Showing headlines posted by Steven_Rosenber

When PackageKit in Fedora 13 said it needed to remove my 2.6.33 kernel to give me the latest 2.6.34, I paused — big time — and did a little Googling to see how I could keep more old kernels. I found that a change to /etc/yum.conf is what I needed to make.

Out of the three kernels present in my Fedora 13 installation (one 2.6.33, two 2.6.34), my quest to gain a usable display (i.e. not blurry/out of sync) had me replacing the stock, open-source ati driver with ATI's own proprietary Catalyst fglrx driver. Today I decided to roll back to the open-source, community-developed ati driver and run 2.6.33.

Linux Mint, long known as a multimedia-ready spin on Ubuntu, has gone deeper and released a Mint distro based not on Ubuntu but on Debian Testing, and my first impressions running the system from the live DVD is that this is a game-changer in the Linux world.

I've been running Fedora 13's Xfce spin on my new Lenovo G555 laptop for about a month and a half now, and I'm very much impressed with the performance, functionality and aggressive update policy even in an already aging (by Fedora standards) release.

Via Planet Fedora I saw Fedora design guru Máirín Duffy's extensive post on the redesign of Fedoraproject.org, with the general idea being to let not just fanboys but the rest of the world know what the Fedora distribution of Linux can do.

Whether or not you care about the woefully unsung gThumb image editor, the state of IPTC metadata in Linux applications, or what journalists need in an image editor, you just might want to care about my journey from discovering the problem through reporting a bug and finally getting a new package for my Fedora desktop. It's enough to make you believe in the power of free, open-source software all over again.

I haven't run the AbiWord word processor in an age. I barely ever run OpenOffice, or MS Office, or any office software outside of Google Docs. I decided to fire it up, and while I was looking for the word-wrap settings (still don't know if these exist ...) instead learned that AbiWord now offers SMART QUOTES. Now if you read entries from this blog in 2007, you could glean that I was somewhat obsessed with smart quotes in word-processing documents.

This Bruce Byfield piece from Linux Magazine looks like it's going to go negative but instead offers a reasoned argument for why Debian GNU/Linux remains relevant and useful in the Ubuntu era.

A look at the roadmap for Ubuntu One reveals the following feature planned for Maverick — Windows file sync: Addresses the needs of the many Ubuntu users who operate in a mixed platform environment of Ubuntu + Windows ... Will support syncing files between Windows desktops and your Ubuntu One personal cloud ... I wonder, what about a free, open-source Ubuntu One client that could be used in any Linux distribution?

The latest Debian Project News recently announced a code freeze in preparation for a new release by the end of 2010. It's a sign of the times that the news went mostly unreported. Which makes me wonder: What is Debian's role today?

If you use or follow Ubuntu, a great way to see what's happening somewhat behind the scenes is the Canonical Design Team site/blog.

Fedora 13 has been working out very well over the past couple of weeks. Let me bullet-point the good and bad.

I use Audacity for podcast audio capture and production on a variety of platforms, and the speed with which my new Lenovo G555 (AMD Athlon II at 2.1 GHz) mixes down to MP3. I can't remember adding the LAME package from RPMFusion, but I must have done that because I tested that feature before I needed to edit a podcast and all was working fine. What I forgot to test was the ability of Audacity in Fedora 13 to import MP3 audio,

A check over at Planet Debian revealed a lot of chatter about Debian's 17th birthday. I'd like to take this opportunity to thank everyone involved in the Debian Project, past and present, for providing a distribution that has been invaluable to me since I began using Linux in 2007. Debian consistently runs on more machines — and runs better — than just about anything else out there.

Writing about Ubuntu even a little critically brings out two types of people: those who get their fanboy bat out to beat the crap out of me and those who actually have solutions to the problems I present. Truthfully, I don't mind the fanboy factor; at least you're reading. And I did get help with my Ubuntu 8.04 to 10.04 upgrade problem.

I love the fact that I can sort of follow along as Debian Squeeze makes its way from Testing to Stable with the excellent images from the Debian Live project. For i386, I was impressed with the Alpha 1 system, and today I just burned and tried the Debian Live Alpha 2 image for i386 on the Lenovo G555 laptop.

Our daughter's Gateway Solo 1450 has been running Ubuntu 8.04 LTS for a very, very long time. Overdue for the upgrade to Ubuntu 10.04, I decided to give it a try. It didn't work.

It's not like this is breaking news or anything, but I was at EZ Lube today getting an oil change and noticed the tell-tale brown GNOME windows of the Ubuntu 8.04 LTS era.

We use HootSuite at the Los Angeles Daily News to manage a growing herd of social-networking accounts across Twitter and Facebook. But the one thing that HootSuite doesn't do is update Identi.ca, the free, open-source microblogging service powered by Status.Net that many FOSS advocates, including myself, use in addition to (or in some cases instead of) Twitter. Luckily there is a solution, which Paul Frields of the Fedora Project outlined for members of the Fedora marketing team.

I've done between 60 and 200 (who can remember?) installations of Linux and the various BSD operating systems over the past few years, and while there's plenty of discussion about how hard it is to install a Linux distribution, nobody talks much about how easy/hard/frustrating it is to install Windows. I've never done it myself — install Windows, that is. Over the years I've upgraded a few boxes from Windows 98 or Me to Windows 2000, I've put a few Service Packs into 2000 and XP, but I've never done the whole thing — put Windows on a bare drive.