the software descriptions include the platform(s) it runs on. PC's are no longer just Windows boxes. I have always believed that good freeware is comparable to (and sometimes better) than commercial software. The classic example is OpenOffice. Why pay Microsoft over $100 when you can have the same capabilities for free? And of course, the Microsoft browser, Internet Explorer, struggles to keep up with the Mozilla browser, Firefox, which has been free from the start. The second article that deserves attention is "The Battle For Your Desktop." It gives a good comparison of Windows Vista, Windows XP, Mac OS (Leopard), and Ubuntu Linux (7.10). Despite what Kim Komando will tell you on Saturday morning, Windows XP comes out ahead of Windows Vista. My experience with Vista on

Six more weeks of Winter!! That's fine for me. Winter is pretty nice in Florida. Oh yes, there are a few cool days when you wear a sweater and sleep under a blanket but it soon warms up again. I promised a "2007 State of the Don" message for the holidays but obviously I didn't make it. 2007 was not a good year. At this time last year I was starting to suffer depression and complained to my friends that "I had little to do and too much time to do it in.!" Life went downhill from there. By April I was in severe depression. I tied up with a young doctor who gave me very bad advice and incorrectly prescribed a high dose of Prozac. I got profoundly ill until I figured out on my own that it was the Prozac making me sick!! I did a lot of praying during this period and I will not discount the role of God in keeping me alive. After cutting out the Prozac recovery took about two months and by September I was pretty much back to normal. My hobbies filled my time (and s