Linux
gregladen | February 14, 2012The following is a subset of the LinuxQuestionsDotOrg's Members' Choice Awards:
Desktop Distribution of the Year - Ubuntu (21.83%)
Server Distribution of the Year - Debian (31.15%)
Mobile Distribution of the Year - Android (69.43%)
Database of the Year - MySQL (49.54%)
NoSQL Database of the Year - Cassandra and MongoDB (26.23% each)
Office Suite of the Year - LibreOffice (81.01%)
Browser of the Year - Firefox (56.60%)
Desktop Environment of the Year - KDE (33.01%)
Window Manager of the Year - Openbox (15.90%)
... some stuff I don't care about ...
Audio Authoring Application of the Year -…
gregladen | December 24, 2011This is a rewrite and amalgamation, into one post, of a series of earlier posts written for non-geeks just starting out with Linux. The idea is to provide the gist, a few important facts, and some fun suggestions, slowly and easily.
At some level all operating systems are the same, but in some ways that will matter to you, Linux is very different from the others. The most important difference, which causes both the really good things and the annoying things to be true, is that Linux and most of the software that you will run on Linux is OpenSource, as opposed to proprietary AND it is…
gregladen | December 11, 2011...A door had slammed shut for Thompson and Ritchie in March of 1969, when their employer, the American Telephone & Telegraph Co., withdrew from a collaborative project with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and General Electric to create an interactive time-sharing system called Multics, which stood for "Multiplexed Information and Computing Service." Time-sharing, a technique that lets multiple people use a single computer simultaneously, had been invented only a decade earlier. Multics was to combine time-sharing with other technological advances of the era, allowing users to…
gregladen | December 7, 2011The Linux Journal reader's choice awards have been announced. You'll recall that I suggested to you some time ago that you contribute your vote. Now, you can find out if you won!
The number one distro is Ubuntu, as I thought. Gnome won the best desktop, also as I thought, but now I am also thinking if this will be the last time that will happen for a while (assuming "Unity" and "Gnome" are not the same thing in a comparison like this). I had voted for "Enlightenment because it may be the best non-Gnome desktop that is not essentially Gnome with a screwdriver driven through it in a few…
gregladen | September 23, 2011I have a small laptop that I carry to the coffee shop for writing. It is a bit shaky in the hardware department, very small, and has no functioning wireless. The hard drive is encrypted. These attributes together make it the perfect laptop to carry around between, say, the gym, the coffee shop, the grocery store, Huxley's daycare, etc. I have a small number of files synced on it via a hard wired network connection at home so there is quasi-real time work to do with it, but only a subset of the larger number of files and folders I regularly use. The lack of an Internet connection means…
gregladen | August 29, 2011Linux probably has a lot more FOSS tools for editing PDF's than other platforms. ImageMagick will do basic manipulation from the command line. But for a GUI interactive kind of editing, you should look at PDFedit
sudo apt-get install pdfedit
You can do what I'm pretty sure is one of the most often required tasks: Take a page or two out of an existing PDF file and put a page or two into an existing PDF file. Like when you mark up one page of a document, and need to scan the marked-up page and stick it back in the original, replacing the pre-marked up page.
It worked great for me!
gregladen | August 25, 2011I remember one day when Richard Stallman, a nobody, was featured on a local news story. Since I was living in Cambridge, some local news stories were about work being done by Harvard or MIT researchers, and in this case, Stallman was an MIT Hacker who had just started to talk about this strange idea: Writing computer programs for free.
Here's the thing: At the time, I was looking at the idea of working as a computer programmer to make money in order to fund a career of studying evolution and teaching and stuff. Then this Stallman guy gets on the TV and says, essentially, that writing…
gregladen | August 22, 2011The deadline is approaching for you to submit your preferences for the Linux Journal Readers' Choice Awards. For purposes of discussion, here are (most of my) choices:
Best Linux Distro: I'm sticking with Ubuntu, even though I'm increasingly annoyed at several aspects of it. I chose Unbuntu because it was the distribution that allowed me to transform from someone who kept trying to make Linux work but never could to someone who uses Linux almost exclusively. The few times I've tried to use a distro other than Ubuntu, I've not had much success, and thus it remains as my choice, though I hope…
gregladen | August 22, 2011I agree with Shawn Powers that Unity has offended all that is good in this world by aggressively grabbing so much of my screen real estate much like Hitler grabbed the Rhineland.
Well, OK, S.P. is not so Godwinesque in his language, but still.... Unity = Microsoft-like marketing oriented philosophy in a FOSS world. I predict Unity will die the death of misuse except in all those commercially marketed end-user systems that force Linux on the owners at places like Best Buy.
Here's Shawn Powers on Unity:
gregladen | June 10, 2011Apropos Linux in Exile losing his Linux System to a Predatory Windows Install the other day (see Windows killed my laptop, again) I've been thinking about and beginning to do something about cleaning house. See below for my latest Windows mini-horror story (not as bad as LIE's). But first, a word about Cthulhu. Who lives in my blog cave.
I have three computers sitting here in the blog cave, two of which I use on a regular basis. The Windows computer is used at this time only for scanning slides because the software that comes with the scanner for Windows is convenient and nice and the…
gregladen | May 21, 2011Both my desktop and my laptop started working more slowly a few weeks ago. This indicated that something about the operating system (some version of Ubuntu Linux) changed in a bad way. Or, perhaps, since the slowness was mostly noticed in the web browser, the newer version of Firefox was somehow borked. It turns out that the latter is true to some extent because the developers of Firefox left Linux out in the cold with hardware acceleration (and despite the excuses for that I'm still annoyed ... had the same issues applied to, say Windows, they would not have left Windows out in the cold…
gregladen | May 7, 2011The games developer David Braben and some colleagues [developed] something called Raspberry Pi. It's a whole computer on a tiny circuit board - not much more than an ARM processor, a USB port, and an HDMI connection. They plugged a keyboard into one end, and hooked the other into a TV they had brought with them.
Yeah, yeah, help the little British school children yadayadayada. Let me know how that goes. Mean time, I WANT SOME OF THESE. I can imagine buying them six on a card off the wall at the supermarket!
One, Imma build into a belt buckle with the usb cord and video cord as the belt…
gregladen | April 17, 2011A lot of people got mad at me when I complained about the upcoming switch from Gnome to Unity. (And yes, I know Unity is based on Gnome but it is not Gnome. It is Unity). And yeah, I had some things wrong and some of the comments contraindicating my concern were valid, but many were more like "They know what they are doing, so just accept it" which is a little to Microsofty for me. And, for that matter, for the Linux Community in general, I would have thought. And now we have disconcerting reports that the new desktop which is coming out in a couple of weeks, in a late (but not final)…
gregladen | March 5, 2011The other day, Julia and I decided to install SimCity 4 Deluxe for Windows on one of our Linux boxes. Using Wine, the install went fine, but the program would not run. It would kind of start up but then die with no obvious explanation. With a bit of work I can probably find the reason and fix it, but first I went to the Wine site to see what it said there, and I found, do my disappointment, mostly Geeksnarkese blithering among the amateur IT experts who had been playing around getting the once-popular city-simulation game running with the Linux program that stands for Wine Is Not an…
gregladen | February 3, 2011The advise I'm about to give you is something I've figured out my own and seems to work, but I do not know why, if it is necessary, or if there is a better way to manage this problem. If you have a better recommendation, please add it to the comments!
Some web sites can't be safely closed. If you visit such a site and try to close the browser or tab, a dialog box pops up asking if you really want to close the page, or some such nonsense. It seems to be the case that if you click on that box, only bad things happen and the web page does not go away. The only thing you can do is crash your…
gregladen | January 22, 2011Apple likes its hardware to be closed source. Very closed:
If you want to remove the outer casing on your iPhone 4 to replace the battery or a broken screen, it won't be easy anymore. In the past, you could use a Phillip screwdriver to remove two tiny screws at the base of the phone and then simply slide off the back cover.
But Apple is replacing the outer screw with a mysterious tamper-resistant screw across its most popular product lines, ...
source
Keep an eye in iFixit for a fix to this.
A little Linux Naval Gazing:
With the recent announcement from Apple that Steve Jobs is taking a…
gregladen | January 18, 2011The Linux command 'units' may or may not be installed on your system. If not, if you use synaptic or apt, type (at the prompt)
sudo apt-get install units
or equiviliant for other distributions. Then type in the word "units" and play around. Here are a few sample outputs:
The program is a little clunky. You have to know the specific codes for each type of measurement, though 'units' will figure out what you mean sometimes. To exit, type ctrl-D. There is a way to use this utility in a script. That and other details are found in the manual.
gregladen | January 17, 2011Xfce 4.8 released after nearly two years of development. Hopefully, there are no added features or functionality! (That's a joke.)
(In fact, there is a loss of functionality for BSD users who implement the *nix desktop environment. But let's not even talk about that problem because it opens a whole 'nuther can of worms.)
Xfce is a Linux desktop enviornment like Gnome or KDE, but supposedly leaner and meaner, and thus more suitable where few bells and whistles are required, or older hardware is being used. If you are a Ubuntu user or otherwise familar with Linux, you've heard of Xubuntu…
gregladen | January 9, 2011UPDATE: The wine-based linux Kindle Cloud Reader file that I used to have is now no longer current, and I don't have the newer file. However, if you want to read Kindle material on your Linux computer, the browser-based Kindle Cloud Reader is better. Use that!
And it is time. The Kindle Reader now works in Linux, under wine (which stands for "wine is not emulator"). Details follow.
You need to install the 1.3.xx version of wine, the development release, which may involve going to the wine site and following instructions to add the development repository. Who wants the stable version of a…
gregladen | December 31, 2010When it comes to ease of use, there is no difference between a computer with Windows and a computer with Linux, assuming both systems are installed properly. That there is a meaningful difference is a myth perpetuated by Windows fanboys or individuals who have outdated experience with Linux. Also, the comparison that is often being made is unfair: One's experience with a computer purchased as Best Buy or supplied at work, with OEM Windows already installed (see below) is being compared with a self-install of Linux onto an about to be discarded computer.
When something "breaks" the two…