Archive for category Technical
Ubuntu 10.04 LTS Review
While it may not be brand-new on the scene, I’ve finally messed around with Ubuntu 10.04 LTS enough to give my opinion on it. Please check out my review at Linux for Christians.org
iPad…Really?
Being that I am somewhat of a technophile, when offered the opportunity to play with an iPad, i gladly said yes. I must first admit that I did have some preconceived notions to deal with, but I tried to be as open-minded as I possibly could. While I do not completely understand the draw that Apple has as a brand name, they do put out some nice looking products, and the iPad is no exception. There are plenty of apps and it uses the same OS as the iPhone. It is, however, not without shortcomings.
Admittedly, I am not a lover of all things Apple. I am quite happy in my “Wintel” world, and tend to stay there. I have worked with Macs before, but don’t particularly like them. Some of that may be due to the fact I am just more familiar with Windows and Linux, but there is some of it that is due to hardware interface issues. Mac keyboards and mice are atrocious as far as I am concerned. All this being said, my initial reaction to the iPad, was surprising: I was impressed. It has a nice feel, both in texture of materials used for case construction and in weight. It is a good size. It’s not so big that you can’t really take it with you, but it is definitely large enough to be far more ergonomically functional than an iPod or iPhone. Of course the OS is based off of the iPhone, so the interface is quite intuitive. Also, the onscreen keyboard that pops up for things like typing in web addresses or e-mails is quite usable, even when held in portrait orientation rather than landscape. All in all, not too shabby.
Of course, not being a regular Apple disciple, once the “shiny new tech toy” feeling started to wane, the more obvious its flaws became. To start with, it lacks an internal optical drive. I’m not saying it needs a DVD-R or DVD-RW, but this would be a logical device for a DVD-ROM. True, you can stream Netflix with one of the available apps, but why not just have a DVD player? I shouldn’t be forced into buying another service to use a particular feature. Other people point out the lack of a web cam. I’m not so sure this is a flaw, but I understand their reasoning, and see no reason why there shouldn’t be one. The only network connections it has are wireless. This one is minor, and for most people, inconsequential; after all, odds are, you aren’t going to use this in an environment where a cabled network connection would be necessary, but it’s good to have a backup. It ultimately does nothing that you can’t do on either a laptop or netbook. In fact, an iPhone will do what an iPad will, and you can make phone calls on it. Despite claims to the contrary, fingerprints show up horribly. Admittedly, this is minor, but for something that is supposedly fingerprint-resistant, after 5 minutes, it looked like a 3-year old with dirty hands had gotten hold of it. Finally, lets talk price. I could buy two netbooks for the cost of one iPad. I could buy a regular laptop for the cost of an iPad. I could buy a desktop PC for the cost of an iPad.
- Is the iPad a shiny cool tech toy? Absolutely.
- Is the iPad a must have device? Not really.
- Is the iPad worth what Apple wants for it? No.
No Offline Gmail for Chrome Users…for Now…
According to an article on CNet, one of the latest updates for the development build of the Google Chrome browser rendered it incompatible with Gmail offline. So far the only work-arounds are to disable offline options in Gears settings, or to use the Chrome Channel Changer to use a previous version of Chrome that doesn’t have the compatibility issue, or (if you use Mac or Linux,) switch to the beta version, which apparently doesn’t have the issue.
On a personal note, (not being a fan of the Google Chrome browser in the first place,) I find it absolutely hysterical that Google’s browser had an issue with Google’s e-mail service. (Long live Firefox! [Or maybe Opera.])
Consider This Before Ditching Your Game Console
In a recent article, it was brought up that all kinds of personally identifiable data is now stored on modern game consoles. If the console is sold or otherwise gotten rid of, with all of that information on the system, there is a potential for disastrous results. Check out the article for information on properly removing that information from your system should you decide to get rid of it for any reason.
Good Deals on Microsoft & Other Software…or Not…
In the interest of preserving the original post on the off chance the site shows back up, I am merely making this supplemental edit. As of this moment, the site mentioned is no longer up and functional. If you follow the direct link, you will be taken to a page that says, “Under Construction,” and the Technibble article has apparently been deleted. Until further notice, please disregard the remainder of this post.
Normally, I wouldn’t bother promoting a commercial site, but this one deserves all the attention it can get. I found out about it through an article on Technibble. The site mentioned, PC Programmers Wholesale, has deep discounts on lots of different commercial software, including stuff from Microsoft. The best part is that the programs they are selling are all full versions; no upgrades, OEM, academic or other special-use licenses. While it may be possible to get a functional copy for less, you’d be hard pressed to find a full unrestricted version for less. The author of the Technibble article stated that even his normal wholesale source was more expensive, and from the prices I saw, I could believe that. (For example, Windows 7 Enterprise Edition, which is the most expensive version of Windows 7—even more than Ultimate, is less than what Windows 7 Home typically sells for.)
This is definitely no-frills software, at least as far as presentation is concerned. All you get is your product key and a download. No fancy laser-etched holographic disks, stickers, or convoluted packaging here. Don’t worry, though, all of their software, even the stuff from Microsoft, is 100% legitimate and will pass all activation and validation processes. (I don’t know about you, but I don’t typically care about fancy packaging and disks, I just care about having legitimate software and not breaking the bank to get it.)
So You Want to Make a Web Page?
There are various and sundry challenges to making your own website. These challenges vary based on what you want to do with the site and how much of the work you intend on doing yourself. While the issue of where to host your site and how to register you domain do need to be addressed, those are actually fairly straight forward when compared with actually designing the site and coming up with content. While the specifics of your layout and content are going to be unique to your site, the principals behind good design and good writing can be, (to a certain degree, at any rate,) quantified.
While I do not claim to be an expert on either the subject of design or writing, I do have a rather excellent source for hints tips and tricks for all things related to web design. In fact, I have recently added a link for this invaluable resource to this site. I am referring, of course, to A List Apart. If you haven’t ever been to this site or heard of it before, it’s full of great articles on keeping your content, code, layout, and other such web-related wonderment in tip-top shape.
Up for a Challenge?
For those who don’t already know, I’m a big fan of Linux. I’ve got some variation of it on practically every computer I own. Something I have only done with moderate success, though, is build my own system from scratch. I just saw today, where Linux from Scratch has just released LFS-6.6-rc1. Personally, if it’s your first time through, I would recommend going with their stable release, instead. The biggest issue is that you have to have a good solid Linux distribution to build from in the first place. Either Debian or Ubuntu will work quite well for this, or you can download the live CD from Linux from Scratch to use that as your base. (A small note about the LFS Live CD: The current stable release is 6.5, but the live CD is only at version 6.3. It will still meet the requirements to build 6.5, or you can build 6.3 directly from the CD, but due to security issues that have come to light since then, I wouldn’t recommend it.)
You may be wondering exactly what the point of building your own Linux system from source is. Well, for me, the point was to learn more about the functionality of Linux. While a good deal of the commands you use are spelled out for you, they are also explained to some degree. This is not, however, a task for beginners. You do need some rudimentary knowledge of Linux and compiling programs. There are some excellent resources mentioned on the site and in the distribution instructions to help you with this.
A small word of advice if you do decide to take on this challenge: Make sure you have a relatively fast system. While you can build this on relatively old hardware, there are components that may take the better part of a day, if not longer to complete, if your system is fairly slow. My first attempt was on a 300 MHz machine with only 384 MB RAM, and compiling some of the beefier tools needed to actually perform the build took over 24 hours to complete. Admittedly, when I tried again on my 1.7 GHz machine, things did go much faster, it would have been better if I would have had more than 768 MB RAM. Ideally, a system for this project should have at least a 2 GHz processor and at least 1.5 GB RAM. Hard drive space, ironically, isn’t quite as important. A 40 GB drive properly partitioned should be more than adequate if your intended use is primarily a desktop or laptop workstation.
Windows 7 and Linux Can Coexist.
Until I got my laptop last year, I had been using Linux almost exclusively for almost two years. The main reason was that I was too cheap to buy a legitimate copy of Windows XP or Vista. When I got my new laptop, however, it came preloaded with Windows Vista. Admittedly, I didn’t exactly love it, but I didn’t find it to be quite so unappealing as many other’s did. Nevertheless, I quickly repartitioned the hard-drive and dual-booted my system with my favorite flavor of Linux at the time. All was wonderful.
Despite the fact that things seemed to be working rather well, I had come to the realization that my computer was a 64-bit system, and the versions of Vista and Linux I had been running were only 32-bit, so I decided to do some upgrading. I got the 64-bit version of Windows 7, and switched to the 64-bit distribution of Ubuntu. Unfortunately, after installing both in the traditional fashion, allowing GRUB to manage the boot process, Windows 7 decided that something was wrong and kept uninstalling all my programs—even Microsoft Office 2007. It turns out that Windows 7 would not accept anything in the MBR except the Windows Boot Loader. This made dual-booting with Linux a little tricky, but not impossible. I will now provide you with the steps I had to use to get Windows 7 and Linux to coexist peaceably. Using the following configuration, you can successfully have Windows 7 and Linux on the same machine, and Windows 7 will remain content and not think that something is wrong, because Windows Boot Loader will still be in control. Whether or not everyone out there has this problem, I don’t know, but I do know that I am not the only one to have experienced it.
**NOTE** This is written under the assumption that Windows 7 is already installed to a primary partition, and that unpartitioned space has been allotted on the hard-drive for the Linux installation.
Step 1: Make sure you have a separate boot partition for your Linux install. Typically, when I set up a normal Linux desktop install, I use 3 partitions. One 50 – 100 MB ext3 partition for /boot, another partition equal to the amount of system RAM for the swap partition, and a final ext3 partition for the root (/) directory. These are naturally in addition to the NTFS partition for Windows. This is the type of setup I would recommend. Naturally, your exact partition structure should be customized to meet your specific needs, but for dual-booting a desktop/laptop system, this will accomplish the installation with the use of four primary partitions, and provide you with the separate boot partition.
Step 2: Install your Linux distribution as usual, until it asks about configuring GRUB. For the most part, this is a by-the-book installation for Linux. Use all the typical settings and preferences that you would normally use for your system, except for where you install GRUB. I’ll talk about that next.
Step 3: Install GRUB to the /boot partition. Assuming you’ve followed my advice, and created all your partitions as primary partitions, most likely, your NTFS partition is /dev/sda1, /boot is /dev/sda2, the swap partition is /dev/sda3, and the root (/) partition is /dev/sda4. (It is possible that it might be /dev/hda instead of /dev/sda.) The default location for GRUB to install is to the master boot record (MBR) of the disk on which you are installing Linux. This is most likely going to be identified as /dev/sda0 (or possibly /dev/hda0). Change this to /dev/sda2 (or to whichever partition you have assigned /boot). This will install GRUB without overwriting the MBR. Once Linux is done installing, you’ll need to reboot into Windows 7 and make some changes.
Step 4: Change the Windows Boot Loader to offer your Linux install as an option. After your system reboots, it will load straight into Windows 7. While it is possible to edit the Windows Boot Loader manually using bcdedit from the command line, the better thing to do is download EasyBCD from NeoSmart.net. This handy-dandy little tool will give you a GUI to edit the Windows Boot Loader, which is far easier. Simply install the program, start it up, select Add/Remove Entries, pick the Linux tab on the bottom, choose GRUB and the appropriate partition, type in the name of your distro, and click Add. Once back on the first screen, click the Change Settings button. Then adjust the bootloader timeout length and the default OS option if desired. Once you apply your changes, you can reboot.
You should now see your newly added Linux entry on the Windows Boot Loader. Select that option and hit the enter key. This should take you to the GRUB menu. Now press enter to load Linux. Once you have loaded into Linux, you can make changes to the GRUB menu so that Winows 7 isn’t listed in GRUB, and/or you can remove the timer delay altogether, and have GRUB automatically load the default option once it takes over, though often, there are multiple boot configurations for Linux, so this may not be such a good idea.
Tech Tip 101: Keep an Eye on Available Tools
Personally, I can think of nothing more satisfying (or infuriating) than cleaning up a computer that’s been completely worked over with all kinds of bad stuff, be it viruses, spyware, etcetera. This is especially true if you happen to be getting paid to do it. The problem comes in when you find out that the tools you have to do the job are inadequate. What happens then? You spend valuable time searching for something you hope will work after being downloaded through an infected system rather than having the appropriate tools to render the system sufficiently sterile in the first place. There is, however, an easy way to avoid this. Check various sites such as Technibble.com and MajorGeeks.com as well as various reputable antivirus and antispyware websites such as AVG, Avast, and Spybot Search & Destroy for up-to-date versions of their latest free versions. Keeping your toolkit current and stocked with new utilities will help keep you from added frustration.
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