Linux Vortex

Blog on hold

2011-06-03T17:39:00.000+02:00

Due to lack of time, this blog is currently on hold for an undetermined time.

Unity, the next generation desktop?

2010-11-11T14:01:00.001+01:00

Why Unity?

Simply speaking, Unity is another visual representation to allow easy access to your installed programs. Compared to launching an application by using a keyboard shortcut, a menu entry, a docky/cairo/... dock icon or a graphical shortcut on the desktop, Unity uses a launchbar glued to left side of the screen plus a graphical menu where all applications are displayed as icons. Gone are the classic menus. Is this something to be afraid of? No, so technically speaking I see no reason to utter something negative about this way of representing an access method to launch applications.

So, if the change is not 'technical', maybe the 'problem' is to be found in the user/device interaction, about how users perceive input devices and how to make it easier to use those.
Currently we live in an environment where the WIMP principle reigns. It does so nearly three decades and it could be showing its age. Is the mouse as pointing device about to be replaced by fingers touching screen surfaces? This is nothing new. PDAs, mobile phones and iPad users are quite familiar with this way of interacting with their device and it works 'naturally' so to speak.
But older IT technology, typically computers - be it PC's, laptop or netbooks - still rely on a thirty year old concept. A screen, a keyboard and a mouse.
The new display interfaces will more and more include touchscreen capabilities which will render the excessive use of the mouse as a pointing device less and less important. A simple touch on the screen will replace it. The reign of the mouse is already coming to an end on laptops and netbook as the Synaptics touchpad allows more and more extra functionalities such as scrolling, 2 finger tapping, ...

So, as more and more touchscreen technology will be implemented in future displays, the need will arise to present the user an adequate interface to make the most of the new technology. Looking at what Gnome, KDE, LXDE, XFCE have to offer with regard to touchscreen interaction, one must admit that those Desktop Environments are not yet Touchscreen Ready. In comes Unity.

Unity is a new design graphical layer build from scratch showing a launcher, applications being represented by big - not to miss - icons and a top panel partly used as titlebar for running applications. I find it look more touch-inviting than click-inviting, so it seems to be more touchscreen ready than current Desktop Environments.

So, by using Unity as the default way of interacting with the user, Canonical is preparing for the next generation of computers, which will be more and more touchscreen driven as touchscreen technology will evolve in the near future.

What about the user?

Unity looks simple and intuitive, but is it something I - a domestic desktop user - could use and is it better than the Desktop Environments conceived in the previous century?

In order to answer that question, I took note of the applications that I use on a daily base today and compared those to the applications I used, say some 10 years ago.
Towards the end of the previous century, a computer user used the computer for application and data storage. On that device you had an unique application for almost every action you wanted to carry out. I had an application for sending and receiving e-mails, another for typing a letter, and another for making a spreadsheet, one for chatting, drawing, listening to music, photo editing, ... you name it, there was an application that had to be installed on your box, and all the data produced by those applications had to fit on a local data storage device.

Today, nearly half of those programs are handled by one single program: a browser. Through the browser we access our mail, we chat, tweet, type/share/store documents of all sorts, buy and listen to online music. We don't need separate applications for those anymore, nor do we need huge local storage. It can all be shared in the cloud, and Ubuntu has its own cloud, Ubuntu One.

As the modern user has/will become a cloud-bound user, Unity offers that user exactly what he needs. A simple interface and a few buttons to access the basic applications of which the browser is the most important. Less applications mean less icons/menu items so a more ergonomic way of interacting with the computer.

If Canonical fine-tunes Unity, it will have an interface that will be usable on all current and future devices, be it desktops, laptops, netbooks, tablets, pda, mobile phones and whatever will be put on the market as there will be a standard operating system cum interface to interact with those devices, while huge local data storage will be optional, as the cloud will cope with it.

I am very well aware that Unity is only a small part of the complex entity that working with computers will be, as privacy and security issues of the 'cloud' will be a factor that will prevent early adoption of cloud based computing, and one may never forget that the cloud can suddenly evaporate as Internet connections can go down, or be shut down by authorities of all kinds.
But for day to day use, Unity will prove to be a highly enjoyable interface to access cloud-based data and application.

This also implies that Canonical must provide and maintain an alternative to Unity because of the technical requirements of Unity at one side, and to prevent non-Unity minded users to jump ship and embark on other Gnome or KDE-centric distribution.

What about Ubuntu Netbook 10.10 Unity.

I read a lot of negative comments about UNE Unity. But I can hardly believe that Canonical would release an unworkable system. So, the best way to experience Unity, is to install Ubuntu 10.10 Netbook on my Samsung N210 netbook and to use it on a daily basis which I have been doing since a good week now.

How did I experience UNE 10.10 Unity?

Installation

Ubuntu Netbook 10.10 installation does not differ from the Ubuntu Gnome 10.10; the boot-up phase and the installation program is the same. You only see the difference when you log in into the desktop environment. Gone are the familiar top and bottom panels, new is the launcher glued to the left side of the screen which actually does not differ that much from the countless docks that many Linux users put on their desktop, so what is wrong with this new launcher? Let's find out.

The Launcher

Auto-hide is not available. This means that on a netbook where the useable area is limited to 1024x600px, many sites require the horizontal scrollbar to view the right side of the page. The top panel lacks the auto-hide too and this one bothers me more. Many programs have fixed sized windows calculated on a 1024x768px area, and thus you you cannot see the bottom of the window (See evolution setup screen). It takes some guessing with the tab-key to hit the right unvisible button.
The launcher auto-hide feature will be fixed with the 11.04 release, but I would to see vertical scrollbars so that I can move the window up, under to top panel, so that I can see the bottom of window as not everybody is familiar with the Alt + Left_mouse_click to drag the window up or down.

The launcher is not that customizable. You cannot move the icons up or down.

Right clicking on a icon allows only to delete it.

Adding an extra button can only while the application is running. For each running application the applications icon appears in the launcher. Right clicking on the icon shows a 'add to starter' menu option that allows you to insert it in the launcher.

Top panel

The top panel is not the same type of panel as the one we are used to in Gnome. There are no applets that you can add to it, so it is still very basic.
But the top panel is used as a dock for the applications menu bar, thus adding extra space to the application area, which is nice. But is the applications name is to long, the name is truncated or sometimes even overlaps the menu.

Not yet ready for prime time.
There are unexpected errors that occur at random times. I have encountered many little ones, but nevertheless an error is an error, and that is not something that you expect from a final release.
Here Plymouthd and Mutter go bonkers.

Another error that I can replicate is when I close PyRoom - which defaults to full-screen mode - both the top panel and the launcher are gone. I am looking at a 'wallpaper-only' screen. The only way to get panel and launcher back is to initiate a keysequence that forces a window to be drawn. I can fix the problem by pressing Alt-Ctrl-Del - which shows the shutdown window - or pressing the PrtSc key. The funny thing is, that this error only occurs when there is no other underlying window open.

Conclusion

Unity does have its fair share of problems and annoyances, while the whole concept should be more flexible in maintenance and usability, but with the advent of touchscreen devices, Unity has the edge on Gnome2/3 and KDE4 in their current layout..

Ubuntu Netbook 10.10 on the other hand is a far cry from what Ubuntu Netbook 10.04 LTS offered. It forces an incomplete desktop system upon the users and AFAIK we must not expect fixes for even the most blatant errors and usability problems before the release of 11.04.
I would certainly not advice netbook users to use the 10.10 netbook version but if possible to go for the 10.04 Netbook Edition which I like a lot and offers all that you need and see what the Netbook 11.04 will have to offer.

Ubuntu Netbook 10.10 the next generation desktop? Not yet.
Too early, too buggy, too ambitious...

Is Microsoft pushing users towards the iPad while killing the netbook market?

2010-10-26T09:24:00.005+02:00

About two months ago, I bought my first netbook, a Samsung N210 which came preloaded with Windows 7 Starter. Having not had the opportunity to work with their latest OS, I decided to give Win7S the benefit of the doubt and to try it out.
On my netbook, I have 1Gb RAM on board and approx. 990 Mb available, which is a fair amount of Ram for such a small device in my opinion.
Alas, Win7S did not work good in this environment. It was slow, came without decent software pre-installed, could not handle multiple mouse clicks when I tried to open Firefox, Skype, Pidgin, Thunderbird one after the other. The system simply came to a halt.
It is not difficult to conclude that Microsoft does not have the ability (or the intention) to produce a lightweight OS for that type of portable, lightweight hardware.

If I would not have known Linux, I would definitely not promote Microsoft based netbooks. They simply are not workable when running preloaded with Windows 7. I would suggest trying out Apples iPad.

My Samsung cost around 350€ while the iPad is available from 499€ upwards. Windows7 requires me to buy at least an Internet protection suite (Symantec Norton Antivirus 2011 PC à 40€).
Windows7 does not come with any additional business software installed either. No decent mail, calender, contacts, notes application, which you find preloaded on the iPad.
In short, Windows7 Starter is a very poorly fitted OS 'out of the box'.

With only a 100€ difference in price between the iPad and the Netbook, no wonder that the iPad is taking the netbook market by storm.

As Microsoft have no lightweight OS that can compete with the iPad and Linux I'm starting to think that Microsoft would rather have people switching to iPad instead of having netbooks pre-installed with Linux, where Microsoft know they will never be able to compete against.

I a now running Linux Mint 9 on my netbook, and can do more with it than I can do with an iPad, without any additional costs. Mint (and other desktop Linux distros) provides me with a super complete system, running without a glitch even in the 1GB Ram.
I can testify that Linux Mint 9 on my Samsung N210 runs better and faster than any 4 GB Windows 7 system on a standard laptop. It loads the applications faster, has more free and open-source applications at its disposal through the repos, amazes the Windows users when running Compiz on it and with a battery life of more than 7 hours outruns all the other PC laptops I've come across. And that for a ultra-portable device is really not bad at all.

It is a pity that Microsoft is destroying a nice piece of hardware, which a netbook is, simply because they are unable to produce a lightweight OS. I hope that more Netbook factories will pre-load the netbooks with an OEM version of Linux (ie. canonical-census - http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=ODQ5MA and https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/canonical-census ) because I would hate to see those small, versatile notebooks disappear because of Microsofts inability to provide a decent lightweight OS - Scorched Earth Policy ???.

No clouds anymore for me

2010-09-28T09:07:00.004+02:00

Social Media and Cloud have been the buzzwords the last years, so I thought it interesting to try out those new means of communication.

The first thing I did was subscribing to Facebook. I had a few 'friends' - actually they were not friends, but were labelled that way by the software - and I could read all their rants and stuff posted on their wall. What was the meaning of that? What news value is the fact that somebody 5000 km from where I live is waiting on a train, that another one felt sick and that yet another one was fired by his boss. Completely irrelevant.
I have not read one sensible article on Facebook about major issues such as Global Warming, Aid to the Third World countries but I did receive quite a lot of rubbisch stuff like links to stupid You Tube movies of guys falling of their bike doing stupid maneuvres and other comics which I regard as internet noise, that you simple ignore.
So, after a testing period of six months I unsubscribed from Facebook and I'm still glad I did it.

Another Social Media & Cloud hype I tried was Twitter. Small and simple compared to Facebook, but alas, the same stupid messages à la Facebook wall. I had to block many unknown accounts that 'wanted to follow me'. I did not invite those people, so they have no place in my life.
Moreover, what can you write down in 140 chars? And tiny URL ... I don't trust them. You could be lured into a malware ridden website without knowing.
I tried in vain to attach a file to a tweet to send it to a friend, but I didn't figure out how to do it. I simply mailed him the file.
So I removed my twitter account last weekend as I am apparantly not capable to appreciate the advantages of such a medium

Then you have the so called 'cloud based services' like Dropbox or Ubuntu One. What is the purpose of those services. My personal data can be placed somewhere on a foreign server, but what for? As a backup the amount of space is much too small. To be able to get to my data when I am not at home...?
I have a netbook, a laptop and 3 USB sticks ranging from 1Gb to 32Gb where I keep my data. The USB stick are autonomous sticks as they all have a Linux distro on them allowing me to work on whatever PC I have at my disposal. The few Gb on the external webbased storage are insuffient to hold my personal data. Another problem I have, is the fact that I encrypt my data prior to uploading it, but then, I can not share them with other people I grant read rights on certain folders. I often forget to upload an un-encrypted version LOL.

Al in all, for the moment I cannot see a big advantage in using Cloud based facilities, as the Cloud does not give me something new, that I could not do using e-mail, instant messengers and a simple blog.

Call me old-fashioned but I feel happy without the cloud based environment, but I know that one day, joining the cloud will be a must, and by then I hope the system will have matured and will be less confusing.

Linux Mint 9 on my netbook Samsung N210

2010-08-25T08:07:00.002+02:00

I finally bought a netbook. I opted for the SAMSUNG N210.

It comes pre-loaded with MS 7 Starter. I left it in place and installed it in its own partition. Once that was done (45min +) I took the Linux Mint 9 Live USB and installed it in dual-boot. As usual the installation was quickly finished - some 18 minutes - and everything was detected out of the box (wifi, webcam,bluetooth,...)
The only drawback was that the Fn-keys were not recognized,nor had I the possibility to change the brightness level of the screen.
A quick look at the Ubuntu forum and the solution was in sight.

in synaptic package manager go to settings, go to settings>repositories and chose other software tab.
Add the following repository: ppa:voria/ppa
click reload on the main package manager screen then search for samsung
check the boxes by samsung-tools AND samsung-backlight
click apply and load the packages. close package manager and reboot

in the terminal run:
sudo gedit /lib/udev/rules.d/95-keyboard-force-release.rules
in the samsung section you will see a line with *N130*|*N140* etc. add |*N150* there
also do the same for:
sudo gedit /lib/udev/rules.d/95-keymap.rules

substitute your model for N150 above if it isnt already there.

The first part loads the samsung tools and backlight utility. this will also get some of your other function keys working. you can see the mappings in system>samsung tools preferences.
The second part gets the mappings working for the fn-up and fn-down keys. it also keeps the fn-keys from going crazy by forcing them to release after being pressed.

A few minor points are the touchpad, where there is little to no height difference between the touchpag, mousebuttons and the surrounding casing.
Running Skype, I cannot get the mic to a high enough input level to record my voice. If I put the level to 100% the background noise is to loud.

But for the rest everything is working. Even resuming when opening the lid works fine and Compiz works out of the box. Beat this Windows 7 !!

It is my first netbook, and of course I still have to get used to it, but at first sight, I prefer this lightweight 1.5kg netbook, over my old laptop weighing up to 2.7kg.

No Drupal anymore, but my own custom made portal

2010-07-31T10:53:00.001+02:00

I used Drupal as my CMS on the Linux Mint Users Belgian site, but I found it too hard to bend and flex the way I wanted it to look. Other non-techie users found it a bit to difficult to write their blog entries through Drupal, so I disabled the blog facilities in Drupal, and added a standalone Wordpress driven blog system (http://blog.linuxmintusers.be/) for them. It now just needs a nicer theme but mods and admins find it much easier to post their rants that way.

In the end, I didn't use any major Drupal component any more, but still struggled to move the panes the way I liked, could not add a YouTube movie without adding another mod, ...
It made me decide to create my own portal from scratch. Some basic HTML/CSS and my static portal was a fact.

The layout is good now. Next week I will begin the migration from a static site to a PhP/MySQL driven portal. Setting up the database, creating the web-based front-ends for the contributors, test-driving on my local LAMP box here. Once all set and done, it is just a matter of uploading the whole stuff on our webhosters reserved parking lot.

Drupal was to massive for what we needed. Taking into account that the site will merely be static, with updates on a weekly or bi-weekly base, a custom written PhP/MySql project can easily take care of that.

Setting up Drupal was a nice learning experience and if ever the traffic and needs would change in a way that a full fledged CMS is needed, Drupal will once again make its appearance.

But now I write my own code and I'm able to respond quickly to demands from the Team.

And most important, the fun is back. Hacking your own code and seeing others appreciate your work is also a major stimulant for the man behind the curtains LOL

Online banking and Windows an expensive cocktail

2010-07-25T11:12:00.002+02:00

Belgian banks did not reveal to the public that since 2007 they knew that malware installed on Windows PC's managed to 'steal' up to 4000 Euro from innocent people. The malware lay dormant, until an on-line banking action was initiated. Then a fake error message was generated requiring the people to re-enter their credentials. Those credentials were then forwarded to the criminals resulting in money withdrawal.

The fact that the amount stolen was always less than 4000 Euro, meant that the Department of Justice was not automatically informed, because that amount is under the critical threshold where the bank suspect foul play. Nevertheless the banks made up for the customers loss.

It is a pitty that people are being robbed of their money, because a software manufacturer isn't capable of delivering a secure system. Of course we all know that all systems can be cracked and infected but some systems are more prone to infection than others.

Why can't banks issue a Linux based Live CD with their web-based applications so that infection is excluded. At least that would be a first step. Asking everybody to use/install Linux is not an option yet.

I did send out a mail to all people living in my vicinity, pointing them to the news articles concerning the cracking of their Windows boxes resulting in money stolen from their account, and offering them the opportunity to invite me at their home, so that I can give a demo of doing Online-banking using a Linux LiveCD. That is a start.
If they use Linux only for on-line banking, I would be more than happy. Running Linux in dual-boot is even better, but the longest journey begins with the first step.

Linux 'is' ready for the desktop

2010-07-21T09:32:00.002+02:00

I've read many postings and rants about Linux not being ready for the desktop, while my experience tends to state the opposite. Linux is – and has been for the last couple of years – ready for the desktop.

It all boils down to the type of audience you speak to.

Windows has been developed with the industry in mind. That implies that you have a group of well-trained IT guys who do the Windows laundry while you, at your desk, can work without bothering whether the latest patches are applied, the AV in up to date, Anti-malware filters are in place, …

But let's look at a typical home user.

What does a 'Joe Doe' - would like to - do with its computer?

Browse the web
Send / Receive Mail
Instant Messaging
Twitter
Skype
Rip audio to MP3
Play and organize their music collection
Transfer music between PC and MP3 player
Upload pictures/movies for a digital camera
Red eye removal and minor enchantments of pictures
Watch movies on DVD
Edit own video recordings
Burn CD/DVD
Write a few letters
Keep budget in check with a simple spreadsheet
Make small posters for festivities
Create and maintain a website
Play games
Install new software
Interact with wireless networks and bluetooth devices

Those actions seem familiar and they 'can' all be done with the pre-installed Windows.
Correction. Not if you stick to your pre-installed Windows. For most of those actions you need to buy expensive software, which for most of us is not tax deductible.

Looking at that list through Linux glasses, with the exception of some games, all can be done using a free modern state of the art Linux distribution.

So, Linux clearly has the edge on Windows here, and Windows being pre-installed anyhow, we always have a fall-back for the few things that could not be done through Linux. Should Windows not come pre-installed, Linux would struggle especially in the games area, but the simple fact that Windows comes pre-installed, plays in the hands of a dual-boot Windows/Linux solution.

What should the same Joe Doe not be doing?

Tamper with the system
Bother about the legal status of the OS
Fighting malware and other nastinesses of the Internet
Be responsible for maintaining system integrity through updates and patches
Buy new hardware every 3 years to be able to accommodate the latest imposed upgrades
Buy expensive software

When using Windows, this is just what Joe Doe has to do to keep its box running. The problems and performance loss inherent to the Windows system are a far cry from the fun and joy of having a computer they expected.
A modern Linux distribution is much simpler to maintain. Its concept prevents a user to cripple the system by disallowing him to venture in typical system folders.
There are no legal issues. Their distribution can be copied, passed on, … without problems.
There are almost no risks that viruses or malware will cripple the system.
Installing software is free and comes from a certified single set of servers.
Runs much longer on the same hardware

All in all, Linux has the edge on Windows here too.

But, Linux is hard to install. You cannot expect an average user to install Linux in dual-boot.

Linux is not harder to install than any other Operating System. But as Windows comes pre-installed and all the user must do is to activate it to get going, the only thing we – Linux users - must do, is to install it on their box in dual-boot, and give them a few howtos on how to work with it.
Isn't it something we all have done in the past many times ?

Linux is ready for the desktop if you never hear those converted users again. It works and it just keeps on working. And that is something that cannot be said from the other pre-installed operating system.

Linux Mint Users Belgium

2010-06-19T09:33:00.001+02:00

I was an admin on the Dutch Linux Mint site almost since the beginning, fall 2009, but some tension grew between the founder of the site at one side, and admins / mods on the other side. We thought then that it was best to leave the Dutch community site and to go our own way. New mods and admins were assigned for the Dutch site and we left. I wish them all the best in their new configuration.

On our side, we decided to create a Belgian Linux Mint community and so on June 12th, the Belgian Linux Mint Users website was created (http://linuxmintusers.be).

It is a brand new and small community, but as Belgium didn't have a Linux Mint community, it fills that gap neatly. The forum was the first thing that was set-up and now we are working on rolling out our Drupal based CMS.

As there are 2 communities in Belgium - Dutch and French speaking - it is possible that in the near future, next to the current Dutch site, a French site will be added.

Amarok out - Clementine In

2010-06-07T19:58:00.003+02:00

When I was running KDE3.5 on PCLinuxOS I used to play my music collection through Amarok 1.4. I liked the interface and the features were super well designed.

In comes KDE4 and Amarok is still around, only to have gone through a metamorphosis. It took me some time to get used to it and even today the interface isn't as intuitive as the old 1.4.
I didn't check the memory footprint, but I wouldn't be surprised if it was larger than the 1.4 version.

I remembered having read an article on different music players and a quick search brought me to http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/6-linux-music-players-replace-songbird/. Among the players, Clementine was discussed and the author describes it as follows:

You see, a lot of people didn’t like what Amarok turned into for KDE 4, so they found the source code for the old Amarok. They made Clementine, which is basically Amarok 1.4 ported to work with modern KDE systems. If you remember using Amarok 4 years ago and loved it, this is the music player you’re looking for.

That was what I was looking for, and PCLinuxOS being always razor sharp with regard to new packages has it in its repos.

Out went Amarok and in came Clementine, and I really like it. Although the version is still in the zeros range - 0.3 - it is already fairly complete. From their website:

Features
Search and play your local music library
Listen to internet radio from Last.fm and SomaFM
Load M3U and XSPF playlists
Edit tags on MP3 and OGG files, organise your music
Download missing album cover art from Last.fm
Cross-platform - works on Windows, Mac OS X and Linux
Native desktop notifications on Linux (libnotify) and Mac OS X (Growl)
Supports MPRIS on Linux, or remote control using the command-line

All those with a nostalgic feeling when using the new Amarok, should give Clementine a testdrive.
As it is still a relative young project, the crew could use some helping hands, as they mention:

Not done yet
There's still a lot of stuff that isn't finished yet. If you'd like to help then please do get in touch!
Automatically copy files from disk to your music library
iPod and MP3 player support
Saving playlists
Automatic tag completion

PCLinuxOS 2010.1 KDE4

2010-06-05T10:16:00.004+02:00

It's been a few weeks now that PCLinuxOS 2010.1 has been available. I have it installed on my 'old' laptop - a HP Compaq nx6325 - and this is my experience up to now.

Download
The download went smooth and after verifying the checksum a shiny new CD was burned. At that time I had Ubuntu 10.04 running on the laptop so I was in for a nice 'clash of the Titans' as PCLinuxOS was about to expell Ubuntu from /dev/sda1.

A shock!

So, in went the CD and a few seconds later, the new PCLinuxOS boot screen came up, only to drop to a black screen after a few seconds. Gosh... this is odd. The download was fine, the checksum OK, burned at the lowest possible speed. I went to my desktop, popped the CD in and there everything was OK.
Back to the laptop. Try number 2. Again the same black frozen screen. Even after waiting several minutes, nothing moved. This was really a first. Never since I hopped over to PCLinuxOS (2007 TR1) had I encountered any problems of this kind on the laptop.
I tried to boot in VESA mode, as I suspected a video driver problem. Again a black screen, but this time the system came to halt on a console where I could log in. Entering 'root' 'root' I was presented with a nice # prompt.
That was nice, and I launched drakconf. I selected the video option and I noticed that no videocard was selected at all. How can that be. This is a kind of regression that a 'radically simple' distro can do without.
I know that my laptop is fitted with a 'ATI Technologies Inc RS482 [Radeon Xpress 200M]' which is detected by ALL distros I tried so far. So what went wrong, I don't know.
Anyhow, I selected the 'ATI|RADEON X1950 and earlier' driver and exited drakconf. A '# startx' later I was back in business, and was running the LiveCD as root.
The problem has been posted on the PCLinuxOS forum.

My Broadcom 3412 wifi had already been detected and I quickly made a connection with my AP.
I also configured my printer (Samsung ML1710)

Installation

As expected, nothing fancy during the installation. /dev/sda1 was selected as root partition and /dev/sda5 as /home partition on my 100% Linux dedicated HD. Both were formatted in ext4 and a nice cup of tea later, I could restart the laptop.

During the first restart I entered my root password and created the first user, and could log into the KDE4 desktop.

First impressions

Printer and Wifi settings from the Live Cd were copied over from the LiveCD session, which is great.

PCLinuxOS has mirrors located all over the world, and in order to get the fastest one for your location, there is a small tool that pings the different repo's and comes back with a list of repos, the fastest one on top. You then have the possibility to select which one you will use as standard repo. You should run the Repository Speed Test prior to updating your system.

I then did an update running Synaptic and at the same time added VLC, libdvdcss2, win32-codecs-all, Bluefish, Gambas2, Skype.

One thing I wanted to figure out, is how Skype works with my local audio, because on Ubuntu 10.04, I couldn't get Skype to recognize my Internal Mic, mainly due to the fact that Ubuntu uses Pulseaudio. In PCLinuxOS no problems whatsoever and a test call worked out of the box.
Then I used Pinocs AddLocale to set my desktop in Dutch. At the end of this process the system is restarted.

On the desktop, you'll find a icon labeled 'GetOpenOffice' that will pull the openOffice suite from the repos localized in the language you want. This is a nice feature as not everybody needs openOffice, and the that space is then reclaimed by other niceties that you find on the LiveCD.

Twitter and Identi.ca are managed using Choqok which is installed by default as is Dropbox. A very nice touch !!

KDE4

I have never felt comfortable with KDE4, but PCLinuxOS tweaks the desktop in such a way, that KDE3 users are not at all lost. I must agree that it is one of the best KDE4 desktop I've seen so far.
The menu is the standard KDE3 menu, but after unlocking the widgets on the panel, you can change the menu to the Kickoff version if that is the one you prefer.

I added some widgets on the panel, but I couldn't find a meteo widget that worked on the panel.

Maintenance

Al user-centric settings are easily configured using the computer settings module, which is just a click away. The icon, represented by a toolset is on the panel, and by clicking it, you can tweak as much as you like from simple fonts to themes and Samba.
The PCLinuxOS Control Center is still there for more administrator like stuff. It is a proven concept and there is really no need to change it.

Rolling Release

This time I had to do a reinstall of PCLinuxOS, I will not have to do another one, as PCLinuxOS is known for its Rolling Release principle which has proven itself time and time again.

On the road

My laptop has around 880 Mb of free RAM and KDE4 is doing fine. I experience no response difference between running PCLinuxOS KDE4 and Ubuntu 10.04 on this box. Only when booting I have a feeling that Ubuntu boots a little bit faster, but that is not important to me. It is how the system works and PCLinuxOS beats Ubuntu, as I find KDE4 (KDE 4.4.4) mature, stable and more user-friendly than the current Gnome.
If you stick to KDE-centric applications (I installed Kopete and dropped Pidgin, installed KMail and dropped Thunderbird, ...) you have a homogeneous group of software tools, that simply do their job. Some even are above par (Amarok, DigiKam, K3B, ...).

Another thing that surprised me, is that the software found in the PCLinuxOS repos is more up to date than the one in the Ubuntu repos. Gambas comes with version 2.20 while on Ubuntu it is still version 2.19 and the same goes for Bluefish where PCLinuxOS presents us the latest version 2.0.0. As far as I'm concerned and the applications that I use, I am running a bleeding edge distro, but YMMV.

Community

The US forum has a nice feel, and you find many competent posters over there. Our Dutch PCLinuxOS community can rely on support from the US guys if needed.
The PCLinuxOS Magazine is a monthly masterpiece brought to you by Parnote and his team, based on inputs from the community.

64-bit

There isn't a 64-bit version yet, but the PAE kernel supports up to 64 gigabytes of memory. Just make sure you have that kernel installed and your 4 GB+ machine will use all of your extra RAM.

Final thoughts

PCLinuxOS 2010.1 KDE4 is a rock solid distro - just in my case I had a problem with the LiveCD, but not with the installed version - which offers a KDE4 DE tailored to newcomers and KDE-geeks alike.
Maybe a DVD version with KdePim installed and Kopete and openOffice would be nice, but hey, you can make such a remaster yourself (see this topic on their forum)

The wait was long, but the result is typically Texstar:

It is ready when it is ready ...

but what you get it is really a top notch distro.

Trying to do with less Google

2010-03-21T10:41:00.000+01:00

I came across the website http://www.onedaywithoutgoogle.org and it made me curious to know what impact Google had on my day to day Internet use.

I started to enumerate the Google apps that I use(d) and noticed that my vision had become a tunnel vision making Google the main name that stood out. Mail, Contact, Calendar, Search, Photo albums, Docs, ...

Could I do with less Google for my day to day stuff? I am not planning to ban Google only because it is Google. They have a very good suite of products and many of my friends use it. I do like Google Docs and Google Groups for instance.

But what Google applications could I replace by non-Google ones and not suffer a loss of functionality?

GMail for instance. I made an AOL account and migrated my Google Contacts. This works fine for me. As I can connect through IMAP - like I do for GMail - AOL/AIM has now replaced Gmail.
The chat feature of GMail has been replaced with AIM IM in Pidgin.
The Google Calendar - that I do not share - has now become the AIM Calendar
Googles Search Engine is now https://ixquick.com/

I now use http://jalbum.net/ to share my pictures instead of Picassa.

It is not much and so far it has been a fun exploration to look for Google alternatives. Moreover I actually like that kind diversity instead of the Google monoculture.

The Blog of Helios: The Last Act of Courage...

2010-02-22T08:29:00.000+01:00

The Blog of Helios: The Last Act of Courage...

Belgian Ubuntu Loco Team

2010-02-04T07:02:00.002+01:00

I've been a member of the Belgian Ubuntu Loco Team for a while, but it is only since the beginning of 2010 that I really had some time to get more involved.

This weekend I will man a stand in a computer fair with 2 other nice guys. I have no idea how many people will show up or what kind of questions they will be asking...
Next week, I will report back on the event.

New year, new goals

2010-01-01T09:31:00.000+01:00

It's been a nice 2009 in which I joined the Dutch Linux Mint community, experimented with many new - but not always better - distros and ended my professional career as I am now enjoying my first weeks as a retired Navy man.

So what would I like to do in twenty-ten? Well at first I am very happy that finally I don't have to work with MS-Windows anymore and that programming in VB.NET is also a thing of the past. That opens the road to trying out new programming languages, and I think that Python will be the one I'll learn.

Next, I will get my digital photo camera and resume where I stopped more than 35 years ago, where I developed my own B/W pictures in my own darkroom. Now of course it will all be digital meaning that Gimp and UfRaw will be two of the packages I'll dive into.

As the rest of my free-time is mostly uncolored, I'll probable find new ways to color it, but the focus will always be FOSS and GNU/Linux, for me as a working tool and during my 'promotional' demos.

Dutch LinuxMint website born

2009-10-11T11:00:00.005+02:00

One of the major hurdles for non-English speaking people is the lack of properly maintained localized websites for their distro of choice. Installing any given distro in your native language is no problem at all, but getting support, installation tips, howto's, ... is sometimes hard for the non-English user.
Most forums have a localized section for non-English users, but even finding those sub-forums is often to difficult for them.

LinuxMint is no different in that aspect. Installing the Dutch localized version is no problem, and there is a subforum for Dutch speaking users (http://forums.linuxmint.com/viewforum.php?f=67), but almost nobody enters any questions in there. This has to do with the fact that most experienced Linux users actually do speak/read/write English and never ever consider to have a look in the localized subforum for newbie questions in Dutch, which has an adverse effect, because if a question is posted in that subforum, it simply never is read, so the OP is left clueless about any possible answer to his Dutch question.

OTOH, setting up a webserver, registering a domain, managing your own site and forum requires not only technical skill, but also a financial input and a never ending dedication to keep it up and running.

Gerard Aalders aka Schorem is the man behind the Dutch Linuxmint website, which he created on October 9, 2009.

It can be access on http://linuxmint-nl.org.

Currently Schorem is the admin with me (Wamukota) and Fred Burgemeester (aka midas) acting as moderator.

We hope that the website will be a success, and that Dutch and Flemish LinuxMint users will flock together on our website so that a thriving Dutch LinuxMint community will emerge.

Open Source but no Open Mind

2009-09-07T13:38:00.003+02:00

This one is about me, but I'm sure some readers will recognize it.

I've been an Open Source user and advocate for years. Even when I was still running MS-Windows, I ran open source whenever possible.
When I started using Linux, KDE was the desktop that I discovered, as it was the default desktop for Suse. I quickly learned to appreciate KDE 3.3 and I have upgraded my KDE desktop up until release 3.5.10 running on PCLinuxOS 2009.2.

Developing a full blow desktop environment is a mammoth task. Not only must it 'work', it must also be written so that anybody can use it, preferable with as little training as possible. It must be appealing to eye, customizable, lightweight, intuitive, able to cope with all kinds of programs in different languages and obviously it must be stable. Not a task for the faint.

When KDE4 was first released, I was really curious and installed it. But it was a great deception. The so-called old KDE 3.5.10 was way better than KDE 4.0, and that pissed me off. Was every new release not meant to be even par or even better than its predecessor?

When KDE 4.1 was released it was still not what I expected and I did the unthinkable. I turned to Gnome and my laptop ran Ubuntu for quite a while.

I tried every follow-up release of KDE 4 and dumped it. It was not the KDE which I had in mind. I found it not so stable, rather complex with a lot of new concepts and programs. To make a long story short, I developed an aversion for KDE4.

When, a few weeks ago, I was helping out my neighbor with his frozen Vista, I talked him over to try Linux. I installed PCLinuxOS 2009.2 on his box in dual-boot and told him to experiment and to give me some feedback.
Last Friday, he told me that Linux was not his cup of tea. The programs have other names, the menu is different, he is missing some applications, the desktop is alien. The classic problems a new Linux user is confronted with. Then I told him that Linux is Not Windows, and that he must approach the new environment unbiased. He must be open for the changes and then it would all be much easier.

Back home, I suddenly realized that what I had told him about being unbiased and open for changes was what I lacked with regard to KDE4.
KDE4 was not bad, I was simply to stubborn to open my mind to the new environment. My creativity was mummified in such a way that I denied myself any freedom to explore new horizons.

I was the culprit in my KDE4 saga, not the developers. They did (and do) a wonderful job starting from scratch, rolling out new releases, changing the concept of the desktop by presenting us with the next evolution in desktop environments, and I didn't open my mind for it.

Consequently, I upgraded my PCLinuxOS 2009.2 KDE3.5.10 to KDE 4.3.1, put aside whatever preconceived ideas I had, read about the 'why' of KDE4, and humbly started to discover my new desktop.

The result is that I can appreciate the new desktop environment, and also accept that some programs are not yet up to standard, but they will in time.

I work now with PCLinuxOS 2009.2 KDE 4.3.1 and I must apologize to the devs and all those involved with the KDE4 project, because they deliver a good piece of software, but I was to closed minded to see the power of the open source KDE4 desktop environment.

I tried out PCLinuxOS 2009.2 KDE 4.3.1

2009-09-04T17:16:00.007+02:00

We all know the serieux that Texstar lies in his PClinuxOS releases and although there is still no native PCLinuxOS KDE 4 release for download, Texstar and the Gang provide the PCLinuxOS user a KDE4 dedicated repository.
That repo is up to date with the latest branch of KDE which at the time of this writing is KDE 4.3.1.

How to install PCLinuxOS 2009.2 KDE4.3.1 ?

As stated on the PCLinuxOS forum by Texstar:

Best to use on a separate installation/partition or in Virtualbox. MiniMe 2009 works quite well. Warning - updating to KDE 4 will remove all of your KDE 3 desktop and applications.

01. Turn off Compiz 3D desktop
02. Open Synaptic , click on Settings -> Repositories
03. If belnet.be is checked uncheck and select another repository (belnet.be hasn't been updated in almost a month)
04. Click on new repository you selected.
05. Change kde to kde4 in the sections area (main extra nonfree gnome kde -> main extra nonfree gnome kde4)
06. Press reload to get updated file listing
07. Click on Search
08. Type in task-kde4
09. Select one of the task-kde4 packages (task-kde4) will install most common components (task-kde4-minimal) will only install kdebase and kdelibs for a minimal desktop. Right click on one of the task-kde packages and mark for install then click apply. Warning this will remove all of your KDE 3 desktop and supporting applications!
10. Reboot system. (If you get dropped to console hold alt and control keys down then press delete key to reboot system.
After rebooting log in to the new kde desktop.

The KDE 4 desktop is still under development and while fairly stable many 3rd party supporting applications have not been ported to KDE 4.

About PClinuxOS KDE4.3.1

Personally I had problems with previous releases of KDE4. Not technically but I couldn't get to grips with the new philosophy behind KDE4. So I ventured into Gnome territory (PClinuxOS Gnome, Ubuntu, Mint, …) but kept a partition alive on my desktop where I installed and 'played' with the different KDE4 flavors as they came along.

As I'm not the 'graphically' inclined user, a desktop for me is really nothing more than a background. The idea of using that blank canvas for widgets was alien to me. I was even so 'brave' to blame my inability to use KDE4 on the devs.... (Shame on me...)

I expected a simple one-to-one replacement of the KDE 3.5.10 environment and was blind for the new concept and philosophy behind KDE4. So, my first experiences were not that good.
I should have given the devs some credit as they need time to get to grips with the new environment, new libraries, had to rewrite thousands of lines of code and keep up with a bunch of whining users who expected more if not all, at once. With hindsight, I must admit that it was clearly a case of PEBKAC

Now that KDE 4.3.1 was released and Texstar updated the repo, I decided to give PCLinuxOS KDE4 a new try (installed it on top of a PCLinuxOS 2009.2 KDE3), blanked my mind and for the first time I found myself liking KDE4. Yes, love must come from both parties.

I wanted to know how my favorite programs fare under KDE4, namely Amarok, Kontact, K3B, Kopete, ... I also wanted to discover the new stuff like Dolphin, Okular. Och I know, there is more to discover but what I experienced up to now is very good. I even put some widgets on my desktop LOL.

It is just 48 hours since I wiped PCLinuxOS Gnome and replaced it with PCLinuxOS KDE 4 and it is here to stay. I am rediscovering my desktop - hey doesn't that quote sounds somewhere familiar ;-) - and I start to like KDE4 more and more.

Kudos to the KDE devs and to Texstar and the Gang.

Broken HD paves the way for Ubuntu

2009-08-25T12:07:00.006+02:00

Last weekend I got a call from a friend who complained that his laptop had suddenly made a strange noise. He shut down the unit and restarted it, hoping that it was just a temporary glitch but the laptop remained dead. He asked if I could help him out.

I reported with my kit of Linux Cd's and the first thing I tried was accessing the HD from the Ubuntu 9.04 live CD. That worked and I was able to copy all his personal files to his memory stick. As the data was safely retrieved I rebooted the laptop with the Windows recovery CD and went for a complete re-installation. All went fine until the formatting of the HD was interrupted. There was clearly something wrong with it.

Booting with Ubuntu again I ran a S.M.A.R.T check on the HD and it became clear that it was indeed dead.

I couldn't leave him 'laptopless' during the weekend, so I removed the faulty HD from the laptop, left the Ubuntu Live CD in the Cd-drive and booted the system.
I showed him how to configure his Wifi and how to use the memorystick for data storage and told him he could now continue to work without the HD until he had the time to buy a new one.

Yesterday evening I installed the new HD, but instead of installing XP from the recovery CD, he wanted Ubuntu to be installed because he found it amazing that he could do everything he used to do with XP, but running live from a CD. I could only congratulate him on his decision to try out Ubuntu.

Windows 7 RC ... is this the best they have?

2009-08-03T07:04:00.013+02:00

The last MS OS I ever had was Win XP. As there is a possibility to download and install WinSeven Evaluation Copy, I thought that I might install it on my laptop, for two reasons.
First, the day I am called to rescue someones broken WinOS, the WinSeven GUI will look familiar, but more important, I wanted to know what the hype around WinSeven is all about.

So, I went along and created a Live.com account - the only way to get to the download page - and was surprised to see that the ISO was 3 Gb in size. That puts it on par with distros like Sabayon, full of software, multimedia and even games. That looked promising.

The download went smoothly, the DVD was burned - although I did not find a MD5 checksum on their site - and I booted the WinSeven install DVD.

I decided to install WinSeven 64-bit as sole OS on my laptop (HP Compaq nx6325, AMD Sempron 3500+, 1 Gb RAM, ATI xPress 200m)

The ISO is no Live CD/DVD, so you must install it to test it. Not very clever from the guys over there. I could have gone for Virtual Box, but then I am shielded from the real hardware detection and it gives you a false result.

The installation is 100% GUI driven, and if you ever installed a previous version of a Microsoft OS you'll feel at home. Just keep the famous Product Key at hand.
There is no separate root account so the first user becomes the first admin of the system.
There is no 'auto partition' option, so I suppose that most users will go for the entire disc in one big NTFS partition, unless they have a prepartioned HD.

All local hardware was correctly detected, I selected my personal wifi AP, entered the WPA code and was online.

No sooner was I logged in that a first Windows Update was thrown at me, with the usual reboot as a consequence.
I was also warned that I needed an anti-virus package, and a HTML page showed me a list of 'friendly' companies who deliver WinSeven specific AV-products. I decided to install AVG Free but the installation could only be done from AVGs website and I had no way to check if that website was genuine or fake. Gives me an uneasy feeling especially when dealing with such an intrusive software.

The only piece of hardware that was not detected was my printer - a Samsung ML-1710P - because it is located behind a printerserver. I entered the IP of the printerserver and then came the message that there are no drivers available for that type of printer !! What? a 3Gb big ISO and no printer drivers... you must be kidding. I've never had that problem with distros I tested or used. I was told to use a vendor driver disk. Yeah, but not now buddy.

So what about the software? A 3 Gb ISO, plenty of expectations, but aside from some basic programs like IE, Messenger, Live Mail, Paint, Wordpad, Mediaplayer, tools and games, there is not much on board that will allow you to do some office work. MP3s could be played, but a PDF is unknown.

It is up to the user to purchase the software or to know it's way around using Bing to look for and download an office suite, photo editing tools, a PIM, ... It has always been that way, proving once more that a Desktop Linux distro is much more user-centric than any of the MS Operating Systems.
Graphics-wise there is still only one workspace, but I was able to get Aero active and besides some overlapping windows, I didn't note anything special.

When playing around in IE8, the system popped up a message that 'Microsoft Defender' had to check my system, and while it was doing this in the background, IE8 became very slow and even typing became irritating, because the letters only appeared after a few moments. Hey, I have 1 Gb RAM onboard... so what exactly are you doing in the background there? And they call this their best OS ever ? You must be kidding.

I am not that impressed. I know it is only a RC but this is not the kind of OS that will make me drop whatever GNU/Linux distro I am using now in favor of WinSeven. No way! Just compare WinSeven RC with any RC of the popular Desktop distros and experience the difference.

Ubuntu Jaunty 64-bit is now once more humming happily on my laptop while WinSeven has been relegated to the oubliettes

Some snapshots of WinSeven on my laptop

9 Gb for a naked OS.

MP3 playing

What is wrong with my USB-stick?

From Mono to Zero UFN

2009-07-18T13:58:00.005+02:00

Mono seems to be the buzz word in the GNU/Linux community currently.

Almost everybody seems to have an opinion on it, but what is the value of those rants and opinions for an end-user running a GNU/Linux distro?

I don't know, but as there are millions of Linux users and only a handful of them write comments on Mono and as the saying goes 'the majority is always right', one could come to the conclusion that Mono isn't worth discussing at all. Ignorance is bliss.... Maybe.

But ignorance often kills and knowledge saves. So kudos for those who take on the mono problem out of the dungeon to the forefront of the community. Only, I, as an end-user, am now more confused than before.

Problem is that I do not know the reason why people are suddenly so upset that Mono is/will be included in a default install of any given distro. Mono is an old project as stated by GreyGeek:

“What's even MORE glaring is that De Icaza has been working on MONO since December of 2000, when he changed the name of his company, Helix Code, to Ximian in order to focus on developing MONO....”

So now, after more than 8 years something drastic must have changed . Is it MSfobia?

What can they do to me? Sue me? But I live in Belgium and I use a distro where the devs have included an application that is possible infringing some foreign patent laws without my knowledge.
IANAL so better save than sorry and due to the lack of correct information I prefer to purge all the mono stuff from my hard-disk until further notice.

sudo apt-get remove --purge mono-common libmono0 libgdiplus && sudo rm -rf /usr/lib/mono

Eliminate the culprit and the problem is solved... for now?!

Am I right? I don't know, but as long as the discussion is not closed I'd rather play save. I don't know who to trust anymore, and this is a very unpleasant feeling, and what about the upcoming Gnome 3? Is KDE4 completely mono free?

Seems I am a FUD victim. Why can't Mark Shuttleworth, Ian Murdoch & Deborah, Patrick Volkerding, Warren Woodford, Daniel Robbins, Gael Duval, Texstar and others come forward with a common statement so that we know where we stand, because erring in the digital and patent twilight zone is not what the community wants.

I prefer my desktop PC to my laptop

2009-07-06T12:55:00.003+02:00

For years I've only used a desktop PC as main box. Some three years ago I bought a laptop (XP pro pre-installed) because everybody around me had one, and they all seemed very pleased with it, and you could take it everywhere you went, ...

Although it has a decent display (15 inch 4:3 1024x768), the keyboard is rather small (missing the numeric pad). It is meant to be 'mobile' and I used it for this purpose only giving Linux demos and presentations. The added hardware that you have to pull along (external mouse, power adapter) makes it less mobile. Therefore, I don't use it as a mobile PC anymore (I use Ubuntu LiveCd's and Live USB to boot off the guests machine) and now it merely travels from the living room to my study (7 meters apart).

Performance wise it works fine, and after three years the battery still gives me nearly 2 hours of power, depending on the type of use of course. As I have to drag the power adapter wherever I use it, it caused the low voltage cable between the adapter and my laptop to disconnect from the adapter itself (again), which caused me to order my third power adapter in three years. Not very cost efficient.
Hardware wise you are stuck with whatever hardware is fitted in the laptop. It has a Broadcom 4312 Wifi and in the beginning it took quite a bit a googling to get the wifi running under Linux. Now, with the drivers in the kernel, that problem is solved.
It has an onboard shared memory ATI video card and we all know the problems with drivers for ATI cards, but I cannot change to an nVidia card.
On my desktop all those problems are not existing. I can put my own box together, selecting the correct hardware for a Linux environment, add extra discs, installing a better videocard if I want to, and it is generally cheaper than a laptop with the same spec without the added cost for a MS-Windows license but it lacks the mobility, which is a non-issue anymore now.
That being said, my HP Compaq nx6325 will remain my first and only laptop for as long as it works fine, but I will not replace it with another one, should it break down.

PCLinuxOS Update Notifier

2009-06-18T10:21:00.008+02:00

Although it is not installed by default, there is a automatic Update Notifier available for PCLinuxOS, called ... Update Notifier

update-notifier is a tool to automatically check for new updates. It displays an icon in the system tray with the quantity of updateable packages. It also provides options to view a list of available packages, and multiple ways to install them. The user can also easily force an update check from the desktop at any time.
The installation process will set up the notifier to automatically start at log-in for both the Gnome and KDE desktop environments. Users of other desktop environments will have to manually start the application or set up auto-start for their environment.

To install, open a console and type in the following:


$ su
# apt-get install update-notifier

Upon login, the update notifier is automatically run, so after installing no configuration must be done.
The symbol - a modified Synaptic icon - appears in your systray.

PCLinuxOS meta packages

2009-06-18T09:57:00.006+02:00

Although PCLinuxOS is a KDE-based distro - KDE 3.5.10 at the time of this writing - you can easily add other Window Managers alongside the default KDE.

The meta packages are available in the repo.

Open Synaptic, and search for task-

For Enlightenment DR17 select and install task-enlightenment
For Fluxbox select and install task-fluxbox
For Gnome select and install task-gnome (although you'd better install PCLinuxOS Gnome 2009.1 from http://linuxgator.org
For LXDE select and install task-lxde
For XFCE select and install task-xfce and task-xfce-plugins.

You can select which WM you want to run, by selecting your favorite WM under the Session menu in the KDM login screen.

Another very useful meta-package is the LAMP (Linux Apache MySQL PHP) package.
Select and install task-lamp and you end up with dependencies for running a LAMP-server, allowing easy installation of a comprehensive LAMP testing/development setup.

There is more to Ubuntu than meets the eye

2009-06-17T09:52:00.005+02:00

It took me more than 4 years to use Ubuntu as my main distro. I am running 9.04/64 on my HP Compaq nx6325 laptop since the beginning of May, and I am very happy with its performance. But that's normal isn't it? So, what more can Ubuntu offer me that will make me stick to it? The human factor.

As I live in Belgium, where only 6 million speak Dutch, the number of Linux users is rather small and LUGs are sparse. But Ubuntu has something that I did not find in other distros; their Local Community or Loco teams.

With the incredible success of Ubuntu around the world, the LoCo project is here to help groups of Ubuntu fans and enthusiasts work together in regional teams to help advocate, promote, translate, develop and otherwise improve Ubuntu.

For me the Belgian Loco Team can be found on www.ubuntu-be.org/en.

I visited their participation page, subscribed to their maillist, created my launchpad account and adhered to some of their teams.
Next to that I also joined as a support point, so that I can assist new and fellow Ubuntu users in my neighborhood.

We have a weekly IRC meeting (#ubuntu-be -- irc.freenode.net.) every Wednesday evening - except during the summer period where it is every two weeks - where we discuss events (like computer fairs) where we try to have a booth to promote Ubuntu.

Although it is just over 6 weeks since I switched to Ubuntu and joined the Belgian Loco team, I feel already completely integrated in the Loco team and I am looking forward to the next computer fairs where I will be one of the volunteers to man the booth and of course the release party of Karmic Koala.

The whole package consisting of the distro itself, the abundance of Ubuntu blogs and forums, the Loco teams makes it one of the most pleasant environments to work with if you want to give something back to the community, without being a Linux developer/packager.

Windows equivalents for Linux software

2009-05-15T09:24:00.006+02:00

There are plenty of lists on the Internet that show that for almost all of the MS-Windows based applications there is an Linux alternative.
http://wiki.linuxquestions.org/wiki/Linux_software_equivalent_to_Windows_software
is one of them.

But let's turn the tables around and see what it would cost if we take a standard GNU/Linux distribution + repositories and move over to a MS-Windows environment implementing all the software and tools which are available on that distro with MS-Windows equivalents.

I've done a little investigation and I became so depressed at the enormous amounts of money that I would've to spend that I quit looking up after ten or so programs.

I did not go for the most expensive versions, and where possible opted for the Student or Academic version and the prices come from a typical computer store in Belgium.

Here is the list

AV security // Bitdefender Internet Security 2009 (3 PC) // € 59.90

digiKam // Adobe Photoshop Elements 7.0 NL // € 99.00

gimp 2.6 // Photoshop Extended CS4 // € 209.00

GNU/Linux (Desktop) //Windows Vista Ultimate // € 527.90

GNU/Linux (Server) // Windows Server Standard 2008 32-bit/x64 5 CALS // € 1379.52

K3B // Nero 9 // € 74.90

Karbon14 // CorelDraw Graphics Suite X4 - Home & Student // € 99.00

KDevelop // Microsoft Visual Studio Pro 2008 // € 149.00

Kivio // Microsoft Visio 2007 Pro // € 749.00

KnowledgeTree // Microsoft Office SharePoint Designer 2007 UK // € 399.00

Krita // Photoshop CS4 // € 209.00

Mailserver // Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 5 CALS // € 1799.00

mySQL // Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Standard Ed. 5 CALS // € 2400.00
openOffice 3.0 // Microsoft Office Pro 2007 // € 249.00

Quanta Plus // Adobe Dreamweaver CS4 // € 269.00

Scribus // Microsoft Publisher 2007 // € 229.90 //

VirtualBox // VMWare Workstation 6.5 for Windows // € 199.90

The Linux mailserver would use Postfix, Procmail, Fetchmail, SpamBayes, Courier-imap, Mutt, SquirrelMail as explained in http://www.hypexr.org/linux_mail_server.php

This list is really just a snapshot of what is used on a daily basis but it gives you a very good indication of the enormous money transfers (and the prices above are VAT included, so the government hungry belly is fed at the same time) that go on, just to do your daily chores while a free and open-source equivalent is available.

Ubuntu Jaunty Jackalope humming on my HP Compaq nx6325

2009-05-12T12:03:00.003+02:00

Since I switched my wife over from Windows XP to Ubuntu JJ 9.04 I've also installed it on my laptop. The box is a HP Compaq nx6325 (Mobile AMD Sempron 3500+), with an ATI Radeon Xpress 200M video card on a 15" 1024x768 LCD, Broadcom Corporation NetXtreme BCM5788 Gigabit Ethernet (rev 03) and Broadcom Corporation BCM4312 802.11a/b/g (rev 01) wifi as main components.

As it is a 64-bit CPU I installed the 9.04/64-bit as the sole OS on this box. The installation was standard, wihout any problems. The BCM 4312 wifi card was recognized and the closed source drivers were fetched from the CD and installed.

I completed the installation by doing an update and adding/removing applications so as to have a customized piece of software.

All extra Fn-buttons were recognized but one. There is a special button on the keyboard to enable a 'Powerpoint' mode when running a MS-OS and it remains dead. The fingerprint sensor is recognized, but as I have no software to test it, I don't know if it is operational.

Everything simply hums along, suspend/hibernation/resume work, audio buttons change the volume level and the Fn-prtsc button takes a snapshot of the screen. For the first time I have everything working.

The 64-bit provides me with another speed boost, which I think must be between the 5 and 10% depending of the task you are performing. Kinda having a perpetual KERS system onboard ;-)

All in all a very pleasant experience.
I am really impressed how Ubuntu 9.04 performs on this box and my wifes box.

Kde4, am I missing a beat somewhere?

2009-05-07T14:26:00.004+02:00

I've been a KDE user ever since, not by choice, but simply because it was the Desktop Environment I came in contact with, as Suse was my first ever distro. I found KDE 3.2 at that time a nice DE to work with, and I found the way of customizing the desktop straightforward.

In my distro-hopping life, I used Gnome and XFCE which each had their pros and cons as far as I was concerned, but as KDE 3.x gave me all I needed I didn't have a reason to try them on a more permanent base.

When KDE 4 came along, I was expecting a steady evolution in the way KDE3 had evolved, but the devs have something completely different in mind, because KDE4 is not a KDE3-plus. It is something completely new and I am not able to make the transition yet.

Simple tasks like making your panel transparent cannot not be done anymore with a simple couple of mouse-clicks. After hours of searching and googling I found out that you have to apply an external theme like Glassified to your desktop to achieve it. Why make it so difficult. What is wrong with panel customizing in Kde 3.5.10 ? Colors, size, taskbar, everything is available in one simple window, whereas in KDE4, I am still wondering how to set the auto hiding to 4 seconds.

I like an empty desktop and when I see how some users have cluttered their desktop with a multitude of widgets I really wonder if the devs wanted to clone Gos Gadgets. Not only do those widgets take cycles and memory away from your CPU and RAM, but they have very little use. Why? As soon as you open let's say OOo Writer, they are covered by the application, and while I know for sure that when I close the door of my fridge, the light goes out, I am not sure that those widgets go to sleep. So a loss of memory for something that is not visible.

Plasma is even more a mystery to me. Having containers on the desktop – be it local or networked – make me think how GEM and MS-Windows 3.1 worked in the late 80's and beginning 90's. Someone needs to explain me what the use of those transparent containers really is, which will be covered like all the rest by the first application you use.

Have you tried to hide or move the cashew nut in the upper right corner of your desktop? You cannot (yet) and its purpose is also not to clear, as the same features are available using a classic right-mouse click on the desktop.

So for the moment KDE4 has not convinced me, but we are only talking of a DE here, and I am still waiting for all the applications to be KDE4-compliant. The only one I used up to now was Amarok2 and quite a lot of goodies (like the moodbar) are not yet available, nor do I like the layout. Try running it on a 800 x 600 resolution and you'll understand why.

Yes, it is a work in progress and YMMV , but I fear that a newcomer just leaving the familiar desktop of MS XP/Vista/7 behind will be at loss running KDE4 while Gnome 2.x will appear to be much more inviting.

So, for the moment KDE4.2.2 is still a NoGo for me, and I hope that once the migration wizard from KDE3 to KDE4 will be available it will take my KDE3 settings in my /home folder and convert everything to KDE4 equivalents.

Well, maybe I am not the type of user for such a desktop or maybe I am to old, but from what I've read in some forums KDE4 will have a major job in convincing me (and others) to stick to KDE. Only time will tell, but tempus fugit ...

Dell Vostro 1310 downgraded to Ubuntu 8.04 LTS

2009-05-07T08:27:00.004+02:00

There is an annoying bug in the latest Ubuntu kernel which causes the keyboard and touchpad to lock up at the start or during work at random times.

The bug is discussed in the ubuntu forum here http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?p=7211701#post7211701 and here http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1140989

I downgraded the 9.04 to 8.04 LTS so that the problems would be gone and am waiting for a fix to solve the problem, before I reinstall the 9.04 again.

I know there is a way to get around the problem (https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bug/341094) but I'd rather have it fixed without a newbie having to resort to changing settings in /boot/grub/menu.lst.

If you have the same problem, this is how you can circumvent it:

Add the following to the kopt setting in /boot/grub/menu.lst
i8042.reset i8042.nomux i8042.nopnp i8042.noloop
and run update-grub as root (or you can use sudo) in a terminal.

Don't uncomment the kopt line. Leave it commented.
To activate the parameter you need to add them to the section below "End Default Boot Options" towards the end of the menu.lst file. Something like this below:

title Ubuntu 9.04, kernel 2.6.28-11-generic
uuid f2a9e7a4-a86f-43e2-85fb-baa9e860992c
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.28-11-generic root=UUID=f2a9e7a4-a86f-43e2-85fb-baa9e860992c ro quiet splash i8042.reset i8042.nomux i8042.nopnp i8042.noloop
initrd /boot/initrd.img-2.6.28-11-generic
quiet

Also you can add the parameters to the kopt option (but leave it commented) so that if they are regenerated (for example if you install a kernel update) the options will go in automagically. You don't have to take this step, you can just be aware and adjust as needed.

But as my wife is happy with the 8.04, and she doesn't need the latest of everything, just a box that works, the 8.04 LTS suits her perfectly.

Dell Vostro 1310 running Ubuntu 9.04/64 bit

2009-04-28T15:23:00.007+02:00

Finally..

no, it is not what you are thinking. It has nothing to do with the OS nor the laptop, but finally I was able to have my wife run a Linux distro.
It took me a while, because she was really addicted to MS-Windows XP, but when her 4 year old Acer laptop died somewhere between Xmas and New-Year, she worked on my laptop, where I had to install XP :-( while she went looking for a new laptop. She decided on buying the Dell Vostro 1310 with Vista/XP Pro where she selected the XP Pro as OS.

The only decent Office tool provided was MS-Works and soon she realized that Works was not MS-Office. So, I installed OpenOffice and the mail client became Thunderbird and all I had to do was wait for her to experience the classic MS-Windows PITA incidents.
Lo and behold ... it took less than a month before she started complaining of the virusscanner slowing her machine down and an unknown Windows upgrade threw the wifi connection overboard (which I had to fix of course).

Just around that period a friend mailed her that she was glad that I moved her over to Linux, because finally she could work on her machine without worries and that did it. It took me three years of slowly preparing the way for my wife to switch to Linux ... and all it took was a simple mail ::)

I decided to install the latest Ubuntu 64-bit version in dual boot. After all, the Vostro has a Intel® Core™2 Duo Processor T5670 on board and even with 1 Gb RAM the 64-bit should give a slight gain according to the following article :
http://www.tuxradar.com/content/ubuntu-904-32-bit-vs-64-bit-benchmarks.

The installation went smoothly and all hardware was recognized out of the box

The Broadcom 4315 Wifi card was recognized . I had no problem setting it up.
Screen resolution was fine (1200 x 800)
The Migration tool for importing her MS-Windows 'Documents and Settings' folder did the job.
Localization to Dutch is mandatory.
As expected there were already some updates to implement.
Her laptop didn't come with Bluetooth incorporated, but Ubuntu had no problem detecting the USB Bluetooth dongle and the Microsoft Bluetooth Mouse was easily setup.
I have a networked printer and setting that one up was no problem at all. I entered the IP address and the wizard did the rest.
To make it easy for her, auto-login was activated.
The last thing I did was copying her Thunderbird mailbox over from the NTFS C-drive and that was it.

A nice touch is that Ubuntu recognizes all Fn-keys (multimedia audio-bar, brilliance, battery settings, sleep mode, ...). The funny thing is that under XP not all of them were usable LOL.

The box was ready for her to test-drive

How did my wife react?
Well, she finds the laptop faster than when she was using a 32-bit Windows XP.
Another important benefit is that the fonts are less straining for her eyes.
What she doesn't like is the Grub menu. Plain text like in DOS she argues.

~~Tonight I have still a few remaining things to do, like installing Acrobat Reader (haven't found it in the repos yet) and I hope that she will stick to Ubuntu.~~

Edit 1:
A very good website to finalise the setup of your 9.04 is:

http://www.johannes-eva.net/index.php?page=2009_04_useful_ubuntu_guide_jaunty

Edit 2 (may 3, 2009):
Fix bluetooth problems with MS bluetooth Mouse

http://blog.chinthaka.org/2008/09/getting-microsoft-bluetooth-mouse.html

Moving to 64-bit

2009-04-26T08:26:00.005+02:00

Old habits never die. That is true. And one of those was to install the 32-bit version of any given distro on my laptop, which is actually fitted with a Mobile AMD Sempron 3500+, a 64-bit processor.

Moreover, I am very pleased with the way MEPIS 8.0/32 works on my laptop, so there is really no reason that I should download, burn and install the 64-bit version of MEPIS. Until I read the following blog entry 'Ubuntu 9.04: 32-bit vs 64-bit benchmarks' on Tuxradar. Although the benchmark refers to Ubuntu's latest, the conclusions can be applied to any given distro rolling out a 64-bit version.

At this point, using a 64-bit distro is rather like enabling hyperthreading on your CPU - you get a free performance boost for your PC, and if that means you can put off upgrading it for another six months then it's an easy win. As we said earlier, it's a nice bonus. Sure, 5-10% isn't a lot, but when it's across your whole desktop and comes at no cost, why not?.

So, I downloaded the 64-bit version of MEPIS Linux 8.0, burned it and installed it. I kept the same /home partition and the same username and I was running a 64-bit OS on my laptop without any problems.

The question of win32 codecs is neatly solved by the MEPIS devs by having a w64codec in the repos. I have not encountered any problems with Flash yet.

About the performance I can be very brief. I mainly use my box for wordprocessing and impress presentations. I rarely do any photo-editing so I want notice any difference there too, but every small gain is a plus.

uname -a results in :

alain@laptop:~$ uname -a
Linux laptop 2.6.27-1-mepis64-smp #1 SMP PREEMPT Sat Mar 28 20:32:30 EDT 2009 x86_64 GNU/Linux

Today was the first step in the new era of 64-bit computing and there is no reason why I should revert to 32-bit as MEPIS 8.0/64 is behaving fine on my laptop.

Mepis 8.0 - I really enjoy it

2009-04-09T18:47:00.012+02:00

I've been using PCLinuxOS for a couple of years now and as was expected I became rather blasé about it. Being an admin on PCLinuxOS.nl and helping others when they are stuck is becoming more and more a routine job, so I needed a new challenge.

But not something that is beyond my grasp. I am neither a packager nor a developer. I use Linux as an OS, not as something that I have to (re)-assemble everyday. I like the 'fire-up and forget' type of distros.

So, before I started looking around I set out very simple requirements for a follow-up distro:

1. Must exist in a LiveCd version
2. Still use KDE 3.5.x
3. Newbie friendly community
4. Support for Broadcom wifi out of the box
5. Multilingual towards Dutch

Giving the Distrowatch list a quick glance it appears that next to PCLinuxOS, Mepis 8 is very close on the list proposing KDE 3.x. I didn't go for Mandriva, because the Debian aroma of Mepis intrigued me.

I decided to test it on my laptop (HP Compaq nx6325 - with a Broadcom 4312 wifi on board), before using it on my work box should I like it.

So I downloaded, burned and booted the LiveCD.

The Grub screen is one of the most complete I've seen and its options are well defined.
The first and default one is labeled 'Default (for most systems)'. It may seem obvious but it lacks the information that it merely boots the LiveCD in Read-Only modus. You cannot save data on external media in this modus. The second Grub entry labelled 'R/W Filesystem (only if 1 GB RAM or more)' is the one you should choose if you want to save stuff on your thumbstick.
Another nice touch are the Menu entries for the various screen refresh rates, although that I doubt that a newbie will be able to select the correct one and will just whatever the system throws at him.

I selected the default option and let the system boot. I logged in as a Demo user (what's wrong with the standard Guest user?) assuming that its password was the same as the login account.
It may seem odd, but some distros don't communicate with you while others do and Mepis did it from the first moment. The default desktop is a nice mix of blue and black, which I like.

On the desktop you find a very detailed and complete user manual. If you are new to Linux and about to install the distro, you cannot afford to overlook the Installation chapter.

Let install it. I have a complete hard-disk at my disposal so no fiddling with partitions. I was really amazed at the speed of the installation. It is a real pleasure to have an installed system in less time than it takes a shuttle to reach orbit. It took just under 10 minutes !!!

I expected so problems with the wireless as some other reviews of Mepis 8 complained about. Something to do with the manual mode being the default choice instead of the better performing Networkmanager. So, with that knowledge in mind, I went for Networkmanager and could connect to my wireless without a problem. It always pays to spent some time reading others experiences.

The whole distro was still in English, but I needed a Dutch localized one. Using Synaptic I installed all the '-nl' packages, changed the country info and a quick logout - login was all that was needed to have Mepis 8 in Dutch.

Out of the box I could play my MP3s, view .avi and .mpg videos. Nice. Adding extra packages is a breeze using Synaptic and the amount of software available is huge, so it doesn't really matter what the devs added or didn't add to the distro, just go online and install what you need.

Brooko, a Mepis admin, suggested "when using synaptic make sure the Community Repository is enabled. We have our own semi-official Community Packaging Team (separate to Warren's efforts - but sanctioned by him) - and we endeavour to keep the Debian stable release as up to date as possible by backporting the most popular apps from Testing and Unstable."

Browsing the Mepis website you can't ignore the abundance of information available, plus the enthusiastic community.
First there is the manual (there is a link on the desktop) - it's really well written and has a host of info.
Then you have the wiki.
Finally they have a nice and growing Community Website separate from the ML Forum. It's entirely Community made and everyone has the chance to contribute. It also contains our projects list.

Although I've only used it for two days, you can feel that the drive behind the distro is there.

It is worth dealing with the small problems, because once fixed with the help of their community, you end up with a lovely distro. It is now running on my work-box and I intend to have it there for quite a while.

Warren and all the devs did a fine job delivering Mepis, I really enjoy working with it.

Mike P added the following in his reaction:

The Mepis8 Live-CD has a new autorunner feature built in for windows users to assist them with a few details through 4 helpful tabs, Welcome, First Look, Installation and How to get help. Each tab gives just enough info to get you started, with the Installation giving 4 snapshots of the installation screens, a nice touch IMHO.

Linux and mac users can view the pages by inserting the CD and navigating to the info folder, then opening the index.html for English, or index_es.html for Spanish.

Thanks for this very interesting tip Mike.

SAM-Linux, PCLinuxOS' Ugly Duckling?

2009-03-21T10:34:00.005+01:00

I used to run SAM-Linux when the 2007 version was released and I liked it very much, but when I got the chance to join the PCLinuxOS.NL community, first as a moderator later as an administrator, I lost sight of the XFCE based distro. Until recently.

I was really surprised to see SAM-Linux dropping down the ranks on DistroWatch - it is positioned on position 85 today (where it was on position 69 a year ago). That startled me.
XFCE is a nice Window Manager and PCLinuxOS a solid base so it should be an super distro for all those low-resource machines, and yet it is dropping down the ranks. Maybe the guys behind SAM-Linux needed a helping hand.
I contacted Nico Reuter, the guy behind SAM-Linux and offered him my help. While I am not a packager and have never been involved in the development of a distro he accepted my offer to join their team.

Most of the dev's over there are speak and/or write German, so I had to polish my German a bit :-) but we manage fine. They write German - which I can read fair enough to follow the threads - and I respond in English.

I've taken on to me to maintain the documentation of SAM-Linux, and I am starting to learn the in' s and out' s of packaging, in the hope to provide a more substantial support in the future.

Being part of a developers team changes your view on how everything works behind the scenes and you cannot but appreciate the work of the hundreds of devs worldwide working on their favorite distro.

Running SAM2008-claw-rc1 is still a very enjoyable experience proving once more that SAM-Linux is definitely not an ugly duckling.

PCLinuxOS 2009.1 - a worthy successor

2009-03-15T08:27:00.013+01:00

It's been two years now since Texstar and his Ripper Gang released their most successful distro. The 2007 made it to the number one spot on Distrowatch, and although it is based on a rolling model and shouldn't need a new distribution release, the connotation with the number 2007 made newcomers skip that 'old' distro in favor of newer ones. So it was time to release a rejuvenated PCLinuxOS.

As with all not commercially supported distros, a small group of dedicated developers and hackers must integrate the development time into their daily domestic schedule, line up with each other, test, debug, and fix whatever sub-project their are working on. It has been a long wait, but to those guys and girls, a big thank you for the effort and dedication you put in the 2009.1.

So, that 2009.1 version. Let's talk about it.

As one might expect from PCLinuxOS, the LiveCD allows an easy HD install and within a matter of minutes, you have PCLinux2009.1 running.

Before the actual installation gets underway, all redundant videodrivers are removed from your system. So, if you have an ATI-based videocard, the NVidia-series drivers are removed and vice-versa.
The installation is straightforward. Only the partitioning and the GRUB settings are required from the user. Upon reboot, the root credentials and the first user account are created and after logging in, the 2009.1 desktop pops up. All in all a very straightforward and normal way to install a new distro on a box.

At first glance there is nothing new, besides a nice blue background and ditto theme. It is still the KDE 3.5 series (KDE 3.5.10) because the devs decided that the KDE 4.x series was just not stable enough to be released. But, you can add KDE4 as an extra option in your repo if you want to.

The standard visit to Synaptic for the latest updates (6 in my case) and some Multimedia codecs (Win32-codecs and libdvdcss2) later and the 2009.1 is ready to roll.

First let's see what we have onboard:
The Kernel listens to the name of 2.6.26.8.tex3.
OpenOffice 3, Gimp 2.6.4, Amarok 1.4.10, Firefox 3.0.7, K3B 1.0.5, Kaffeine 0.8.7, Kopete 0.12.7 are installed by default. New are Krusader and EmelFM as File Managers. Without adding anything extra you already have a very complete working platform.

Under the hood you'll notice that Grub now uses UUID:

title linux
kernel (hd0,0)/boot/vmlinuz BOOT_IMAGE=linux root=UUID=8b77bf57-62ad-4ab9-9dbb-2f0b480ae9e2 acpi=on resume=UUID=ad8a29dc-88e8-4efe-ba1d-d2269bfa3a51 splash=silent vga=788
initrd (hd0,0)/boot/initrd.img

And what about Wireless?
If your wireless card is not recognized and you have to resort to ndiswrapper for it to get it active, Drakconnect presents you a whole list of preloaded drivers such as airplus, bcmwl5, bcmwl5a,rt5200, net5211 and many more. There is a good chance that your specific driver is in that list (well mine is, having a Broadcom 4312 wifi card, i use the bcmwl5 driver).

Isn't the motto 'Radically Simple'?
So what is interesting from the point of view of a newcomer?

On the Desktop there is a folder 'Utilities' where you can find some nice tools like 'Create Live Remaster' or 'Create Live USB'. Newcomers will be interested in a 'Synaptic Repair' tool or a 'Repair Boot-record'.

The most important novelty in that list is the 'Setup Language' tool. Living in Belgium, where Dutch is the default localization, we want to have the distro in Dutch. So, we from the PCLinuxOS.NL community used to create a Dutch Remaster, but now the Setup Language Tool does that for us.

The PCLinuxOS devs made the whole localization process very simple. You start-up the tool, select your language, and let PCLinuxOS fetch the localized packages from their repo and install them. Once done, you simply log out and back in again, and that's it. You can repeat this process for as many languages you want, so that each user can have its own localization on the same box.
There are quite a lot of localized PCLinuxOS communities worldwide. You can find a list of them under to 'International' menu on http://www.pclinuxos.com/

I've been working with the 2009.1 for a few a days now and I have yet to encounter my first problem. The response is good and the default palette of presented software covers all my daily needs.

As long as it comes with KDE 3.x it will remain my primary OS, as KDE4 is not (yet) my cup of tea. Maybe then I'll switch to PCLinuxOS Gnome 2009.1 or Sam-Linux (XFCE-based) which are both based on the solid foundation of PCLinuxOS.

Only time will tell, but for now, I have all that I need with PCLinuxOS 2009.1 KDE

Get PCLinuxOS2009.1 KDE
Get PCLinuxOS 2009.1 GNOME

PCLinuxOS2007 preparing for the big jump

2009-01-26T11:47:00.004+01:00

PCLinuxOS2007 is around since May 21, 2007 and although you may think that based on the release date it is an outdated disto, it is still very well up to date, but not as up to date as most of us would like it to be.
In September 2008 a freeze was issued on the repos in order to allow the devs to prepare the next major update, PCLinuxOS2009. Unfortunately some small hiccups occured, Xmas imposed its social duties causing the repos to remain frozen for more than 3 months.

Some Test Releases were issued, but as with all test releases the focus was laid on the more advanced users in order to test and upload feedback, while the normal user was still unable to update his system. There were no major problems and security was never a issue, but some users complained on different forums.

Well, it's all about to change.

There is a big update underway for PCLinuxOS users. All forum members received a message from the PCLinuxOS.com forum admins stating :

A big update is coming to the repo's that everone should be aware of. Please read, http://www.pclinuxos.com/index.php?option=com_smf&Itemid=26&topic=52923.0

Regards,
The PCLinuxOS-Forums Team

I have never heard of a distro crew sending a general mail to all their users informing them of an important update. Must be a first :-)

The upcoming process is simple. Make sure that by the end of this week - so before Jan 31, 2009 - you have fully updated your PCLinuxOS2007 and once the admins have finished uploading the new packages and all mirrors are in sync the following steps must be taken:

The update will be done in two or three stages. You will be running a Reload-Mark All-Apply at least twice, and doing a full reboot in between. The first stage update will be HUGE. Its size will depend on what version of PCLOS you have installed and how much stuff you've added to your install.

During this stage a new repository section (gnome) will be automatically added to all your repository entries. If you don't understand this, don't worry about it; it should all work transparently. The second stage will be relatively small and consist just of updating a few of the gnome libraries and whatnot. The third stage, updating your kernel, is optional, but VERY highly recommended.

More details are provided in the message on the forum itself.

What do you get in return?
Once updated your install will be very close to what will become the 2009 Final release. Updates after this will get you the rest of the way when the time comes, proving once more that the principle of a rolling distro is a very fine principle.
Those who do not want/cannot update can simply wait until the 2009 Final is released, download the ISO and proceed from there.

So, the long wait is finally over. Users will be able to update again and other than the odd error and a possible last Test Release the PCLinuxOS2009 Final should be delivered very soon.

I would like to thank Tex and The Ripper Gang for all the time and effort they put into one of the finest distros around, and although the wait was long the result will be super if the Test Release 5 updated with the latest of the testing repo on my boxes can be a reference.

Windows in hospitals... a bad combination

2009-01-17T14:04:00.004+01:00

The Conficker- aka Downadup-worm http://vil.nai.com/vil/content/v_153464.htm is attacking Window based platforms at a terrific rate. The worm uses a security breach in the Windows Server Service and although MS issued a patch - MS08-067 - the worm still manages to bypass the patched systems.

A Belgian hospital (Imelda-hospital in Bonheiden) suffered a severy outbreak of the worm, up to the point of almost paralyzing their network, causing huge delays when doctors needed to look-up a patients medical data, and although the pure medical hardware remains untouched, the hospital is asking the emergency services to proceed to other hospitals in the vicinity.
More than 3000 hospital computers were also infected in Bulgaria and Austria and The Netherlands issue numbers of 200 to 300 infected businesses.

The Belgian Public Service for Health, Food Chain Safety and Environment just issued a warning to all Belgian Hospitals about the virus outbreak.

I really cannot understand why hospitals, who ultimately deal with human lives are allowed to use MS-Windows on their networks. Even a simple delay in looking up if a person has a allergy for a given drug can prove to be fatal.

Governments should forbid the use of MS-Windows in hospitals (and other institutions of high risks) as long as their OS is prone to cracking, vulnerable to virus and worm attacks and full of apparently badly written patches.
I don't want my personal medical file to pop up on a obscure website in Russia, China or whatever country those crackers work from.

What I really would like to hear from their IT-managers what is wrong with a LAMP based server park and a GNU/Linux desktop network for their office and patient information management and what reason they utter to defend running a very expensive, insecure environment which ultimately puts the lives of patients at risk.

Edit :
Lord Raiden from Readen's Realm informed me of the following
Virus sinks Royal Navy fleet comms http://www.itwire.com/content/view/22716/53/

Two years with PCLinuxOS as main OS

2009-01-12T19:27:00.001+01:00

My first contact with PCLinuxOS was two years ago in January when the 2007 Test Releases were being rolled out. Although I was a happy Suse, then openSUSE user, I lost the connection, the good feel I used to have with their 9.3 and 10.0 releases once the 10.1 became available.
I went looking for another distro and amid several releases I tried, a small distro managed to get my attention. It was PCLinuxOS2007 Test Release 3. No sooner did I installed it on my desktop, the 'I feel at home' feeling popped up.

Living in Belgium, I went looking for a Dutch version of PCLinuxOS, and found it on the Dutch PCLinuxOS site (http://www.pclinuxos.nl/), run by NewMikey (creator of PCLOS DFPE) and DutchWolfie.
NewMikey created the Dutch Remaster of PCLOS2007 and he did a wonderful job.

I felt so at ease with PCLinuxOS that I started to help quite a few newcomers who posted questions on our forum.

Apparently my inputs must have been noted by NewMikey and DutchWolfie, because beginning 2008 I was asked if I would like to join their team as a moderator. I gladly accepted their offer and proceeded to help them with the Dutch PCLOS documentation pages.

Fall last year, taking part in the PCLOS Localization project, we managed to get the whole localization to be translated into Dutch. It was a very dull job, took hours, but all the Dutch mods and admins lended a hand and the result is a 100% translation. Yet another example of how close the community members work together, regardless of their country of language.

Meanwhile I have joined NewMikey and DutchWolfie as administrator of PCLinuxOS.NL and I am more than ever committed to PCLinuxOS.

I have PCLinuxOS2009 TR5 running with the full updated testing repo on my testbox and I am very impressed with the TR, Tex and the Ripper Gang have created.

I am eagerly looking to the final 2009 release so that we can show the world how a good, user centric distro must look like.

Zenwalk 5.4 Beta 1 released

2008-12-25T17:06:00.003+01:00

Christmas day and a nice gift from Jean-Philippe Guillemin: The first beta of the next Zenwalk 5.4

Let's look at the announcement:

Zenwalk 5.4 will have the bigest changelog ever for Zenwalk (6 months since 5.2). Most if not all packages have been rebuilt for improvement or update, and many new features have been added, some regarding the base system.

Here's a list of the most important changes :

- Kernel 2.6.27.10 with gspca (supports many USB webcams)
- XFCE 4.6 (beta2, already very stable)
- Faster boot (tunned init scripts, with realtime I/O scheduler)
- PAM authentication has been added to the system
- Wicd is becoming the main network configuration tool
- Improved suspend/hibernate, with XFCE Power Manager
- new Netpkg with orphan dependencies and "offline operation" support
- New Zenpanel with integrated Disk Manager, Wifi and Wired Network Manager
- Gksu keyring based desktop granting system
- New artwork
- Many new applications

I installed the 5.4 B1 on my HP Compaq nx6325 laptop with the Dutch localization.

I encountered no install problem whatsoever. The ncurses installation method is still a quick and simple installation method that works well on any box and the fact that you don't have to boot into a graphical front-end to start the installation method add the to crisp and neat feeling during the installation.

Only had to install the Dutch localization for Iceweasel 305 from a snapshot repo.
The wifi card is a Broadcom 4312, and using the XP drivers I used the ndisgtk tool to add the Windows drivers and rebooted. Upon restart the wifi lights came up and I could setup my wifi networking. I prefer this way of setting up my wifi because the b43-kernel drivers tend to cause frequent drop-outs with this card (in all distros I used on this laptop so far).

Apart from those, no extra tweaks were needed.

I haven't had the time to test the new XFCE 4.5.92 features yet and using it only for a few hours is not an accurate measure but if what I experience now is the base of the next final, I think that the foundations for a decent 5.4 are laid.

Linux at industrial level

2008-10-26T11:34:00.006+01:00

Members of our Digital Photography Club paid a visit to CeWe Color an industrial digital and analog photolab situated in Mönchengladbach (Germany) http://www.cewecolor.de. CeWe Color is one of the largest European players in that market with offices in 10 different countries. They deliver 2.500.000 photoprints in 24 hours. 25% is analog, the rest is digital.

Etienne Van Eenaeme, aka Mick, took a few snapsots inside and one of them got my full attention.

Two nice KDE displays coupled to a rack with 7 CD/DVD writers per box.

I asked Etienne to enlarge the desktops for me, because I wanted to see what distro they were using. I couldn't make it out, but got another surprise ...

Vista ??? Or did they 'upgrade' from Vista to a KDE-based distro...

Thanks to Mick for the pictures. Visit his blog

PCLinuxOS 2009 – N1PTT Public Beta 1

2008-10-18T17:26:00.004+02:00

The PCLinuxOS Ripper Gang is pleased to announce the first public beta ISO release of what will ultimately become PCLinuxOS 2009.

This series of beta iso's will be released under the name of N1PTT to honor the loss of Robert Green, a long time dear friend of the PCLinuxOS community who recently succumbed to cancer. Rest in peace my friend.

This beta iso features kernel 2.6.26.6.tex2, KDE 3.5.10, Open Office 2.4.1, Firefox 3.0.3, Thunderbird 2.0.0.14, Frostwire, Ktorrent, Amarok, Flash, Java JRE, Compiz-Fusion 3D and much more.

It was decided to use kde3-5-10 as the default desktop as the the Gang could not achieve a similar functionality from kde4. Kde4 will be offered as an alternative desktop environment available from the repo once they stabilize it.

Download mirrors:
http://ftp.heanet.ie/pub/pclinuxos/live-cd/english/preview/
http://ftp.nl.freebsd.org/os/Linux/distr/texstar/pclinuxos/live-cd/english/preview/
http://ftp.sh.cvut.cz/MIRRORS/pclinuxos/live-cd/english/preview/
http://mirrors.lastdot.org:1280/pclos/live-cd/english/preview/
http://pclosusers.com/pclosusers/isos/livecd/
http://mirror.pacific.net.au/pub1/linux/texstar/pclinuxos/live-cd/english/preview/

Read the full announcement here.

I just downloaded the N1PTT Public Beta 1 and installed it on my testing laptop without any problems.

Live CD
The beta1 comes as an 651 Mb ISO. As there is a fair bit of empty space left on the CD we can assume that the Gang will fill that up by the time the 2009 goes Gold.

Theme
The theme has been altered slightly, but nothing to drastic. It is still a PCLinuxOS desktop you're dealing with. The icon set is still the same as the 2007 one

Installation
As expected the installation using the Draklive-Install is simple, and fast. Only this time, the root password and user accounts are not entered during the installation. After setting up Grub, the wizard ends and you are invited to reboot.
Upon rebooting you enter your root password and create the first user/users.

Software
There is nothing fancy about the software yet. Although KDE 3,5,10 is provided, OpenOffice is still the 2,4,1 version and Gimp is still the 2,4,5.
This leads me to think that the major software changes will appear in the next beta's once the gang have ironed out the tiny flaws.

Letś get cracking...
The testing period has begun for what promises to be another super distro.

Zenwalk 5.2 ... hello old friend

2008-10-15T14:42:00.007+02:00

While rummaging through some old CD's I stumbled upon a Zenwalk 4.2 labeled one, which reminded me that last year I really liked that distro, but due to some BIOS problem on my laptop, it didn't behave the way I liked.

Now, a year later, I was willing to give Zenwalk another try.

Since last year both my laptop and Zenwalk have evolved. I flashed my BIOS with the latests version available on the HP site and Zenwalk has reached the 5.2 milestone.

I did the test on my HP Compaq nx6325 without a wired Internet connection.

Installation
I booted the newly burned CD, selected the appropriate UK keyboard and let Zenwalk take over my whole hardisk. The installation went smoothly, root password and user account, Lilo, localization 'Nl-Be (Dutch)', UTC clock, acknowledging some copyright issues... all went smoothly in less that 15 minutes.

The whole install process is very simple and gets good marks for that.

Wireless
Once in the XFCE environment, I needed to get my Broadcom 4312 wifi card alive so I could update the system. As the box is a laptop I always simulate it having no wired Internet connection so it's always a big question whether the distro provides the needed tools out of the box, allowing me to connect to my Wifi router.

First I copied the Windows driver files (bcmwl5.inf and bcmwl5.sys) from a thumb stick in a folder. Then comes the fun part: do I need to go into a terminal and use ndiswrapper or is there a GUI driven way.

~~Much to my surprise I found a utility 'WICD' that allowed me to install the BCM4312 Windows drivers.~~ The ndisgtk utility allowed me to load the BCM4312 Windows drivers. I then rebooted, came back to the WICD-utility and could specify my Wifi settings and WEP security key . That was very easy. Again very good marks.

Documentation
Now that I could go on line, I visited the Zenwalk website and checked the documentation, because I wanted to get my system up to date.
I quickly landed on the Zenwalk Documentation page where I found the Zenwalk manual (translated in Dutch). It is a small but fairly complete manual mostly aimed towards the beginning Zenwalk user.

The Wiki OTOH is aimed towards the user that has a running basic Zenwalk system, and wants to tweak and hack so to get more out the system. It is basically an English Wiki but French, German, Italian, Polish, Hungarian and Spanish translations are available.

Updating and Package Management
The manual has a section dedicated to Package Management and everything was clearly outlined and explained. Following those guidelines my system was updated using netPkg.
Good points scored again.

Up to now I was pleasantly surprised with Zenwalk 5.2.

How complete is the distro out of the box?
Zenwalk comes with a rather interesting package of programs. Abiword, GNumeric, Gimp, Iceweasel, Icedove, Thunar, Brasero, mPlayer, Streamtuner, Pidgin, Transmission, ... . Basically you have everything on hand for word processing, spreadsheets, image manipulation, browsing, email, file management, CD/DVD burning, multimedia playing, instant messaging, torrent downloads, ... but no games ??

I added openOffice and Acrobat reader using netPkg but could not find the MS-fonts (arial, times new roman, ...). Maybe they are named differently.

Edit 2008/10/16:
There is a thread on the Zenwalk forum about installing MS-Fonts:
http://support.zenwalk.org/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=11440

All in all a good and complete set of software and knowing the size of the openOffice package, it is sensible to leave it out.

Multimedia.
Out of the box I could play MP3, Ogg and Flac, view wmv and avi, play DVD's, rip audio CD's, ... Once again a fairly complete set of tools are available for the most common multimedia uses.

Conclusion

Zenwalk 5.2 is a refreshing wind blowing in distro world.

Coming from an all KDE environment (PCLinuxOS) and experiencing XFCE for the first time, Zenwalk has not deceived me at all. I encountered no show-stoppers, was able to get everything up and running, noticed a nice and busy forum...
Of course, I still need to get the hang of XFCE and look into the wiki in order to tweak it a bit more, but it's all part of getting to know the lady.

Zenwalk 5.2 has replaced PCLinuxOS on my laptop and is there to stay. Don't worry Tex, I still run PCLinuxOS on my desktop :-)

42 Phrases a Lexophile Would Love

2008-09-16T17:33:00.001+02:00

Funny phrases

read more | digg story

5 simple reasons to choose Linux over Vista

2008-07-29T22:23:00.001+02:00

Linux enthusiasts have always touted for Linux to be one of the best operating systems ever. Their voice grew shriller with the advent of Microsoft Windows Vista in the market.

read more | digg story

8th Annual System Administrator Appreciation Day

2008-07-25T08:16:00.001+02:00

July 25th, 2008 (Last Friday Of July)9th AnnualSystem Administrator Appreciation DayIf you can read this, thank your sysadmin

read more | digg story

WebKnight : MS-IIS security add-on released under F/OSS and GPL

2008-07-25T06:50:00.005+02:00

When we speak of F/OSS or GPL we think mostly of software and/or documents developed for the GNU/Linux community. Few are the projects in the Win32 environment labeled as F/OSS and GPL.

There is a sector in the IT-world where openness, rapid intervention and adaptability to changing events is a prime concern and it is the Internet security sector.
It is very illogic that companies/users cannot protect their data from external attacks, due to an economic factor like lack of funds or a slow reaction from the software company in developing and releasing an updated version to counter the new threat.

One Win32 security product that is F/OSS and GPL is WebKnight from AQTRONIX. http://aqtronix.com/

From their website:

AQTRONIX WebKnight is an application firewall for IIS and other web servers and is released under the GNU General Public License. More particularly it is an ISAPI filter that secures your web server by blocking certain requests.

I asked the developer, Parcifal Aertssen, how he came to developing WebKnight and why he decided to release it as Open Source under the terms of the GNU General Public License. His response:

I started WebKnight because I wanted to block viruses, script kiddies, bad robots... and I wanted to prevent them from using the web server resources and filling the log files and give them a nice legal notice or special response which crashes their script kiddie tool. I also wanted to be able to see all attempts without having to read all the web server log files. I needed a tool which worked closely with IIS and could block certain requests even over SSL. One such tool was URLScan (free tool from Microsoft: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/security/cc242650.aspx).
However, I wanted to add extra functionality: I wanted to be able to block new attacks before the vendor released a patch or block attacks like SQL injection which was not possible with URLScan. So I started coding my own "URLScan". Today I can say I have an application that does what URLScan does and so much more...

I released it as open source, because I believe security should be free, when you buy an operating system or any other system it's worth nothing without really fast support for security fixes, especially for systems that are wide open to the Internet like IIS. When I started coding, only a few commercial web application firewalls were available, but their prices were too high or you could not add custom filters or add functionality to block 0-days exploits. In addition I found a few easy to fix vulnerabilities in IIS and it took Microsoft more than 6 months to come up with a patch only after I disclosed the vulnerabilities publicly on our site and NTBugTraq. This didn't feel right from a security perspective and I believe administrators should not solely rely on Microsoft for the security of their IIS servers, so I released WebKnight as Free Open Source Software.

The product itself is widely used, especially in South Korea where the 'Korea Internet Security Center – KrCERT/CC' tested it in 2006 and issued this conclusion:

We have reviewed the method of blocking the SQL injection attack, using WebKnight – the free web firewall software. We were able to confirm the excellent attack blocking effect when we applied WebKnight to the vulnerable web server that is actually providing the service. It seems to be suitable for small and medium-sized websites that cannot afford to purchase the commercial web security tool.

The latest official release of WebKnight dates from October 2007, but even the recent 'SQL Injection uses a CAST' (http://www.rtraction.com/blog/devit/sql-injection-hack-using-cast.html) – that brought the Belgian website ZDNet.be down for a moment on July 21, 2008 - is detected. That specific SQL injection is already mentioned and explained on AQTRONIX site since May 2008 (http://aqtronix.com/?PageID=98).
The fact that ZDNet.be was unable to prevent that SQL-injection attack proves Mr. Aertssens point that commercial tools often lack the quick response time.

In true F/OSS spirit Mr. Aertssens works closely with the users of his product and upon general request he is now working on a 64-bit version and the first private 64-bit beta has already been delivered.

F/OSS and GPL in the Windows world, especially in the server oriented world, is very rare, but developpers like Mr. Aertssens prove that even in a closed source world, open-source has no problem to prove its true potential.

Pardus 2008 : A testdrive

2008-06-29T14:48:00.006+02:00

What is Pardus?
A few weeks ago I was asked to testdrive Pardus - a distro of Turkish origin - once it was released. It was released on june 27 and here is my report on this distro.

The Pardus Team can be found in the National Metrology Institute Gebze - Kocaeli / Turkey (see map here and a satellite picture here).

The distro comes on a single CD and after burning the CD, I booted the distro. My box is a laptop HP Compaq nx6325 with a ATI video card, Broadcom 4312 Wifi, and runs PCLinuxOS Minime2008 as main OS. Debian 4.0 R3 is also installed on a small partition and Pardus will be installed in a 10 Gig spare partition.

Installation
Upon booting you are greeted with GRUB on a orange background and all text is in Turkish. You can change to your native or a more common language (like English) by pressing the F2 key. Unfortunately the auto-boot delay is rather short, and a newcomer will see the installation proceed in Turkish before he/she noticed the option to change from Turkish to another language. A somewhat longer delay should be considered here. I went for the Dutch language.

I did a manual partitioning and Pardus provides an easy to use partition interface. After partitioning (using my current swap and /home), the copying and installing process begins. It feels like it takes somewhat longer than I am used to in modern distros. And once it reaches the 100% mark it goes on to configure all the aplications. I wonder why both cannot be done at the same time.
I noted that all the locales are being copied to the HD, although I only chose Dutch. Could this be because the Turkish community worldwide can have eg. Turkish as main language and German/Dutch/English as second language so that in Germany/The Netherlands/UK/USA they can have both languages at their disposal. Seems logical to me.

Then a standard root password is asked for.
When entering the user data, there is a check box that you must check if you want this user to work with some Administrator rights. If you are running as a user without admin rights, you cannot 'su' to root in a console and as logging in as root from the KDM screen is also impossible, that checkbox should be checked by default when the user data for the first user is entered.

Grub did a fine job by recognizing my grub on sda1 and asked if this one must be used. By using the existing menu.lst of the PCLinuxOS and adding Pardus at the top, Grub now lists Pardus, PClinuxOS and Debian as distro entries.

All my hardware was detected, with the exception of the Wifi. I'll try to get it going once logged in.

Installation : Conclusion
In general, the installation runs fine, with really very good interactive screens but it seems a bit long (although I didn't time it). I have not discovered any major showstoppers, but you must know in advance that at least one user must have admin rights.

The Desktop
There is not much to be said about it. It is KDE and colors, themes and other visual goodies are so personnal, that I will comment on it.

Wifi
A Broadcom 4312 used to be hard to install and even some modern distros like Ubuntu could not handle it without some CLI magic on my box. Pardus simply detected the wifi and using the Network Manager I was able to set-up my wifi in a matter of seconds. Great feeling !!

Printer
Upon plugging in my printer (Samsung ML-1710P laser) it was automagically installed and configured

Software
Pardus comes with a rather complete assortment of packages. Openoffice, Amarok (plays MP3 out-of-the-box), Gimp, DigiKam, Kontact, K3B, Kaffeine (Win32 Codecs, Libdvdcss2), ...
So for multimedia all drivers are available to play your DVD's and Win32 formatted media.
Installing new software using their GUI Package Manager running on top of PiSi is a breeze.

Specific Pardus Software
Coming from PCLinuxOS I found a number of 'strange' software names like TASMA (Control Centre), KAPTAN (Welcome Screen), PiSi (Packages Installed Successfully, as Intended) . The website gives you a nice explanation on those projects :http://www.pardus.org.tr/eng/projects/index.html.

TASMA, the control center, is a nice looking frontend, which resembles the PCLinuxOS Control Center and is the Central Point of Contact for all configuration stuff in Pardus. It makes it very easy for a newcomer to find the right tool for any type of configuration.

History Manager
A nice tool is the history manager. It allows you to roll back to a previous state if after an update something isn't working as expected.

What is still missing?
Well, not much. It isn't a LiveCD. Being so user-friendly a LiveCd would be a nice add-on. I also noted that some programs, like Scribus are missing from the repos, but this is normal as it is a rather young distro and it takes time and determination from the devs to get all that stuff in the repos.

Overall conclusion
Pardus surprised me. Today it is listed as nr 49 on Distrowatch, but it deserves a place near or in the top-ten. It is a distro that has everything to become a major newcomer-friendly distro.
It is a distro that I will use/propose (along with PCLinuxOS :-) ) when converting Windows Users to Linux, and the Dutch version is also very good (kudos to the Dutch translation team).

We must warn the new Linux user about the importance of recovery partitions and CDs on a preinstalled MS-Windows box

2008-06-15T09:54:00.005+02:00

99.9% of the laptops/desktops bought today have XP or Vista pre-installed. They almost all lack the Windows OEM CDs. It is up to the user to burn a copy of the pre-installed system upon first boot, on one or more DVDs, and to store them in a safe place. Some systems have a (invisible) recovery partition at the end of the HD that can only be accessed using a boot hot-key allowing the unfortunate user to recover his crashed Windows.

As we all know, many users do not burn the recovery DVDs, be it from ignorance or the 'I'll do it later' attitude. The large majority of them simply are not aware of the consequences of not having a copy of the Windows OEM system if something goes wrong. They are surprised when they are asked for the recovery DVDs by the computer shop technician . 'What are you talking about. There were no CD's in the box when I bought the laptop'. The technician has only one option left then, and it is to reorder – at the expense of the unfortunate user – an extra set of Windows OEM CD's.

Some users know about the recovery partition and how to access it using the boot hot key, but are unaware that installing Linux on that box will overwrite the MBR and that from then on they cannot access the recovery partition anymore.

It is clear that most install wizards do not inform the new Linux user about those fact.
The devs of the newcomer friendly distros (Ubuntu, Mint, PCLinuxOS, ...) should add a warning in the setup wizard when the tool discovers a MS-Windows partition as first bootable partition or a hidden NTFS partition at the end of the HD.

That warning must at least inform the user of the need to have the MS-Windows recovery CD's or DVD's as well of the modification of the MBR which implies that the access to that recovery partition will become impossible.

82 year old runs PCLinuxOS

2008-06-08T10:25:00.009+02:00

I told you already of the French Remaster I made for my 82-year old neighbor - read it here - . Well, I knew it was only a matter time before his Win2K would run into trouble.

Two days ago, he informed me that he couldn't Skype anymore. The audio was gone, since his 13 year old grandson downloaded some game or some other piece of software last week-end. He asked me to come over and if possible fix it for him because other stuff didn't work as before.
I went over, with the PCLOS French Remaster under my arm and at first tried to revive the audio. Alas, nothing seemed to work. It is also worth mentioning that his box is an 8 year old IBM (P4-512 Mb) and finding the right audio drivers for this box seemed more an adventure than a search - locate - download - install I was expecting.

As I suspected malware or virus being involved, I asked him if he still wanted to give Linux a try and he said 'Why not', because he realized that once again I would have to reinstall his Win2K for the n-th time, and frankly I think that he was a little embarrassed about it.
So in went the CD. and I let the LiveCd boot. No joy... a video problem. Then I tried with the NoFB option and up came the video and I installed it without a problem in dual boot.

Every piece of hardware was detected without a problem. I apt-getted Skype and we were skyping in no time, mic and audio working. Then I installed his HP Laserjet 6P - which gave us quite a lot of problems under Win2K oddly enough - and we were printing in no time.
In all the years he had his PC, he never succeeded in playing a DVD movie. I apt-getted the libdvdccs2 and for the first time he watched a video on his IBM.
Then I remarked that his DVD player was a CD-Writer, which he didn't know. I popped over to my house, fetched some empty CD-R's and once back I burned all pictures from the Win2K My Pictures folder on a CD to show him his CD/R worked. Talking about those pictures, he said to me that he always had problems to download pictures from his tiny digital camera to the PC. The software that he had to use under Win2K was so complex that he didn't understand how to do it.
I showed him the magic of Linux and HAL. I plugged in the USB cable from his camera then switched it on and HAL asked me what I wanted to do. I selected 'Ouvrir dans une nouvelle fenêtre" (Open in a new Window) and we browsed through the folders to where the pictures were saved. It was only a simply Ctrl-A - Ctrl-C - Ctrl-V to have them transferred to the pictures folder on his Home folder.
Finally I tweaked some minor stuff like setting the default file format of OpenOffice to Word and Excel, auto-login and so on.

He was very happy with the way PCLinuxOS had expanded the possibilities of his IBM, like the viewing of DVD movies and the burning of CD-R/W.
And mostly that he didn't find it difficult at all to get used to KDE interface. He was a bit apprehensive at first, but the end result was very much to his liking.

Acer bets big on Linux

2008-06-04T21:02:00.002+02:00

Vendor shifts towards open source 'because of Microsoft'

Acer has stated that it will be pushing Linux aggressively on its laptops and netbooks.
The company is already heavily promoting Linux for its low cost ultra-portable netbook range out later this year, but senior staff have said that Acer will also push Linux on its laptops.

We have shifted towards Linux because of Microsoft
Gianpiero Morbello Acer

Was leaving MS and opting for Linux a good move?

2008-06-03T18:42:00.007+02:00

Three years already ...
It's been three years now since I started using Linux, which I think is a reasonable time to look back and evaluate that move.

Having had some CP/M and OS/2 boxes over the years, it is since Win95 that I only had Microsoft (Win95, 2K, XP) on my desktop at home.

I've always felt that Microsoft does not care very much for the home user, as their systems are clearly marketed at businesses, where a team of well-trained IT personnel manage the ‘behind the curtain’ stuff such applying patches, running a corporate security policy (AV, firewall, network protocols,...) all this by spending a good amount of money on decent and need to have tools, applications and support.

At home, MS is not for the faint of heart who are trying to set the system up, looking for compatible drivers all over the net. It is so difficult that it comes pre-installed on almost all PCs and Laptops you buy. Even then Joe Doe must try to get the system safe and stable by applying patches and paying a lot of money for software that will allow him to run a personal firewall, hunt down spyware, eliminate viruses (he could eventually opt for free – adware driven versions) or if he wants to write a letter once a week, fill-in a spreadsheet once a month and a use database once a year he'll need the expensive MS-Office (where he rarely uses its full potential), and to do some red-eye removal on his lovely photos he goes for the very expensive PhotoShop because his neighbor uses it, ... just to name a few.

Was I that kind of user?
Yes I was. I bought my hardware with Windows XP in mind, didn’t know anything about open-source (I thought it was the same as freeware …) , bought some of my programs, got some from my friends and cracked some other. Did I feel guilty? No, not at all. I didn’t know better and everybody I knew at that time had more or less a similar semi legal, semi illegal box.

Why did I decide to go for Linux?
Very simple. One of my work colleagues said he was doing an evening class to learn Linux. I said, 'Och you mean that OS that is used for servers only'. He told me that he was planning to run it as a desktop OS. I was intrigued and subscribed for the next Linux class. They were giving lessons using Suse 9.3 at that time, and I must say that I liked it. I found it exciting to learn something new that wasn’t MS-driven. But, I had quite a lot of problems with my hardware in my desktop PC at home. It had a Matrox Parhelia videocard, a Hercules sound card and a Lexmark X215 All-In-One printer which were no-go or partial-go. So, I decided to buy a new video card (NVidia), a new printer (Samsung Laser) and a classic SB-audio and sold my Matrox and the Hercules second-hand and kept the All-In-One for my wife (she still uses XP on her laptop).
Once that was done I really enjoyed working with the Suse 9.3 and after not more than 3 weeks, Linux became my primary OS. After the typical distro-chasing-hopping-trying period, I came along PCLinuxOS 0.93 and that was the distro that stood out from the rest.
Meanwhile I had sold my desktop and bought a HP Compaq nx6325 laptop that nowadays runs PCLinuxOS 2008 MiniMe as sole OS.

Does PCLinuxOS (or Linux in general) live up to my daily expectations?
Yes. I can do all the classic stuff like browsing, mailing, office tasks, photo editing, music listening and so on – things I did with MS-Windows - with a FOSS equivalent on a stable platform, in a legal way, at a fraction of the cost with more pleasure than ever before.

Do I miss some MS-Windows application?
Not really. As a home user my requirements are much lower than what I would need on the job and there isn’t any ‘home-application’ that I miss.

I honestly believe that there is no reason whatsoever to have MS-Windows XP running in a home environment. The money you put aside by having a very low-cost Linux OS on a very low-cost PC (even several years old) can be used to fill-up the gaps where Linux is still doing some catching up - functioning as a decent gaming platform let’s say – like buying a state of the art game console for example.

And Photoshop , don’t I miss it?
No, because I do not need software developed for the professional user. Gimp is largely sufficient for me whereas RawTherapee allows me to work on my RAW pictures and Digikam is more than a decent Photo Gallery Manager compared to the Win32 Photoshop Elements.

What is the neatest feature of Linux?
I find that being able to create my own LiveCD’s is super. I use it when I have to give a presentation. I create my presentation with OpenOffice Impress, start PCLinuxOs Minime2008, add just the tools, codecs and software I need, along with my presentations and burn my own distro. Everywhere I come people are amazed that I can simply boot my OS on their box and run everything without touching their hard disk.

An unexpected positive note
Linux, but more precisely the Linux community opened my eyes on the capitalistic economic model we grew up with. We are so indoctrinated that we take it for granted that everything has a price, and that the more you pay for an item, the better it must be. Talking to and reading articles by FOSS adepts learned me that there is another world where different values are honored and where mutual understanding thrives. It also learned me the true meaning of Freedom of Choice and freedom in general.

So, was leaving MS behind good or bad for me?
I am really pleased with what Linux has offered me, and there is no doubt in my mind that it was the best choice I ever made since buying my Tandy TRS-80 Model I way back in 1979.

PCLinuxOS 2008.1 GNOME installed

2008-05-31T15:59:00.004+02:00

Being involved in the PCLinuxOS.NL team, I was constantly focusing on KDE. I thought it was about time to get to know a distro running GNOME, so last month, and mainly due to the hype surrounding Ubuntu's HH release I tried HH and it still makes me think of the AC/DC song "Shot Down In Flames". The number one distro of the planet simply couldn't get my Wifi (Broadcom 4312) up and running out of the box. Next I tried Fedora 9 and once again it was no-joy with the Wifi.

The funny thing about all this was that I had a PCLinuxOS 2008.1 GNOME available for download under my nose and it simply didn't' occur to me to try this one out.
If it wasn't for a Dutch Forum user asking about a possible Dutch remaster of PCLosGNOME, I would probably have overlooked it all together... Shame shame shame ...

But, this morning, I downloaded and installed it on my spare partition on my laptop (HP Compaq 6325). What can I say. Everything worked out of the box.

It's PCLOS so it SIMPLY DOES WORK!!.

My wifi was configured using ndiswrapper and after a small update using Synaptic (72 files) I had my first working distro running GNOME, in less time than I expected.

What struck me first was the high quality of the graphical part. I am personally rather fond of 'dark' themes, and this one is really, really subtle in its simplicity.
Being a newcomer in the GNOME community, I cannot say much about the default package selection, but using Synaptic I simply added OpenOffice, some games and Pidgin (because Emesene is Microsoft Messenger only).
At first sight I can play my mp3 music collection, view movies (haven't tested the DVD movies yet) all out of the box.

PCLinuxOS 2008.1 GNOME gives me a very good impression and I haven't encountered any show-stoppers yet.

Some small things that I noticed were that - as DrakLive does not include other OS in the menu.lst of GRUB - a simple tool like the 'redo mbr' of the Minime2008 would be most welcome, in order to look for and include other installed distros in its menu.lst.
Another point is that among all the possible languages (from /etc/rpm/macros :
%_install_langs an:da:de:el:en:en_GB:en_IE:en_US:es:fr:hu:it:ja:nl:pl:ro:ru:sk:uk)
the Dutch language is missing. Maybe a tip for the devs to include it in the next release ;-)

I will now use the PCLinuxOS 2008.1 GNOME version as major distro on my box, so that I can appreciate GNOME and its programs and get a feel of the GNOME way of interaction with the user.

PCLinuxOS to the rescue - again

2008-05-24T13:36:00.002+02:00

As it so often happens my neighbors - a French language teacher - XP desktop didn't boot this morning. There was a file missing or corrupt and the only thing that appeared on the screen was that "Reboot with the XP Cd and press 'R'". Well everybody knows how user-friendly Windows is, but that statement doesn't fall under that category I suppose.

I went over to him armed with my 120 GB USB external HD and my copy of PCLinuxOS.
Booting was as usual no problem and the LiveCD did a fine job of detecting screen, printer, LAN, audio and I was up and running in no time. Then I plugged my external HD in the box, asked him where his 'I need to recover'-data was and copied around 45 Gb from the NTFS C: partition to my USB hard disk.
Next we rebooted with the XP CD and performed a full new install. I then installed PCLinuxOS as dual-boot and copied all the data over to his XP partition.

It all went so smoothly that he will give PCLinuxOS a try. Well, I hope that he can appreciate the power of Linux and that we have another happy Linux user among us.

I remastered PCLinuxOS in French for my neighbor

2008-05-18T15:18:00.005+02:00

One of the remarks I often read is that PCLinuxOS is an English only distro. While that is true when you download the iso, the road to make a localized remaster in another language is not so difficult for a somewhat handy linuxer.

I have a neighbour who is retired and loves to internet. That is not so special, but what is special is that he is 82 years old and would like to start learning Linux. He is French speaking so installing a localized French version of a Linux distro was a must.
As I know that Mike (NewMikey) of PCLinuxOS.NL made a Dutch remaster and had posted a small article on how to do it on the PCLinuxOS.Nl forum, I would give his tutorial a live test.

So, I created a 8 Gb partition at the end of my HD and installed the Dutch Minime2008 Remaster on it. I followed the steps set out by NewMikey and after 45 minutes I had a fully working French PCLinuxOS.

How did I proceed?

I logged in as a normal user.

Via System -> File Tools -> File Manager - Super User Mode I edited the file /etc/rpm/macros. I changed the line '%_install_langs' to '%_install_langs fr'

Did a full synaptic update

Installed aspell-fr (locales-fr is also installed then) and kde-i18n-fr.

Configured KDE region and languages as follows Western Europe -> France

Logged out of KDE and then back in. The KDE menus are now in French

Instelled using Synaptic : pclinuxos-menu-messages

As root in a konsole I typed #update-menus

Started the PCLinuxOS Control Center and changed configure the system language and region to Franch, clicked next and changed the country to Belgium. I did the same as user in the LokalDrake (user) where I selected the correct country.

Logged out using the Control-Alt-Backspace and then back in again.

Reinstalled the most common programs that I know have menus that must be reconfigured like synaptic, kaffeine, amarok, gimp, drakxtools, harddrake, drakconf, ...

Set in kcontrol/system administration/login manager in the tab-page 'Appearance' the language to French (That way the login screen is in French)

Opened the file /sbin/splash.sh as root, looked the strings up - near the end - that I want to be changed to French during booting or shutting down (they appear near the bottom of the splashscreen, and tell you to press Esc to see the details)

After all those changes, I now have a fully functional French PCLinuxOS. I must just make a LiveCD of it and I can install it on my neighbors box.

A multilingual DVD/CD would definitely be a major step up for my favorite distro, but I know that Tex and the Gang are working on it so I rest assured.

2008-05-12T10:45:00.002+02:00

Malware-Laced Banner Ads At MySpace, Excite by Brian Krebs on the washingtonpost.com. Malware-Laced Banner Ads At MySpace, Excite. According to security researchers, banner ads that try to install malicious programs are running on social networking site MySpace.com and search portal Excite.com. [...]

2008-05-11T07:18:00.002+02:00

Gmail can be used as “Spam Bazooka” by ZDNet's Garett Rogers -- INSERT, the Information Security Research Team, has sucessfully created a proof of concept exploiting the “trust hierarchy” that exists between mail service providers. Taking advantage of the way Gmail forwards messages, the team was able to send 4000 messages in a short period of time from a single account without any countermeasures taken by [...]

Grey-haired Tux to the rescue?

2008-05-08T12:19:00.002+02:00

Every year a number of postings predict that 2006, 2007, 2008 … will be the ‘year of the Linux Desktop’. But every year it is just not quite what some predicted or hoped for.

What can the community do to fulfill those predictions?

First of all we must make an analysis of possible computer users that could opt for a desktop Linux distro.
Basically we have two main groups: business and home users

Business users.

Switching over business users from a Microsoft managed environment to a GNU/Linux is something that will have to be pushed through the company by the system administrators. Every business has its own specific set of applications that are used throughout the company. Those applications are mainly Win32 applications developed in-house or bought from a software company and are installed on the local desktop.
This makes it rather difficult to migrate to a GNU/Linux solution on the fly.
As soon as web-based implementations on the work floor will start to appear en mass, they become less dependent of Win32 solutions and a possible opening towards Gnu/Linux will be created.

Home users.

When a decade ago home users wanted to have the same look & feel on their home computer as what they used at the office, Microsoft was all to happy to sell them their OS, be it as an preinstalled OEM. A whole industry emerged around that OS and where the business user can rely on a professional trained system admins, the home user had and still has to deal with the flaws and maintenance of the system himself like regular system updates as well as buying or downloading security software (anti virus and anti malware tools), codecs, office and multimedia applications. For a large group of them it proved to be to difficult so the OEM manufacturers added quite a lot of commercial applications in trial or demo form to the OEM software but even that approach once the 90-day trial period was finished did not result in everybody buying the yearly security licenses.
It clearly does not work looking at the number of infected zombie PC’s around the world.

But how does the Joe Doe look like sitting behind a hijacked PC?

I’ll separate them on age. It can be assumed that teenagers know how to set up their box, because they are open to the new technologies like the internet, chatting, forums and they know quite a lot of hacking XP in order to play their games, the importance to shield themselves behind a firewall and how to eliminate the threat of viruses and other malware.
It is also that generation that supervises dad’s or mom’s laptop or PC, and some other boxes in a 500 meters radius.

The most vulnerable group is the 50+ group. It is the fastest growing demographic group, and they were not raised with the modern IT technology. They learned it on the work floor and there a system admin took care of the maintenance.
Being sometime computer illiterate they have no idea of what the computer does, why strangers are after their passwords, how it can be possible that while doing online banking they are actually doing it on a fake look-alike site.
Speaking with that group you realize they really like working on their box, but they hate the dangers that lurk on the net. But they are not willing to stop chatting to their relatives located at the other side of the world, nor would they like to miss the latest pictures or videos of their first grandson.
Another interesting point is the language. Almost every spam or malware popup on the Internet is in English, which they can’t read nor understand. They see a OK button in the popup window and by clicking the Ok button the screen disappears. Mission accomplished – for both players I should say.

Our target group… the 50-plussers.

If we want GNU/Linux to become more popular on the desktop, is the 50+ group that must be targeted.
By developing good installers and nice Live-CD’s, showing them how simple it is to work with GNOME or KDE, how safe it is (IE their grandchildren wont screw up the PC anymore), that all data they have can still be accessed and edited and how cheap it is compared to the cost of maintaining the preinstalled OS they will more than willingly leave Microsoft and go for a GNU Linux distro.
Their grandchildren will see how the distro works and will try it out also.

There are a few hurdles yet to take, but knowing that hardware OEM manufactures are going to open their driver code for use in FOSS environments it might be possible to realize a ‘I detect all hardware correctly out of the box’ distro in a not so far future.
Games are another hurdle. Having the 50+ group as main user group will increase the number users and then the game industry will slowly follow, because the grandchildren will be the ones who will ask for their game to be available on Linux..

Hopefully we can then have a reversed experience where instead of having the same OS at home the one they use at the office, they will want to have the same OS at the office like the one they are running at home.

So today all distro communities must start to get the 50+ target group interested in their products and while some of them will like the Ubuntu’s and PCLOS’s other will find it challenge to go for Arch, Slackware or Gentoo.

50-plussers have the time and the determination to use it and we have the resources to give them what they want.

Let’s get cracking.

Windows-based EeePC cheaper than Linux one

2008-05-07T19:15:00.000+02:00

Is ASUS in bed with Microsoft? The new XP-based EeePC 900 will actually be cheaper than the Linux-based version.

Read all about it on http://apcmag.com/windowsbased_eeepc_cheaper_than_linux_one.htm

EeePCLinuxOS : PCLinuxOS ready for the Eee PC

2008-05-07T18:24:00.003+02:00

According to ASUS, the name EEE derives from "the three Es: Easy to learn, Easy to work, Easy to play". Previous versions of EEE PC had only 2GB of flash drive, but the recent ones come with as big as 20GB of SSD and 1GB of RAM, making it a decent personal computer.

At first the Eee PC used to ship with a reduced version of Xandros Linux, but devs from other distros such as Mandriva, Ubuntu (EeeXbuntu), Fedora (EeeDora) have developed slimmed down Eee-versions of their flagship products.

PCLinuxOS has now joined as another distro that will available for the Eee PC.

You can visit the site of ASUS-Eee PC if you want more info on the box itself.

The EeePCLinuxOS project (http://www.eeepclinuxos.com) is being developed by JMiahMan, the current maintainer of the PCLinuxOS Hardware Database.

From the wiki :

What this Project is:
This project is an attempt not just to have PCLinuxOS installed on the EeePC but create something better then your run of the mill Linux distribution running on the EeePC. Much like how PCLinuxOS got its beginning from taking something and improving on it we hope to do the same for the EeePC. There are many articles on how to install your favorite flavor of Linux to the EeePC and many of these same articles can be used or adapted to be used with PCLinuxOS. Most semi-knowledgeable users can do this and even new patient users could pull it off. If this is what you want to do then you're at the wrong place. What we are is innovation in the making and we're targeting the EeePC to be something more then what people think it is, and make it what we know it truly is.

What we offer:
File System compression is something we're keen on, but it shouldn't come at much of a cost. We've created a system that allows you to have 2G in a compressed 700M image and it's read/writable through a method that allows you to have a changes file that can be more then 3G utilizing your space more efficiently. This will allow you to have your documents, media and just your own stuff in general taking up most of the drive rather then system files and programs. This will allow the EeePC to be treated more like true laptop replacement. You can still even update and install your own programs the same way you would through synaptic on a normal PCLinuxOS install.

Backup & Mobility is simple because of the compression system we use, your whole system consists really of two files. True mobility also comes into play, if you're a person with multiple EeePCs you can simple copy your changes from one to the other or your system doesn't even have to stay on the EeePC it can also become mobile on a USB stick (4G+) booting up into any system that has USB boot support. Backup and mobility will soon be even easier with simple tools that are being developed to simplify an already simple process.

Installation is getting simpler and simpler with our own modified install script and with recent versions of EeePCLInuxOS most if not all key hardware works. More simpler scripts and tools are being developed to help install be just as easy as a PCLinuxOS install and with new soon to come documentation and screencasts installation of EeePCLInuxOS on you own EeePC could be just a few clicks away.

It is an interesting project, and knowing the determination of the PCLinuxOS devs, we can expect a state of the art distro for the lovely Eee PC.

What can you do with a second Ethernet port?

2008-05-06T21:17:00.001+02:00

Nathan Willis wrote an interesting article on how to use two Ethernet ports on your box.

Purchase a new PC or motherboard soon, and the chances are good that it will come with two built-in network interfaces -- either two Ethernet jacks or one Ethernet and one Wi-Fi. Tossing in a second adapter is an inexpensive way for the manufacturer to add another bullet point to the product description -- but what exactly are you supposed to do with it? If you are running Linux, you have several alternatives.

See http://www.linux.com/feature/133849

Small test of Mandriva2008

2008-05-06T19:20:00.001+02:00

Manmath Sahu has posted a small but open minded review of Mandriva2008

http://pclinuxos2007.blogspot.com/2008/05/break-from-pclinuxos-to-test-mandriva.html

PCLinuxOS Next Release due before summer

2008-05-06T17:26:00.000+02:00

Texstar and the gang will be rolling out beta's by the end of the month of May if all goes according to schedule and if no major setbacks occur an updated iso should be available for download at the end of June.

But, we all know Texstar's motto : It will be ready when it is ready ;-)

Ubuntu 8.04 ... see you later

2008-05-05T20:10:00.001+02:00

I did install Ubuntu 8.04 with a wired LAN connection and I managed to install the drivers for the BCM4312 wifi.

While doing the installation, I saw the Wifi lights come on-line, and I opened the details pane to see what Ubuntu was doing. After the installation was completed Ubuntu 8.04 froze solid !!!

Only a cold boot allowed me to continue.

During the reboot, the Wifi lights came on, and I proceeded to enter the data for my wifi using a static IP, DNS and Gateway address. I entered my web-key and .... nothing.

I could not connect to the internet. Something is definitely wrong with the wifi configuration for the BroadCom 3412 .

On the Ubuntu forum there is a thread explaining you how to get it working after all. It is so simple that a newbie will be running away ... Look for yourself :
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=766560&highlight=BCM4312

That did it, and I will put Ubuntu 8.04 to rest until they do a major upgrade and then I'll look into Ubuntu 8.04 again It is too unstable to be tested on my box.

Ubuntu 8.04 - Nothing goes anymore

2008-05-05T13:21:00.001+02:00

I connected my laptop to my wired connection and did the complete system update. Next to that, I found where to activate my BCM4312 wifi card and downloaded the drivers and the cutter.

The light of my wireless lighted blue ;) and I did a complete reboot, just to be sure.

But, something different happens now. During the boot process, Ubuntu switches over to a console screen for a few seconds and then back to X, where I can log-in. Very strange.

But I cannot start any given application. It takes several minutes before the desktop is displayed. I am fed up with it, and will not look into this problem any deeper.

So, it will be a new install I guess and try again.

Hopefully things will go better.

Ubuntu 8.04 ... the best Ubuntu ever? I doubt it.

2008-05-05T09:52:00.000+02:00

Being a PCLinuxOS user, and having read all about the Ubuntu 8.04, I decided to give the distro a go on my laptop.

My configuration is simple:

HP Compaq nx6325
Mobile AMD Sempron(tm) Processor 3500+
1 Gb RAM
HD 80 Gb
Broadcom Corporation ‎BCM4312 802.11a/b/g (wifi)
Broadcom Corporation NetXtreme BCM5788 Gigabit Ethernet (wired)
ATI Technologies Inc RS485 [Radeon Xpress 1100 IGP]

I already have PCLinuxOS running on that box and created a 10 Gb unallocated partition for testing purposes.

Downloading the distro went fairly good. Using K3B I burned the RW and rebooted the system.

First impression

I could select Dutch as primary language straight away and using the F3 key, selected my UK keyboard.
The option to install directly is a nice shortcut so I opted for that.

Then the Ubuntu appeared and what looked like the Windows XP marque like stuff, even in the same orange color, bouncing from left to right got my attention. Why in hell did they mimic MS Windows XP here.
I pressed Esc to look at the processes while booting, but nothing happened. Just like in Windows I am locked out of the booting process. I start to get an uneasy feeling.

An error flashed by concerning my Broadcom Wifi card but I was unable to read it, as once again I am looking at the boot splash screen.

The installation wizard is simple and well done. I went for manual partitioning and the installation started copying the distro.

Up to now I get a feeling that I am working with a Windows derivative. Change the name Ubuntu in Windows XP and you'll bet you are booting Windows. Not what I expected.

The Desktop

I have no experience whatsoever with Gnome, so let's see what it looks like.

Only three menu items are shown, but although I selected Dutch as language, they are in English. The submenu item are in Dutch. Small glitch that the translators overlooked I suppose.

The desktop is well done, with and empty canvas and some quick access icons clearly visible.

Upgrading the system and installing extra software

I still don't have an internet connection and as it is a laptop, I always work wireless, so let's get the wireless up and running.
I started looking for a way to get my Wifi on-line, but nothing seems to be available to do it. Strange, but no problem, I have my memory stick with the Windows drivers for my Broadcom 4312 card and will have to do it, using ndiswrapper then. This is certainly not something for the newbie who wants to try out Ubuntu....

I open a console and type in ndiswrapper, just to remind me of the command options again, and can you believe this !!!!

Ubuntu does not ship ndiswrapper !!!!!

Ndiswrapper is currently not installed: You can install it by typing:
sudo apt-get install ndiswrapper-common

So basicly what Ubuntu says is this:

Go online, download the drivers to setup your card so you can get online to download the drivers to setup your card so you can get online to download the drivers to setup your card ...

Here I am now, stuck with the so called 'Best Ever Ubuntu' and we speak 2008 and there is no way to get my Broadcom BCM4312 wifi driver alive.

I will have to go to the attic, fetch a network cable and hope that using a wired connection, I will be able to get my Wifi up-and-running.

BAD .. BAD ... VERY BAD

I really did not expect such a major errors from a so acclaimed distribution.

Hope they fix this problem real soon.

Meanwhile I will try to get my Wifi working and proceed with the discovery of Ubuntu later today, although my enthusiasm for Ubuntu has diminished to just above freezing point.

Will my next box be running MS-Vista, OsX or Linux?

2008-04-26T11:25:00.004+02:00

A work colleague is, just like me, not a typical Microsoft user. She is a Mac addict while I am a PCLinuxOS addict.

A while ago she asked if I had ever considered switching to Mac should I need to buy a new laptop. I had never thought of buying a Macbook as follow-up laptop, just like many a MS-Windows user never considers Linux.

That being said, I decided to do a little investigation on my own.

The budget will be ranging from €1000 - €1200 for the hardware, that will consist of an Apple MacBook on one side and a PC Laptop MS-Vista pre-loaded on the other side.

For the software I go for three options :

Macbook uses only the Apple Software
PC laptop Vista Preloaded uses only Vista Capable Software (no freeware of open source)
PC laptop with PCLinuxOS installed uses open source and GPL software

Next I decide what I will do with the box.
This is fairly standard : email, chat, browse, website development, photo editing, music, viewing DVD's and an occasional letter, spreadsheet or presentation.

First let's look at the Apple Macbook
With a price of €999.- for the smallest unit it is becoming a feasible buy, but if you want something a little more powerful (2Gb RAM instead of 1 Gb RAM and a DVD-writer) the price goes up to €1199.-.

Macbook is delivered with Mac OS X Leopard and iLife. Those would allow me to do everything I set out but if I would like some office stuff I must buy iWorks which would cost me €79.-

Next the PC Laptop running MS-Vista.
The basic software would suffice but there again I would need to buy MS-Works9 priced at €39.95 for the office stuff. All the rest seems to be on board (IE7, Windows Mail, MSN, and multimedia).

Finally the PC Laptop running PCLinuxOS.
All the software needed to do the basic tasks I set out is available, either directly on the Live CD or through the repositories.

Let's talk hardware
The Macbook is very cool. Everything is nicely integrated and works seamlessly together. There are no driver problems at all and all you need for multimedia is available.

The PC Laptop running MS-Vista (now with SP1) should be able to handle all the hardware found on the laptop.

PCLinuxOS will recognize the majority of the hardware on the box, but cutting edge stuff like a fingerprint reader (anyone uses that ?) or the typical multimedia buttons will probably not work at first, if ever.
Not that this is a problem, but it would have been nicer if the OEM's made Linux capable devices.

Security
Mac and Linux are known for their good security. MS-Vista is better than XP, but it is still not on the same level as the other two. Basically neither of them can be called unsafe.

Running the OsX or Ms-Vista it is assumed that you do not modify the given programs. You use the proposed software (which you pay for) or you don't use it at all.
Running any Linux you have full freedom to do whatever you like (and can) in order to tweak the distro to your liking. It is more or less assumed that you hack your system.

Both Apple and Microsoft are commercial companies and will again and again roll out new products in order to increase the benefits. They are not FOSS (http://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_and_Open_Source_Software) and GPL (http://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_General_Public_License) adherents.

What is the small conclusion ?
The Macbook is a beautiful system, and if you need only the basic task as a home user it is number one. It is a stable, safe and complete fully integrated system that looks nice also.
It is the kind of box I would give to my wife for her mailing and browsing and the occaional photo editing.

The Ms-Vista laptop cannot compete with the Macbook on the ease of use base and on security. Running MS-Vista je must have much more knowledge of computers to keep your box clean of trojans, viruses and all sort of malware.
On the other hand, it is the worlds business standard and you'll find a wizkid in your neighborhood able to help you out anytime.

Running a dual-boot MS-Vista / Linux box gives you the best of both worlds. Why still have MS-Vista on the box. Simple. As long as the laptop in within the warranty period, you need to keep it on it.

Looking back on this little investigation I would go for the PC-based laptop running MS-Vista / PCLinuxOS in dual boot, or I would buy an extra HD and swap it with the one in the laptop. That way, I can run 100% Linux and if the box must be returned for whatever reason, I simple reverse the swapping process.

PCLinuxOS.NL alive and kicking

2008-02-10T10:27:00.000+01:00

De lange winterdagen behoren bijna tot het verleden, en tijdens deze voorbije periode is er heel wat gebeurd bij PCLinuxOS.NL voor mij.

Ik ben er officieel aangesteld als moderator en ik hou me nu intensief bezig met de website, die door Jos aka DutchWolfie werd opgestart in Drupal. Dag na dag groeit de website en dit jaar moet de basis voor de site af zijn.

Daarnaast heeft Mike aka NewMikey de Nederlandstalige remaster van de MiniMe 2008 gemaakt alsook de Digital Photography Edition gebaseerd op de MiniMe 2008 (http://www.dfpe.pclinuxos.nl/)

Wanneer de PCLinuxOS 2007.x of PCLinuxOS2008 zal verschijnen zal die natuurlijk naar het Nederlands geremasterd worden en ter download aangeboden worden.

PCLinuxOS.nl documentatie

2007-11-18T10:27:00.001+01:00

It's been a time since I posted something here. This is mainly due to my health problems. Luckily all is getter better now and I can once again spend more time on PCLinuxOS.NL

I am proud to be asked to run as administrator and docuteam manager of the Dutch PCLinuxOS.NL community. This allows me to better exchange my experience with the other PCLinuxOS.NL users

Currently I am busy rolling out the documentation pages, in Drupal.

Hopefully, Drupal will allow the user to find the documentation he/she needs more easily than with an ordinary wiki.

It took way to long, and so does the alternative

2007-08-09T15:54:00.000+02:00

I did try to install Gentoo 2007 on my laptop, but after a mere 4 hours, I barely got it working. I could boot into Gentoo and ended on the nice login prompt.
At that time I didn't have X nor KDE installed and could not imagine waiting another x hours for those packages to be installed.

Really, I am not the guy who will sit hours on end before his box waiting for a 160 applications to compile, so I decided to install Sabayon 3.4e.

The installation went fine and within one hour I was up and running. Although Sabayon is all about sources being compiled, I didn't notice a clear speed advantage using my daily tools which are Firefox, KMail, openOffice Writer. So a source driven or a binary driven distro doesn't make a difference for me.

Then I tried to update firefox 2.0.0.3 to the version 2.0.0.6. On my PCLinuxOS box, it is simply a matter of launching Synaptic, selecting the Mozilla-Firefox application for update and starting the update. Total time needed? Approx. 5 minutes.
I tried the same on Sabayon. I started a konsole, su'd to root and emerge mozilla-firefox was the command.
After more than 40 minutes the compiling was still not finished so I decided to abort it using Ctrl-C. A few hours later, I resumed the emerge command with emerge --resume and after another 35 minutes I decided that it was enough.
I wonder how those people keep their system up to date.... it's 20 hours compiling for 4 hours work or what ???

I got the message. I am not the kind of person who will use source based distro's. I just don't have the patience to deal with all that compiling. And if in the end there is no real gain it is even more a waste of time.

I am happy I tried it because it allows me exclude a certain number of distro's that don't match my character.

Installing Gentoo on my laptop

2007-07-29T07:48:00.000+02:00

Now that my laptop has been fixed, I have been asked by a Gentoo user if I am interested in a challenge. Installing Gentoo on that laptop and writing down my experiences about the project.

I find it an interesting challenge, merely because Gentoo still rings a special bell as 'the' distro where you learn GNU/Linux and secondly my experiences might eventually help others.

So, I will start installing Gentoo on that laptop and inform you of an eventual succes or failure.

My laptop died

2007-06-10T06:51:00.000+02:00

Sad story isn't it. My laptop - a HP Compaq nx6325 - died yesterday. Something to do with the power supply. I can't power it up on AC-power and as my batteries ran out, I am sitting with a dead bird on my desk. The adapter seems to be okay, so the problem lies somewhere within the unit itself.

I delivered it for repair in my computershop, and now I must wait for the repair to be done, if it is not to expensive ... If they have to put in a new mobo I wonder whether the cost will be worth it.

The ambigious attitude of MS-Windows users

2007-05-09T16:45:00.000+02:00

When you talk to MS-Windows users about using Linux instead of MS-Windows on their box, you get the classic FUD driven responses we all know:

Linux is for geeks.
Linux cannot play my games.
Linux is made by amateurs.
If Linux really is superior to MS, how come more that 90% of the users have MS installed?
Linux is not compatible with my hardware.

It is the last remark that really pisses me off.

I will not deny that some hardware companies deliver goods that can not be integrated into a Linux environment. OTOH the community keeps up with most of the latest hardware and as a newbie you'll find many websites that will describe what is go and what is nogo with Linux.

But even then, the MS users come back to you with their silly argument "When Linux will work with 'my' hardware then I will consider the jump."

Well, last week, I bumped into a I-know-MS-like-my-pocket friend of mine, who complained that it takes much to long to find the right drivers for his 'dead-under-Vista'-scanner since he embarked on the Vista-cruise. I simply said, "Why don't you complain to MS for delivering a system that is not compatible with your hardware". He stood there flabbergasted, and I continued "That's what you said about Linux not supporting some of your hardware. It is the OS manufacturers fault, isn't it? ".

So a typical MS-users points a finger to the Linux community for not being able to deliver the correct drivers for some piece of hardware, but if he is suffering the same fate with MS-Vista, it is not MS but the hardware company he points his finger to.

This attitude is typical for MS-addicts. There ain't a cure for that disease.

PCLinuxOS replaces my openSUSE

2007-03-08T17:59:00.001+01:00

After testing PCLinuxOS for several months now, I finally decided to replace openSUSE 10.2 with PCLinuxOS 2007/TR3.

As I am involved with 50+ people and Linux, I was looking since a while for an easy to use distro, small and available as Live CD. PCLOS seemed to be the right one, when Texstar released his 2007/TR1 beginning this year. I tested the TR1 and the TR2 and was very impressed.

So, now that the TR3 is released I installed it on my desktop box, and got rid of openSUSE 10.2. I am quite sure that it is a decision that I will not regret.

As soon as the final will be released I will get the Dutch localized version and use this one as a tutorial distro for 'my audience'.

PCLinuxOS Localization Team - Dutch

2007-01-29T11:16:00.001+01:00

It's been a while since I wrote an entry in my blog.

Now I can announce you that I joined the Dutch Localization Team for the PcLinuxOS distro. I tried the 0.94 beta and was/am really thrilled about the quality of the distro.

It is the first time I felt that I needed to join a distro team so I applied for a place in the localization team. The main purpose of the team is to convert the English only distro, to a Dutch version, so that users in the Netherlands and Belgium can use it in their native tongue.

PCLinuxOS on my desktop box

2006-12-27T16:25:00.001+01:00

I've been a (open)SUSE user for several years now, partly because it was the distro used by the person who installed it on my box, years ago, secondly because once you get used to a distro, you feel at ease with it, and when installing other distro's you're biased anyhow.

But when I downloaded the openSUSE 10.2 begin December, I got a bit annoyed that I had to download 5 + 1 CD's to be able to put the distro at work on my box. Moreover, you cannot even give a Live Cd of openSUSE to a newbie, just to get the hang of it. It is a all or nothing situation and this is a real drawback for the not initiated.
It is clear to me that openSUSE must focus on a LiveCD for their 10.3 so that people can experience how good a distro openSUSE really is, before taking the plunge and installing it next to their obsolete ;-) Windows XP.

In my perpetual quest for a distro that is :

downloadable as a Live CD (max 700 Mb)
KDE oriented
Multimedia enabled out-of-the-box (MP3, AVI, MPG, ...)

I was directed towards PCLinuxOS. It struck me that this distro, albeit being number 6 on Distrowatch was a complete unknown to me.

As I am a bit tight on bandwidth this time, I decided to download the MiniMe 0.93 which only needed 300 Mb. After burning it, I launched the live CD and was really pleasantly surprised. It worked fast, and looked cute also. I played a bit around and then the "Why not" was whispered, and I installed it on my box. It recognized my three openSUSE partitions, correctly identified / (root) and /home and suggested to format only the / (root). Cool.

Synaptic allowed me to install only those applications I needed on a daily basis and after one hour, I was operational again.

It is now 24 hours later, and there is a very good chance that, once the 0.94 is released, I will simply replace openSUSE with PcLinuxOS.

I'll keep you informed.

Niertransplantatie en orgaandonatie

2006-12-25T16:08:00.000+01:00

Ieder jaar tijdens de Kerstmis en Nieuwjaarsperiode gaan mijn gedachten steeds naar de familie van de donor van mijn nier. Deze familie gaf toestemming aan het transplant team om over te gaan tot prelevatie van de organen van hun hersendode geliefde.

Het is nu mijn vierde Kerstmis die ik kan vieren met mijn familie danzij deze altruïstische daad die me op 23 april 2003 toeliet om een nieuwe nier te krijgen.

Ik ken deze familie niet maar tijdens deze periode van bezinning en goede voornemens dank ik alle personen die toestemming gaven tot orgaanprelevatie en de families die hetzelfde zouden doen voor hun geliefden.

Ik kan hen niet genoeg bedanken.

HP Compaq nx6325 - A problem child?

2006-12-25T09:35:00.000+01:00

I recently bought a HP Compaq nx6325 notebook. I decided for this type of notebook, because I've always had good products from HP, both private or on the work floor, and HP is known as being not Linux unfriendly.

The nx6325 comes fitted with an AMD Sempron 3500+, on board ATI video card, 80 GB HD, no floppy and I upgraded it to 1 GB ram. Windows XP SP2 is installed by default.

It is only after having purchased the notebook, and during the installation of openSUSE 10.1 on the box in dual boot, that some serious flaw with this package were brought to my attention. The first indication was a very very hot keyboard which caused me to abort to installation leaving me with a crippled MBR (quickly fixed though) and leaving me wondering what was wrong. Somehow, the fans were not working when installing openSUSE 10.1 !!!!

I did some googling and it seems that somehow HP changed stuff in their BIOS which resulted in a ill functioning ACPI / DSDT table. For those interested, a nice report on what is wrong, and how to fix it eventually can be found on http://www.wolframschenck.de/nx6325.htm, but in short that is what the author says....

ACPI management is broken on the nx6325 with a standard linux installation. Using ACPI, you will most likely overheat your CPU because the CPU fan won't turn on properly. After the initial installation, you should start your notebook with the kernel option acpi=off until you applied a solution to the problem. This will turn the CPU fan on regardless of load. On the downside, you won't be able to access the battery state, and worse, your dual-core CPU will only use one of its cores, but it won't overheat... During the installation (started with ACPI support), I enabled in the bios "Fan always on with AC adapter plugged in", and of course, I plugged the AC adapter in :-)

I tried some other distro's like FC6, Ubuntu 6.10 but all could not get the fans to work normally ;-( Anyhow, I installed openSUSE 10.1 with the fans running on AC Power and everything went well, with only the WiFi (Broadcom 4310) not being detected. Using the ndiswrapper workaround I installed the wifi using the tips by AndrewD18.

So, now I have the box running knowing that the battery indicator is not working reliably, that I must choose to work on AC power, so that the fans are always on (ACPI=off is not an option as then the fans drain the battery much to fast and I have no reliable indication of their status) and that the CPU freq. is unreliable - running much to slow most of the time.

Luckily the guys at kernel.org seem to be working on the problem and with an update of the kernel the problem will be kinda fixed... I hope

Och yes .. XP is running fine on this box ... (surprised ???)

Just a few words to start this blog

2006-12-24T23:00:00.000+01:00

Two years ago I installed a Linux distro on my PC. It was Suse 9.2.
Since then I have been enjoying the GNU/Linux and openSUSE 10.2 is now installed on both my desktop and my laptop.
How I experience working with GNU/Linux and FOSS will be the main thread in this blog.

Next to that, I will also publish stuff about my condition, being a kidney patient, living since 2003 with a donor kidney.

Stay tuned