OpenSource
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, 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 | December 11, 2009If you have not yet read John Wilbanks' posts on OpenSource Science, which is a critique of the idea, than you should. Start with this one. There are two more right after that. But they are very long, so by the time you are done reading all three of those, there will probably be a fourth one!
gregladen | November 23, 2009The Free Market is a god-like powerful force that we can rely on to solve our problems, especially those of supply and demand. So if, as the WHO estimates, about 2% of the population is going to be covered by H1N1 Swine Flu vaccine then ... shall we assume that the other 98% of the world's population did something wrong and angered the Free Market?
Everyone has seen this [shortage] coming. But everyone also decided that we would have to rely on the "market" and the private sector to solve it. Well, not everyone. We have been calling for years for ten or a dozen international regional…
gregladen | November 12, 2009No, don't go, stay! The NAME of the language is go.
Which was a poor choice of name because it will be very hard to google "go." In fact, Google won't let you google "go" by default because it is one of the SLWs (stupid little words) that Google prefers to pretend does not exist (I assume, possibly wrongly). And the true irony is that go, the language, is Google's new language!
Anyway...
It is a compiled langauge designed to build things like servers and other system level stuff, and it seems to have a ver very fast compiler. The idea is to have a programming language like Cxx built…
gregladen | November 8, 2009Fight! Fight! The librarians are fighting about software!
I never realized how tough and ideological librarians were until I sat on a University committee on IT. The Librarians were always giving the administration a hard time about their knuckleheaded decisions regarding software, passwords, etc. These people are totally radical, extraordinarily well informed (they actually read the theoretical literature on passwords and software licensing) and are very very scrappy because they know that as the end of civilization approaches and the libraries are burned to the ground they are all going…
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 | October 26, 2009My blogging brother Mike Dunford steps in to save poor old Apple Corporation from me and a few others who consider building corporate ads into an operating system to be evil.
He's wrong, I'm right, but if you must go read his post and decide for yourself.
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.
gregladen | October 13, 2009October 13th was the eigth birthday of the Office Suite OpenOffice.Org. This is an OpenSource office suite that will look familiar to anyone using Microsoft Office, WordPefect Office, etc. It has a word processor (Writer) that does pretty much everything Microsoft Word does, but with a more logical layout for menus and some other cool features; a spreadsheet (Calc) that is comparable to Excel and other spreadsheets; a database system (Base) which is an SQL system that can integrate seamlessly with MySQL an other high end databases; a chart making utility; a Presentation application (Impress)…
gregladen | October 8, 2009James Hall has a post on Collective Imagination that you will want to read if you are interested in FOSS.
gregladen | September 30, 2009These two OpenSource operating versions, to become available over the next several weeks, demonstrated improvements over prior versions and compare well to each other.
I woul like to tell you that my preferred operating system, Ubuntu, came out on top .... and it did! But if you are selecting an operating system where speed is essential and there is a limited range of tasks to be performed regularly, you should compare the two more closely by looking at the review. While Ubuntu rocked, FreeBSD kicked butt in a few areas., especially pertaining to SQL related tasks.
Actually, there is…
gregladen | September 30, 2009According to Google, this is what wave (which is OpenSource) is:
A wave is equal parts conversation and document. People can communicate and work together with richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more.
A wave is shared. Any participant can reply anywhere in the message, edit the content and add participants at any point in the process. Then playback lets anyone rewind the wave to see who said what and when.
A wave is live. With live transmission as you type, participants on a wave can have faster conversations, see edits and interact with extensions in real-time.
And here's the…