Linux
gregladen | May 5, 2008Linux is not for everyone.
Linux is an operating system that is idea for people who need their computers for important tasks, require reliability, and who do not need the hand holding and eye candy that some of the other operating systems seem to focus on. In short, Linux is for people who are smarter and more serious than average.....
Offended? You must be a Mac or Windows user!
Whether or not what I say above is true is not important. I did want to show you something, though. The following are two lists provided in a recent post called "How to Mke People Love Linux." This is just a…
gregladen | April 24, 2008Linux is more than grandma-ready. Linux is by far the preferred operating system for most grandmas.
The other day graduates of my UMN degree program presentations of their work. One of the students had borrowed a laptop from the UMN unit she worked for to give an on screen presentation. She had borrowed a Windows XP computer the week before for the practice session, and everything went fine. But this time, with the same computer, same software, same presentation, etc. she could not get it working.
At the last second, I whipped out my laptop, booted it up, we threw her presentation on…
gregladen | April 10, 2008Shuttleworth is the man behind Ubuntu. He has written an essay on his blog (Here be Dragons) on playing nice with windows.
Windows is a very important platform, and our justifiable pride in Linux and the GNU stack shouldn't blind us to the importance of delivering software that is widely useful. I believe in bringing free software to people in a way that is exciting and empowering to them, and one of the key ways to do that is to show them amazing free software running on their familiar platform, whether that's Windows or the MacOS.
Read the rest here.
gregladen | April 9, 2008This is a brief overview of one school's foray into the OpenSource operating system Linux.
gregladen | April 8, 2008A must read for those in the midsts of a decision about their operating system.
All your choices have their technical merits but, you really shouldn't select an operating system based solely on it technical merits. You should instead select one that best suits your usage case. To that end I have done my best to summarize the pros and cons of each operating system from the point of view of the average end user.
Here
gregladen | March 26, 2008The following is not really a poll. It is just a picture of a poll. If you click on it, you will be swept away to the actual poll.
I voted for gnome but I like some of the other ones too. I don't like KDE.
gregladen | March 22, 2008
For the first time in ages, the sale of new PCs with Windows as a percentage of the PC market is declining sharply. The new winner is the Mac, but, while no one does a good job of tracking the still-new, pre-installed Linux desktop market, it's also clear that Linux is finally making impressive inroads into Windows' once unchallenged market share.
[source]
sporte | March 19, 2008The University of Virginia does.
They survey students every year to find out what they're up to tech-wise. Apparently 99% of their first year students own computers.
And, a large majority of those computers are laptops (3058/3113 or 98%).
And, what's on those laptops? Let's have a drum roll:
60% have Windows VISTA
26% have Mac OS X
12% have Windows XP
and, 2% or less have something else - like Linux.
This is why I really, really, want good web-based applications.
Just for the record, I don't care what operating systems students use. My concern how to help them use those computers to do…
gregladen | March 18, 2008Gnome 2.22 was just released (a few days ago). This is not the big-bang major overhaul type of release we have just seen with KDE, but it is worth nothing.
Information on Gnome can be found here.
A few highlights:
GNOME 2.22 introduces a new application, Cheese. Cheese lets you take photos and make videos using your computer's webcam. You can apply a range of different effects like mauve, noir/blanc, shagadelic, and warp. You can share these photos and videos with your friends, load them into F-Spot, or set them as your account photo.
Cool.
GNOME 2.22 introduces GVFS: a new network-…
gregladen | March 18, 2008We tell people we use Linux because it's secure. Or because it's free, because it's customizable, because it's free (the other meaning), because it has excellent community support...
But all of that is just marketing bullshit. We tell that to non-Linuxers because they wouldn't understand the real reason. And when we say those false reasons enough, we might even start to believe them ourselves.
But deep underneath, the real reason remains.
We use Linux because ...
An Amazing Mind: The REAL reason we use LInux... has it exactly right.
gregladen | March 17, 2008If you are interested in astronomy, you know that there are a lot of Planetarium applications that you can install on your computer in order to find your way around the night sky. Kstars is a well known standby for KDE (but of course it will run under Gnome as well). Search for "stars" in your package manager and you'll see quite a few other pieces of software as well.
But when you get to "Stellarium" ... stop and install that one.
Stellarium pretty much has all the stars. Well, not all of them. It has 120,000 stars (I understand there are billions and billions of them...). It has the…
gregladen | March 14, 2008Play On Linux is a script written in bash that helps you to manage Wine on your Linux box.
After using Wine we realised that it sometimes needs complex commands. PlayOnLinux helps you to soften the processn making your life even easier in the Linux world.
More, some people who care about the games they own won't come to Linux simply because they want to be able to play them again. Our script will help them to move on Linux.
The Play On Linux Site is Here
gregladen | March 14, 2008What do Linux and Santa have in common? What is the name of Murdock's Linux Distribution? Give me a three letter word for a Unix Mail Client. How about a 5 letter word for a Linux Distro for Martini Lovers?
If you know ANY of these, you can start filling out this Linux Crossword Puzzle.
The problem, of course, with crossword puzzles is that not everything in Crossword Puzzle Land jives with actual reality. There are subtleties we experience in real life that are glossed in Crossword Puzzle Land to make the clues work. Then there are things like animals you will never see (like the "ern…
gregladen | March 12, 2008The Acid Test is a webs standards test to which browsers can be subjected to see which is best. Here are some of the current results for browsers that are released (the one you are likely to use if your software is reasonably well updated):
Konqueror on Ubuntu 7.10: 62%
Epiphany on Ubuntu 8.04: 59%
Camino on a Mac and Firefox on Mac, Windows XP, or Windows Vista: 52%
The list that I'm looking at then has fourteen combinations of different browsers, versions, and operating systems ranging from 39% to 52%
Then, way down the list, we get:
INternet Exporer 5.50 on Windows XP at 14%
Then a bunch…
gregladen | March 7, 2008From Slashdot:
"After major improvements in SMP support in FreeBSD 7.0, benchmarks show it performing 15% better than the latest Linux kernels (PDF, see slides 17 to 19) on 8 CPUs under PostgreSQL and MySQL. While a couple of benchmarks are not conclusive evidence, it can be assumed that FreeBSD will once again be a serious performance contender. Some posters on LWN have noted that the level of Linux performance could be related to the Completely Fair Scheduler, which was merged into the 2.6.23 Linux kernel."
gregladen | March 3, 2008
The Asus Eee Laptops being sold by Best Buy come featured with an Intel Celeron M Processor, 512 MB of DDR2 memory, 7" widescreen display, 4GB solid state drive, built-in webcam, and the Linux operating system. Weighing in at only 2lbs, the laptop is great for day-to-day traveling. The hardware might not seem much, if you're used to the high demands of a Windows-based PC, but for Linux, 512 MB of memory and a 4GB hard drive is plenty. You won't be using the laptop for much server-based work or playing any 3D accelerated games, but that's not what the laptop is about. It's about having e-mail…
gregladen | February 24, 2008That's the sound of a statistician or scientist laughing because s/he has some really cool software and didn't pay a dime for it, because it is open source.
Since we are talking about R, I thought I'd point you to a couple of screen shots. Here it is running on a Mac, and here it is running on a Linux box.
These images are about 200 K or so in size, and they come to us courtesy of The R Project for Statistical Computing
gregladen | February 21, 2008And they are paying for it.
Google is funding work to ensure the Windows version of Adobe Systems' Photoshop and other Creative Suite software can run on Linux computers.
For the project, Google is funding programmers at CodeWeavers, a company whose open-source Wine software lets Windows software run on Linux. Wine is a compatibility layer that intercepts a program's Windows commands and converts them to instructions for the Linux kernel and its graphics subsystem.
Story here.