Showing headlines posted by Steven_Rosenber

Reader Alan Rochester told me about xkill, the utility that helps you ... kill things on your Linux desktop. I had gFTP die on me today and gave it a try.

I was having dinner with friends the other day and we started talking about word processing programs we'd all used in office jobs. "You know, I've been using Word for over 20 years," I said, and immediately felt older than dirt. But it was true.

[While not exactly FOSS news, this is pretty much an obituary for Microsoft Word and all word-processing apps. Best article I've seen in some time - Steve]

I've been meaning to do this for ages, and I finally installed Puppy Linux on a bootable USB drive. I went whole hog and used a 128 MB stick. Yep, that's it. I have a huge 20 MB left for storage.

I used to think that 512 MB of RAM was enough to make the average Linux system very usable. But things change, and now I'm not even happy with 768 MB running Ubuntu 8.04.

This fix, courtesy of the fine users of Arch Linux, solved my Xorg problems and cleared the way for me to upgrade from Ubuntu 8.04 LTS to Ubuntu 9.04 — and to the next version of Debian, to Slackware 13.0 ... and just about everything else Unix-like out there on my 2002-era Toshiba 1100-S101 laptop.

When I try to use Iceweasel to access a certain Firefox-compatible Web app, I get an error message and can't continue. However, there's an easy fix: Make your browser tell the world that it's Firefox, not Iceweasel.

It's usually not this easy. Ever since I did this test Debian Lenny installation with encrypted LVM, I've had trouble with NetworkManager, the package that allows for "easy" management of networking settings.

I was listening to the Ubuntu UK podcast yesterday, and they were talking about how to do encryption, either full or partial, to protect the data on your computer from being stolen and used against you should the machine itself be lost or stolen.

As an experiment, I decided to bring my Evolutionary Computing presentation on making the journey into free, open-source software — a slide show originally created in OpenOffice Impress 2.4 — into Google Docs, which happens to have a presentation app in addition to the better-known Docs and Spreadsheets components. I revised the presentation — taking some things out, adding others and providing some updates on what I'm doing — and output it as a PDF.

I'm doing all I can to stick with Ubuntu 8.04, the long-term-support release of the world's most-talked-about Linux distribution. But when a bug threatens my desktop harmony, I begin both attacking said bug and exploring OS alternatives because the most important thing about this particular installation — my main Toshiba 1100-S101 laptop — is that I keep working with little to no interruption.

I've been holding onto a bunch of audio since the SCALE 7x show in February, and it's way past time to start unleashing it. Rather than take an extra six months to start cutting the audio, I'm just going to post it here in its gory entirety. Today I have my interview with Karsten Wade, whose official title is Fedora community gardener. See ... he's a gardener because he's growing community for the Fedora Project.

It's the announcement we've all be waiting for, one that Google at one point in the past said it wouldn't make. But it did: Google will release its own PC operating system, Chrome OS, to leverage the company's Web-based Google Apps and bypass Microsoft's Windows operating system entirely on not just netbooks but every PC platform from the smallest ARM ultraportable to a full Intel-based desktop.

Earlier today, Canonical has announced the availability of a major security update for the following Ubuntu distributions: 6.06 LTS, 8.04 LTS, 8.10 and 9.04 (also applies to Kubuntu, Edubuntu and Xubuntu). The update patches no more than 15 security issues (see below for details) discovered in the Linux kernel packages by various hackers. Therefore, it is strongly recommended to update your system as soon as possible!

As much as I've railed against quickie distro reviews, I find myself trying a new version of Ubuntu in live CD form and writing just such a piece. I apologize in advance for not running Ubuntu 9.04 longer, but in this evaluation that has everything to do with the hardware I'm using, I'll explain why this is a wham-bam distro evaluation

I decided that I was tired of brown, brown, brown in Ubuntu, so I changed out the wallpaper on my Ubuntu 8.04 desktop to this blue-themed image from the fine folks at GNOME. I also changed the way my "theme" looks by going to System - Preferences - Appearance in the GNOME menu and picking something less brown, more blue.

Over the years, more than a 1,000 computers have made their way through my office and lab. They've included a $25,000 PC, Gateway's very first 486; several SPARCstations; an IBM AS/400 mini-computer; and a NeXTStation Turbo Color, which I wish I still had. Most of them only stayed long enough for me to review them for magazines like Computer Shopper, Byte, or PC Magazine. I've also owned close to a 100 computers, and some of those have stuck around.

I'm no coding guru. And I feel like having to write my own scripts to get stuff done in Unix/Linux is all too much like reinventing the wheel. Be that as it may, I hacked together these two short scripts to back up my /home files in Ubuntu 8.04 to an external USB drive.

It's been many months since I last used Puppy Linux. I bet more than a year has passed since I seriously ran Puppy, still one of the best Unix-like distributions/projects for older, underpowered computers. I decided tonight to break out the 1999 Compaq Armada 7770dmt (233 MHz Pentium II MMX processor, 144 MB RAM), which has OpenBSD 4.2 on the 3 GB hard drive (yes, I know 4.5 is out, and yes I do have the CD set, and yes, I'll probably reinstall) and two pup_save files in its 0.5 GB Linux partition.

I've been bringing more data into my main Ubuntu 8.04 LTS installation on one of my two Toshiba Satellite 1100-S101 laptops, and I continue to be satisfied with the performance of what by most accounts is the world's most popular desktop Linux distribution. No, its GNOME desktop isn't as fast as Debian's. But even though I do have Xfce (and not the full Xubuntu) installed on this Ubuntu laptop, I'm still using the brownish-themed GNOME that ships with the distro.

I've written hundreds of posts about Debian — and maybe just as many about trouble I've had with my Intel-graphics-using laptops and screen artifacts in the X Window System graphical environment for Unix/Linux operating systems. Now I've got a fresh, working Debian Lenny installation on a test machine and have solved the artifacts-in-X problem that has plagued me in Slackware and Debian (and a few other distros that escape me) for probably a year or more.