Don's Weblog

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 ...