Linux
gregladen | April 7, 2010I'm going to make an argument that you should buy an Apple iPad despite widespread rumors of hardware problems and despite widespread criticisms of its design as funky and flawed.
And by "you" I mean yooz guyz who are skeptics.
In order to get there, to the point of this argument, I'm going to have to define skeptical computing, and to do that, skeptical anything, and to do that, what being a skeptic is. That sounds like a long journey but I promise to be concise.
What is a skeptic? A skeptic is a person (or other sentient, symbolically thinking being) with the ability to make rational…
gregladen | April 2, 2010This might be a little over-determined for my taste, but it does look interesting, and as far as I can tell is currently maintained.
The project home page is here
gregladen | February 1, 2010The joys of markdown are many.
Markdown is a formatting “language” like HTML that you can use to specify the final appearance of text. When you use a “word processor” like Microsoft Word or Openoffice.org Writer, the text you generate is “marked up” (or “marked down” as it were) with formatting codes that determine how the text looks on a screen or when printed out. If you were to look inside a PDF file you would find commands that do this as well. And, a web page is rendered properly in your browser because of formatting codes in HTML. (If you want to see what the HTML guts of this web page…
gregladen | January 19, 2010Now that USB 3.0 is out, when will Linux get it?
Well, Linux has it. Windows does not. Mac does not.
Are you shocked? If so, you have just exposed a limitation on your own thinking. Linux supports more hardware (overall configuration and bits and piece) than any other system, by far. Linux is quicker to support hardware other than cases where proprietary drivers come out with the hardware from closed source companies, but Linux then ultimately tends to support those drivers sooner than other non-targeted OS systems do.
In fact, let me tell you just how bad your thinking was on this, if…
gregladen | January 8, 2010Ubuntu, Imma gonna let you be my operating system, but first, I gotta ask you to stop acting more like Windows with every new release. K?
... as time goes by two things remain annoying about Ubuntu. One is off and on, and varies over time, and that is the lack of certain essential automatically installed apps and drivers and such. These are things that should be installed to make the system and software work for many users, but that are not included in the distribution because of some misplaced and rather perverse sense of "freeness" of software. For many potential Linux users, this makes…
gregladen | December 25, 2009This is the fourth in a series of posts on using Ubuntu Linux specifically written for that select group of people who are smart but non-geek computer users who are using Linux because they are. Just are.
How to Install and Remove Software
There are a lot of ways to install software, and total geeks can make this really hard on themselves. You may not know this, but a software application usually needs to know how to exist on a wide range of systems and hardware configurations. Even within a given Operating System (OS), there are things the software has to do to compensate for a lot of…
gregladen | December 24, 2009Ray Ingles pointed out this position paper which I think is worth looking at ...
Traditionally, Unix/Linux/POSIX pathnames and filenames can be almost any sequence of bytes. A pathname lets you select a particular file, and may include one or more "/" characters. Each pathname component (separated by "/") is a filename; filenames cannot contain "/". Neither filenames nor pathnames can contain the ASCII NUL character (\0), because that is the terminator.
This lack of limitations is flexible, but it also creates a legion of unnecessary problems. In particular, this lack of limitations makes it…
gregladen | December 24, 2009I've assembled links to a few sites that people new to Linux should consider exploring.
About Knoppix
Knoppix is a special distro of Linux that focuses on being able to run on and manipulate all hardware. Knoppix was the first (or one of the first) "live CD's" A live CD is a cd you can boot from. If you put a Linux live CD in your computer and boot from it, you have a linux computer. This is actually not a totally dumb way to run Linux. Anyway, you can then use that Linux running on your system to fix or diagnose problems with your computer.
Klaus Knoppe, the inventor of Knoppix, has a…
gregladen | December 22, 2009This is the third in our six or seven part series on how to use Linux if you are a regular smart person who needs a functioning computer but is not a geek. Today, a few items to know about files.
All computer systems keep your data and stuff in file, and you probably know that "programs" (applications) can be files (or sets of files) and that there are configuration files, etc. There are a few things about the Linux system, regarding files, that you should probably know, or at least, have a place to look up in case you need to. This is more of a list than a coherent story, so here's the…
gregladen | December 21, 2009This is a continuation of a series of posts written for non-geeks just starting out with Linux. Today, we look at the concept of a "distro" and why it is important to you as an average user of Linux.
It would be nice if you knew the meaning of these terms ...
OS (operating system),
Distribution,
Kernel,
Window Manager,
Desktop
.... but mainly it would be nice to know about "distribution" because it really puts all the other terms and concepts together.
An Operating System is a part of your computer that does not do any of the things you need your computer to do, but without which…
gregladen | December 20, 2009This is the first of a series of 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. Some of the posts in this series may end up being useful references, so consider bookmarking those.
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…
gregladen | December 18, 2009Photographer Scott Rowed has penned an excellent essay on his experience making the switch to Linux, and he's agreed to place it here as a guest post. Please read it and pass it on to people, school districts, small island nations, and others who may benefit:
Switching to Linux
by Scott Rowed
Changing operating systems is not a task to be taken lightly. I generally follow the philosophy "if it ain't broke don't fix it." A year ago, however, the family notebook was broken, hopelessly crippled by a nasty virus or worm. I'd been regularly updating the virus software and running complete checks…
gregladen | December 16, 2009I've convinced a few people to use Linux and most of them don't hate me, but most of them were masochistic geeks who were probably going to use Linux anyway. But there are three people who are pretty important to me who are now using Linux because of me, but who otherwise would not likely have ever used Linux, and who are not masochistic geeks. The whole idea of Linux being "grandmother ready" now takes on new meaning for me. I could be in serious trouble.
So, I've started a new project.
~~~
There are now three people in my life who hold the following things in common:
1) Regular…
gregladen | November 14, 2009In the old days, you could just use the "help" menu item to figure this out (drilling down to "about") but now there is so much "helpful" crap in the dialog that opens when you do so, that it has become much less helpful.
So just open a command line and cause the contents of the files that contain your release information to be fed to standard output.
i.e., type:
cat /etc/*-release
gregladen | November 7, 2009I don't mean blog posts or emails. For blog posts I use souped up gedit, and for emails I use pico. (There was a time when I thought I'd be using emacs for both of those, but emacs suffers from a deep philosophical dysfunction.) I'm talking about longer documents that have sections with headings, bibliographies, etc. I may well make this transition with the never-ending paper I'm writing with Lizzie.
It is hard to describe the difference between what are called markup systems and, say Microsoft Word, OpenOffice.org Writer, or AbiWord to people, especially to some of the newer people who…
gregladen | November 4, 2009Huh?
...The person I was talking to responded (quite seriously) that WYSIWYG means "What You See Is What You Get", not "What They Get", that Word actually renders the document on screen based on the capabilities of the default printer on that computer, so that you should expect the same document to print differently on different computer+printer configurations.
Funny. Not long ago I printed something out that was composed on Word on Windows but was printing out no my Linux computer using Openoffice.org. It came out different (slightly longer, as I recall, than the original). Someone at the…
gregladen | November 2, 2009Google is great, and yes, I know all those tricks that make it greater. But I still want to use REGEX in some cases. So, I figured out a way to do that, in theory, all I need now is the code...
Briefly, the software I need, which I shall call googlereg for now, feeds the harvest from a google search through a regex filter and produces a list of hits.
There are three streams of data that could be fed through the regex filter: The basic output of the Google search (what you see as results on a Google search page), the actual pages found by the Google search, and the entire site at the domain…
gregladen | October 25, 2009Move Over Windows 7!
Canonical on Thursday made available the Release Candidate of its latest Linux-based operating system, Ubuntu 9.10, on the same day Microsoft launched the long-awaited Windows 7.
The upcoming Canonical release, which is code-named Karmic Koala, is the latest version of the popular flavor of the Linux OS. The development release on Thursday pushed the OS one step closer to final release, which is due on Oct. 29, according to the company's release schedule Web page.
An image of the OS is available for download on Ubuntu's Web site.
source
gregladen | October 22, 2009By now I assume you've experimented with Alpine, as a character-based email client. Well, I have another tip for you.
I have been using alpine almost exclusively for a few weeks now. I switch to Evolution now and then because it is easier to gather groups of emails and move them to storage folders, etc. in a fully GUI program, but for the most part, if you have been communicating with me via email at all over the last few weeks, you have to imagine me on this end looking at a terminal window, using a character based program, mouse-free, typing rather than clicking.
I've provided a few…
gregladen | October 21, 2009 Well, not really. But if you are looking forward to this momentous occasion, have a look at Linux in Exile's pre-release commentary. Here.
JH compares the current Windows 7 release with the Vista release in times of yore.
Tux Radar has a set of benchmarks tests comparing Linux to various versions of Windows, including the new release. It is here. In almost every respect Windows gets way higher numbers than Linux. Unfortunately, these numbers are for how many seconds it takes to do stuff.
Sorry, Windows, you're just not that good and probably never will be.