Tinker Blog

http://blogs.techrepublic.com.com/five-tips/?p=204

The only thing new for me was the first one- maybe the others will be for you. I’m not sure how much faster my boot time can get- even with the profile flag it was pretty speedy.

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One thing I love about Dan Gillmor’s recent article on switching is his emphasis on the increasing control Apple is exercising over their customers.

Whereas I’m free to use any software I want to access my Android phone when I dock it, your iPhone will only work consistently with iTunes from Apple, and only the apps that Apple allows into the iTunes store. Buying media in that store? Good luck accessing that media in places Apple hasn’t decided you should.

It comes down to Apple (and Steve Jobs) knowing what’s best. And doing what’s best for you. They don’t. They do what is best for them.

I think I’ve mentioned before an experience my wife had with the home movies she likes to make in iMovie (I’m not making her switch). For years we had been buying iTunes music with DRM and since we used Macs that wasn’t a problem. We spent lots of money in that store- it’s easy to after all. And we had a lot of fun using that music in our home movies. Without notice or warning, an update came out an suddently DRM music from iTunes couldn’t be used in iMovie. Oh, we tried lots of things. But Apple had decided we couldn’t use that music in our home movies. Even though we had paid for it.

We buy all our digital music from Amazon now. We don’t live in Apple’s little Animal Farm anymore.

As has been widely reported, Dell’s Ubuntu sub-site was offering not just Dell computers preloaded with Ubuntu, but advice on which OS should be used. I’m thinking that a Linux fan was tasked to create the page without much supervision- maybe even a Canonical employee. Regardless, when I noticed it, I knew it wouldn’t be up for long so I took a screenshot and copied the ten reasons so I could use them when I had the time. Below are the screenshot and the ten reasons to use Ubuntu as cited on the Dell website. My favorite part other than the obvious dig at Windows were the bolded ‘Unwarranted’ marks under Anti-spyware / Anti-virus. :) I love educational facts.

10) Ubuntu is simple and elegant

If you’re the kind of person who likes your computer to simply work, Ubuntu is right for you. It’s based on stable, secure, easy-to-use software that’s been around for a long time.

9) Ubuntu is designed for the Internet

Do you spend most of your time on the Internet? Ubuntu connects you to the Internet in seconds. Firefox is a very popular browser and works well with practically every website you’ll run across, e.g. news sites, social media sites, etc. It also works great with web-based e-mail sites like Yahoo or Gmail.

8) Ubuntu is “social from the start”

The people who make Ubuntu designed it to be very social-media centric. Do you use Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, or any of the other dozens of popular social networking sites? Ubuntu 9.10 works very well with these websites. And beginning with Ubuntu 10.04, these websites will be integrated into the Ubuntu OS itself for your convenience.

7) Ubuntu plays videos, songs, and movies easily

Do you like to watch videos on YouTube, buy songs from Amazon, pop in DVD’s from the local video store? No problem! Dell bundles a multimedia player with Ubuntu to deliver a great entertainment experience.(DRM protected music not supported.)

6) Ubuntu is safer than Microsoft® Windows®

The vast majority of viruses and spyware written by hackers are not designed to target and attack Linux.

5) Ubuntu boots up fast

Beginning with Ubuntu 10.04, available on Dell systems this summer, boot times have improved dramatically over Ubuntu 9.10. Depending upon the Dell computer your purchase, boot times can be around 30 seconds!

4) With Ubuntu, you have access to 1,000’s of free software programs

What do you like to do?

3) Ubuntu with OpenOffice is compatible with Microsoft® Office and Adobe® Acrobat®

Do you need to open Microsoft Office documents? What about Adobe Acrobat? Ubuntu comes with the award-winning OpenOffice software. With it, not only can you create word processing documents, spreadsheets, presentations, and even drawings, but it can also open and save documents in Microsoft Office format. Do you ever get .pdf files emailed to you—no problem!

2) Ubuntu is based on Linux®

Linux has been around for nearly 20 years. The software itself is not only stable and reliable, but also pervasive. Linux is used on computers of all sizes ranging from the biggest to the smallest.

1) Ubuntu comes pre-loaded with select Dell desktop, notebook, and netbook computers

Beginning in 2007, Dell began shipping computers with Ubuntu. Since then, Dell has shipped more computers pre-loaded and pre-tested with Ubuntu than any other computer maker in the world. Every computer we ship with Ubuntu has been fully tested to ensure the best possible Internet and multimedia experience Linux has to offer.Two high-tech leaders—ensuring Ubuntu on Dell “just works.”

Windows or Ubuntu?

From ZDNet: http://www.zdnet.com/blog/btl/five-tips-for-improving-linux-security/35798

A school district is mandating that students’ parents buy them MacBooks. According to the article,

Superintendent James Hayes sees the technology as an essential move to prepare kids for the future.

Well, that makes sense- Macs are everywhere. I bet by the time they graduate, there will be nothing but Macs as far as the eye can see. Right.

Maybe someone should have mentioned to Mr. Hayes that despite Apple’s popularity, Macs account for only 8% of computer sales in the US. I think Mac news sites play on this a bit too much as good news- that’s less than 1 in 10! That means if there are 10 homes on your street and everyone goes out to buy a new computer this year, maybe 1 will get a Mac. 1. You can tell me how great his life will be compared to those other 9 all you want, guys. It’s still only 8% sales.

Or, even more relevant Mr. Hayes, why would this prepare kids for the future? Apple seems to think we won’t use computers for much longer. But even if we do, why would you go with the platform (Mac OS X) that has less than 6% market share? I don’t like Microsoft (I after all, root for the OS that has under 2% market share), but the fact is that most people in the business world will have to use a Windows PC. Maybe you’re lucky like me and have always had the professional flexibility to use what you wanted to as long as you got the job done. But most people will not have that luxury at least for now. But enough talk of Windows dominance- if Macs are such a small player, why did that school district choose them?

Money Talks

I’m sure they’re getting a pretty good deal- Apple has been know to really cut the price down on such large deployments. And I do not doubt that the computers will be great and that the software will too. But the easy answer as to why the school would go with Apple? Cost- if they force everyone to use the same thing, it cuts support right down to a phone call (which according to the article, Apple will handle) for any student. The teacher only has to know one system. The same instructions will work for each student. Each keyboard will be the same. They don’t have to worry about a handful of students that maybe are missing a certain port or feature and therefore can’t participate. The article even mentions that even kids that already have a MacBook will have to have it checked to make sure it’s new enough. It’s the same reason builders like to build a hundred homes that look almost exactly the same. It saves money.

So, in the end, the students will learn about business, because this is the kind of decision a business would make- to save on costs. It just turns out that most businesses don’t choose Macs.

I have a fun new phone finally and ran into a snag trying to get things into an arrangement where stuff on my desktop and on my phone sync.

Google’s Android essentialy skips the problem of syncing software for the desktop by syncing with their Internet based services. With the wide range of software that can sync from the desktop computer up to their services, it’s a pretty safe strategy. Even on Linux there are readily available solutions.

To integrate Google Contacts and Calendar, I did have to add a couple packages to my openSUSE installation:


zypper install akonadi-googledata
zypper install libgcal0


But it still didn’t work- it kept saying I had an invalid password. Happily, I came across this thread which guided me through the openSUSE-specific change I had to make to the proxy settings. I wonder if anything else has been affected by this setting.

Anyway- it looks like it’s working, although I still don’t see my calendar, so there’s more to do there.

Attempting to change the photo in the ‘About Me’ Personal Settings control, I ran into the error above.

I found a good hint at http://forum.kde.org/viewtopic.php?f=63&t=62046#p134788 but with one minor change. I don’t know why they felt they needed to put the terminal command- you open ‘Configure Desktop’, go to the ‘Advanced’ tab and click ‘Login Manager’.

While they used ‘User, System’, that didn’t work for me- I had to choose ‘User’.

Mac OS X uses the HFS+ filesystem. Most of the time I don’t think we notice or care what filesystem we use, but in some cases, the filesystem itself is an important feature and even a draw to a platform. The BeOS for example had the Be FileSystem (BFS), which essentially allowed you to tag your files making your files even easier to find. If that sounds a bit like Mac OS X’s Spotlight, then maybe it won’t surprise you to learn that many Be engineers ended up at Apple. :)

I’m not an expert on this, but as I understand it there’s the file contents and then various types of information about the file that the filesystem uses. In moving from Mac OS X to Linux, one thing I’ve run into is that some file types, like TextClippings (*.textClipping files) are empty. All the data the file uses is kept in one of those bits of information about the file. Because you’re no longer using HFS+, it is not possible to get the information. In fact, for all I know, it’s actually gone what’s moved to a different filesystem. I think .dfont files also fit in this category.

To my knowledge there’s no way to open the data on a non-HFS system- you’d have to get what you need before jumping to Linux.

I recently got a great refurbished HP workstation from geeks.com. It’s got dual Xeon processors and 4 GB of RAM and I’m having a blast. It’s been top notch. I was happy to find some notes on HP’s site on their Linux hardware support- thanks HP. I got a 23″ monitor to go with it and it’s just shockingly good.

One think I really love about KDE and this new setup is that the screen is just wide enough to squeeze two windows side by side. What makes this so easily doable is a new feature in KWin, the KDE window manager. Just grab the title bar of the window and drag to an edge of the screen. You’ll see a heavy border wrap that half of the screen and let go and boom: sized to a half screen automatically.

I spent a bit of time early this morning trying to get my scanner working. My previous instructions on getting it to work didn’t seem to be doing the trick. I played with a lot of settings in conf files all over the place before finding reference online to the Scanner component in YAST, the openSUSE configuration tool.

Boy do I feel dumb.

A couple clicks later I was up and running.

I was also pleased to learn about a KDE app, Skanlite which is much more pleasant to use than XSane (although I have nothing against what XSane can do).