A Cajun-Asian View

As someone who just upgraded his laptop to Ubuntu 7.10, primarily used Ubuntu linux as my primary desktop O.S. since Dapper was in beta, and utilized Linux O.S. since 1998 as a server, the following quote from Rupert Goodwins blog really says it for me1:

Then how come I'm so much more at home with Ubuntu than Vista? It boils down to one abiding impression: Ubuntu goes out of its way to get out of your way, even if it doesn't succeed all the time. Vista goes out of its way to be Vista and enforce the Vista way. You must conform regardless of the implications.

1. 1. Granted, I have limited experiences with Windows Vista, mainly playing with it on a friend's computer. But the quote still highlights what is an important different between close source and open source software are to me in general.

Work got me the Nokia 770 Internet Tablet to check out. The company got a couple of these to determine their (and the Nokia N800's) usefulness to our clients.

After playing with it for several days there much I could criticize it for like the weak processor, the lack of memory to run programs, and the use of the older MMC cards for flash memory. But the potential in this device is quite great. Based on Debian, the O.S. on the Nokia 770 is rather robust. In terms of experience, I found that browsing from the couch or at a coffee shop is so much more convenient than with a laptop, even if I can't watch Youtube (or other flash site) videos on it with only having Macromedia Flash 6 available on it. The fact that I can play Sudoku or Mahjong anywhere with it is extra.

Via Slashdot a couple days ago, I became aware of the Openmoko project, an attempt at an cell phone O.S. that's based on open-sourced software, like the Linux kernel, the GNU C library, the X window system, and the GTK+ toolkit. It seems that FIC is behind this, and has already released the Neo1973 for developers to pick up and start programming on (The wiki for the O.S. states that the software is still in a pre-alpha state and not ready for end-users yet).

Yeah, I'm a few days late on this. Heck, Dell had launched the systems on Thursday. Actually, this hasn't been too new, as Dell have been selling Red Hat equipped servers for some time (And they even have their own customized Yum repositories for hardware-specific drivers). But this is a very good sign for Linux (and other open source systems) when Dell is willing to sell systems with Ubuntu 7.04 preinstalled!

I had installed PostgreSQL, Apache, and PHP on my laptop (running Ubuntu 6.10 Edgy) to aid in development. But when I was attempting to load a copy of the production database into PostgreSQL, it kept giving me errors on setting up the functions. Turns out that PostgreSQL (which I installed with the Ubuntu GUI package system, Synaptic) was expecting a file at /usr/lib/pgsql/plpgsql.so, but the real file was at /usr/lib/postgresql/8.1/lib/plpgsql.so. In fact, checking the file system, there was no directory called pgsql in /usr/lib. Apparently, there's some kind of bug in the Debian packager.

The quickest fix I determined was to run the following to create a softlink:
$ sudo ln -s /usr/lib/postgresql/8.1/lib /usr/lib/pgsql

Now those functions setup without any errors.

The next version of Ubuntu is finally out! Now to download it and check it out on a virtual machine. Later on, I'll attempt to do the upgrade process on the install that's on my main desktop then my laptop.

It also seems the Ubuntu website is getting hit by some pretty serious traffic, so it seems to be switching between a holding page that lists the mirrors that you can download the ISOs from and the original site.

Found out about World of Padman from Digg, a total conversion of Quake 3. Quite an odd first person shooter, but it does have a native Linux installer and does work on my gaming system running Ubuntu. I have the details up on full and pretty much maintain 90 FPS.

Running Windows XP in a VMware virtual system in Linux. Pretty handy if I need to check a website out in Internet Explorer without having to setup Wine, especially if I already had a copy of Windows XP Pro sitting around gathering dust...

I'm going to have to look into some of these when I get the time.

Yes, it's a joke article, but it did peak some interest from me with the links it provided. Especially to UFO: AI. I was a X-COM: UFO Defense addict in the early and mid nineties. Being able to play it on my laptop would severely bring my productivity on Linux down...

From Dell's Ideas in Action page on March 28, 2007:

Dell has heard you and we will expand our Linux support beyond our existing servers and Precision workstation line. Our first step in this effort is offering Linux pre-installed on select desktop and notebook systems. We will provide an update in the coming weeks that includes detailed information on which systems we will offer, our testing and certification efforts, and the Linux distribution(s) that will be available. The countdown begins today.