Before I get to the comments themselves, I want to ask, what do you all think of the new blog look and feel? I had to redesign it to get all the gadgets to look right. Let me know in the comments of this article. Anyway, let's get back to the comments.Open Question: Install Linux without Live Media?This post was about installing Linux on a friend's laptop which can't boot from a USB stick and whose DVD drive is broken.Reader Azmo suggested, "I have had really good experiences with gPXE and Fedora (boot.fedoraproject.org) lately. Just a thought...
Sunday, 31 October 2010
Saturday, 30 October 2010
I'm going home for winter break, but I need to be back in college by the end of January. I was thinking of the things immediately afterwards at home that I would miss, and I remembered that one of those things would be watching the Super Bowl with my family and friends at home. (Super Bowl XLV airs on 2011 February 6.) Now, of course, I'll be watching it with my friends here, so that makes up for it. Then, as I thought about it more, I wondered if I would need to buy tickets to attend a showing in my dormitory hall, as it would be considered a...
Friday, 29 October 2010
Yesterday in my web design, the lecturer was a guest speaker. This particular guest speaker is my college's IP attorney, and as we are designing websites, our professor feels that we should be suitably aware of the issues surrounding IP so as to not get sued. At first, I was highly skeptical as a similar talk my high school librarian gave last year was almost totally propaganda in favor of IP-protection and the wonders it does for creative works. That said, I listened to the whole talk, and I'm glad that the attorney delivered the facts straight...
Thursday, 28 October 2010
For the last few years, Microsoft has been making vague threats to sue vendors of Linux-based products for infringing on Microsoft's patents. When Microsoft is asked to elaborate on what exactly is being infringed, it suffers a convenient case of amnesia. In any case, while it has bullied a few companies (first Novell over SUSE, now companies like HTC over Android) into paying excessive royalty fees for no reason, it has never made good on its threats to sue anyone, probably because it would be clear as day just how ridiculous Microsoft's infringement...
Wednesday, 27 October 2010
I wrote a couple posts back that one of my motivations for completing Fresh OS (which is very close to completion but won't be complete until the weekend probably due to my schoolwork) is so that I can install it on a friend's laptop as that friend expressed an interest in running Linux. Well, that thought is right now at the back of my mind. The DVD drive doesn't work (it's partially broken, actually), and she has told me already that live USBs don't work (as she has tried before). I tried using Wubi, but unfortunately some issues with Microsoft...
Tuesday, 26 October 2010
There's always been murmurs of discontent in the Linux community with Canonical, the company that sponsors and manages Ubuntu. Before, I didn't really understand what all the fuss was about; it was the easy-to-use distribution and it seemed to work quite well. Having watched Ubuntu's development over the last year, I can now see why.A large part of this is just that users are jealous that Ubuntu, and not their favorite distribution, is seeing so much success. I'm not going to go into this, because it'll likely degenerate into a flame-war.However,...
Monday, 25 October 2010
I was talking to one of my close friends (whom I shall not name here for the sake of privacy) from back home (he also goes to my old high school) over the phone (whoa, a phone! Who still uses those?) and he was asking me about stuff relating to college applications. Somehow, Princeton University entered our conversation, and he talked about how an admissions officer who visited our high school said this:Don't show any of your friends your college applications. They're going to steal your essays.First, let me leave aside any discussion of copyright....
Sunday, 24 October 2010
There's been a lot of talk in tech news about Apple's new Mac OS X 10.7 "Lion" and the new Mac App Store with one-click installation, updating, and removal.When I saw this, I was going to post this right away, but a lot of other writers beat me to it. This article (Ryan Tate, Gawker) sums it up nicely. Basically, Debian, Red Hat, and SUSE have had these features all along. I think one way to make Linux more appealing then is to brand them in ways similar to Apple's or Android's branding; it just seems more hip now, even if it made sense the whole...
There were only 2 posts that garnered comments this past week, so I'll post most of those comments.Will KPresenter and Gnumeric Please Come Forward?Reader murray has this to say about OpenOffice.org Calc and Gnumeric: "I tried to use gnumeric instead of openoffice, due to the fact that I need to load 40M DBF's each month, and that where incredible slow in openoffice (more than 10 minutes). More, if you take in account that gnumeric loads it in 30 SECONDS. Lately, openoffice calc gets way better, taking 2 mins. The thing is, that in gnumeric,...
Saturday, 23 October 2010
Before I get to the review, I want to say that while I tested Pardus 2009.2 on my old computer in VirtualBox with 448 MB of RAM, I have tested Pardus 2011 Beta on my new laptop in VirtualBox with 1024 MB of RAM, so it isn't quite an apples-to-apples comparison. Please keep this as well as the fact that I'm previewing a beta release in mind for the rest of this post.If you couldn't glean what I'm about to say from the opening paragraph, I'll just say it: the review didn't go well at all. I raved about Pardus 2009.2 "Geronticus Eremita" in my comparison...
Friday, 22 October 2010
I have exams on Friday (today) and Monday, so I'm pretty busy for these few days. However, after my Monday exam, I'll be a lot more free, meaning that I'll be able to tweak Fresh OS some more.I read WebUpd8 pretty often, and they had an article this week about Manhattan OS, a custom Ubuntu build with GNOME and Plasma along with a bunch of other cool goodies, being renamed Jupiter OS and moving to a rolling-release Debian base. Hey, that sounds a lot like Fresh OS! I'm already feeling the competition (hehheh). I guess that's one incentive to push...
Thursday, 21 October 2010
Main ScreenFor the few years that I've been reading software news and reading about new Ubuntu releases, I don't think I've ever seen one that's generated as much talk and/or hype as version 10.10 "Maverick Meerkat"; this is rather anticlimactic as well considering that this version isn't close to as revolutionary as version 10.04 LTS "Lucid Lynx" was (versus 9.10 "Karmic Koala"). But aside from that, a new Ubuntu version means a new version of my...
Wednesday, 20 October 2010
This is probably one of the few times that I'm wishing that I had Microsoft Office on my computer. (As it happens, as I go to the library for at least an hour every weekday anyway, I just used Microsoft Office there.) Why?Well, for my latest chemistry problem set, I need to plot a range of data and add a trend line. Although OpenOffice.org Calc can do this, there aren't as many options. It only gives options for linear, exponential, power, and logarithmic trend lines, none of which are what I want. Although the power regression fits well, what...
Tuesday, 19 October 2010
I want to take this time to update you all on the progress of my respins and my future plans for them.Both wikis (Oxidized Trinity and Fresh OS) are up and running. I've included stuff like download and installation procedures and desktop overviews; I'll include more stuff like pictures and system requirements as soon as I have a good bit of free time.Oxidized Trinity seems to be the more popular one (download statistics-wise), though admittedly, it has been available longer than Fresh OS. Within Fresh OS, as I've split Fresh OS into regular (Linux...
Monday, 18 October 2010
I just saw an New York Times article by Miguel Helft about whether Apple's model of tightly-controlled development can work any longer now that Android devices are selling in larger numbers in the US than Apple's iOS-based products. The article talks about how while Apple releases a new or refreshed product every few months, there are a couple new Android products released every week. Furthermore, the iPad is also facing competition from Android-based tablet computers. Finally, the article discusses how the last time Apple's products (Mac OS) were...
Sunday, 17 October 2010
There were two posts from this past week that garnered comments.GNOME 3, Activities, and KDE 4The most common complaint about this post was that I should have read Aaron Seigo's post on the matter before writing this; unfortunately, it didn't happen that way. I'll get back to this point later. Let's continue with the comments themselves.An anonymous reader points out, "You shouldn't worry about Compiz. Mutter will provide the desktop effects. If you really, really want Compiz integration with GNOME 3 you are out of luck. Don't ask me why but...
Saturday, 16 October 2010
I'll say it up front: I only watched about the first 20 minutes (or maybe a little more). The primary reason for this is that I'm a little busy (and writing this is my short break). This is why I didn't feel uncomfortable leaving so soon. The secondary reason is that it just wasn't all that great. Sure, it seemed to have a few cheap laughs here and there, but the story just didn't seem to get anywhere. It just seemed like one of those cheap comedy flicks with lots of stupid jokes and boobs. If I had more time, I would have probably sat through...
Friday, 15 October 2010
I'm a fan of (and have subscribed to) KevJumba on YouTube. Recently, KevJumba and his dad made it onto CBS's TV series The Amazing Race, and KevJumba has made 3 videos out of this so far. The most recent one (which I will embed at the end of this post) details how they almost didn't make it because one of the tasks in the beating Ghanaian sun almost made his dad suffer a heat stroke (so his dad needed serious medical help); I was truly touched by this uncut show of mutual affection and support, and I was happy to see that this round was not an...
Thursday, 14 October 2010
One: Main Screen(NOTE: I know a lot of commenters have asked for clickable thumbnails. Unfortunately, this appears to be an issue with Blogger, because when I initially upload pictures, they are clickable thumbnails, but a few minutes later, they magically lose their functionality. I'm not sure why that is, and the only workaround is to make the images the original size, which is huge (800 by 600 pixels each) and would drown out all the text, which...
Wednesday, 13 October 2010
This isn't a true follow-up in the sense that it isn't about the patent which I talked about earlier. It has to do with something that happened to me a few days ago when I needed to boot into Microsoft Windows 7 to relax and play some of my computer games (that don't work on WINE in Linux).As usual, Windows needed to download and install updates and patches, and it needed to restart afterwards to make the updates effective. As usual, I chose to ignore the warnings and restart until the next nagging reminder came along. This particular warning asked...
Tuesday, 12 October 2010
Over the last few months, there have been myriad changes to Facebook's privacy policy, many of them for the worse (in terms of being able to maintain privacy). This one (Robert McMillan, PCWorld via Yahoo! News), however, seems really bad, not least because Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook, was himself a victim of this change in the privacy policy. Basically, this new "feature" allows people to unilaterally make their friends members of groups. However, if the friend leaves that group, the original person can no longer make the friend part...
Monday, 11 October 2010
There have been a slew of new articles detailing the progress of work on GNOME 3, and the refrain in all of them has been that "GNOME 3 will revolutionize the desktop". The focus on GNOME 3, ever since the release of the first mock-ups, has been on the new GNOME Shell and GNOME Activities (which are really just two sides of the same coin). The thing is, GNOME Activities has essentially the same concept (and even the same name) as KDE 4 Activities. So I was thinking for quite a while: how can this be called "revolutionary" with a straight face?...
Sunday, 10 October 2010
The 2 posts that garnered comments this week were both my previews of Debian 6 "Squeeze" (which I had embarrassingly misspelled as "Sqeeze" in both article titles — eek!). As always, I won't be able to include every comment, but don't feel bad if yours isn't included.Preview: Debian 6 "Squeeze" (Part 1: GNOME)An anonymous reader pointed out a way to have both a stable Debian base combined with the newest versions of other applications. "I like a very stable system but newest desktop software (firefox, chromium, vlc, banshee, thunderbird...) that...
LXDE Main ScreenEach review done individually would be rather short, so I'm combining reviews of these two DEs into one post. It shouldn't turn out to be too long. The other thing is that I didn't test the installation procedure in either because I suspect it's the exact same as in GNOME and KDE (and because this current virtual hard drive is messed up GRUB-wise).LXDE seems to be the new hot thing; to cater to users who need a lightweight distribution...
Saturday, 9 October 2010
Main ScreenThis is the second part in my series of previews of Debian 6 "Squeeze". The ISO image I used this time was again the daily build from 2010 October 3. I tested this in VirtualBox with 1 GB of RAM allocated to the guest OS and a 25 GB virtual hard drive available (the same one on which I installed the GNOME version).Why am I covering KDE separately from GNOME? It may seem strange at first, considering that Debian doesn't make too many huge...
Friday, 8 October 2010
Main ScreenTrying to forecast when the next version of Debian will be released is like trying to figure out whether or not it will snow the next day in Washington DC in winter; it's an exercise in futility. That said, I'm going to go out on a limb and say that Debian 6 "Squeeze" will be released soon. Why? I'm testing the new Debian live images which were first released a week ago (and are daily builds — this one is the 2010 October 3 build); before...
Thursday, 7 October 2010
A few weeks ago, I wrote about a new IBM patent on estimating the average weight of passengers in a vehicle. Well, I just read a TechDirt article about an even more frivolous patent by IBM for similar things. Basically, this patents the measurement of a car's speed and the division of 60 mi/hr by the speed to determine the refresh rate of a billboard at that location.How is this even more ridiculous than the last one? The last one didn't explicitly use a symbolic formula; it just described the calculation in words. Here, an explicit symbolic formula...
Wednesday, 6 October 2010
This semester, I'm taking a class on web design. The name itself is misleading, as this class is also a humanities ("HASS-H", in MIT parlance) and communication-intensive ("CI-H") class; therefore, the emphasis is more on working together as a team and writing high-quality proposals and reports, and the professor expects that each group have at least one member proficient in web design. Neither myself nor my group members are proficient enough in web design to be able to build a dynamic website from (essentially) scratch, and all of us want to...
Tuesday, 5 October 2010
When I got my Asus laptop, I immediately installed Linux Mint 9 "Isadora" GNOME and searched for the proprietary NVidia graphics driver. For some reason, at that time, nothing turned up. I didn't really worry about it, as I could enable 3D acceleration and desktop effects anyway, and they worked really well, as they still do. A few days ago, I got the idea of looking again to see if I could install those proprietary drivers, as those might give my computer using Linux Mint even greater graphics capabilities. To my pleasant surprise, this time,...
Monday, 4 October 2010
In my physics recitation class today, our recitation leader briefly digressed from the material at hand to discuss the history of differential calculus and the conflict between Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz. Basically, Newton claimed to have invented differential calculus first (although, as with any other "invention", neither can truly claim to have invented calculus from scratch as they were building on the work of mathematicians before them (and I don't just mean 1 + 1 = 2 — I mean things like infinite series and tangent lines)), but as...
Sunday, 3 October 2010
There were a few posts that garnered quite a few comments, so I'll try to include a few comments from each post.Review: aptosid 2010-02 "Keres" KDEI complained about the lack of Synaptic Package Manager in aptosid. Reader T Beermonster had an excellent explanation of this: "Because aptosid is based on debian unstable packages move fast (when debian isn't in a pre-release freeze anyway) upgrading (which should always be a dist-upgrade not an upgrade) or installing anything that touches X should not be done from a running X session because breakages...
Main ScreenI've already reviews Sabayon 5.2 and 5.3 KDE, so I don't think it's necessary to repeat the history and roots of Sabayon. Suffice it to say that it's an easy-to-use binary variant of Gentoo that includes everything and the kitchen sink.According to the Sabayon developers, Sabayon 5.4 brings to the table a new theme, many bugs fixed, and a couple changes in the included applications. Follow the jump to see how it fares. I tested this in...
Saturday, 2 October 2010
Main Screen and Main MenuThe only review of a lightweight Ubuntu-based distribution I've done before this is of #! 9.04.01. I was looking around to see if there are any others, and I came across wattOS.wattOS R2 is based on Ubuntu 10.04 LTS "Lucid Lynx" and uses LXDE. From other reviews of this distribution that I have read, the thing that sets it apart is its comprehensive set of power management tools (hence the name).The other reason I wanted...
Friday, 1 October 2010
There have been a slew of articles about a new piece of malware called Stuxnet which has infected tens of thousands of computers in Iran without the computers' users' knowledge. There's an article by Ellen Nakashima in the Washington Post about how Stuxnet could be used against the US, considering the target of the original attack was probably one of the nuclear power plants in Iran. I wondered what sort of havoc it could wreak on our country's computers. Then I clicked on page 2, and my suspicions — not about Stuxnet's fearsome capabilities, but...
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