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Linux/Unix
Google G1 Android phone
3 years ago
by manfred
in Linux/Unix
The first Android phone has been launched by T-Mobile for European and American markets. Based on the HTC Dream, the G1 boasts both a touch screen and a slider keyboard. All the usual applications are available to the user including a web browser, media player, mail client and Google‘s suite of software.
From a hardware perspective, the G1 includes a 3MP camera, QWERTY keyboard, 3G and WLAN.
To combat the Apple iPhone app store, one-click access is provided on the device to the Android Market. Developers are encouraged to develop applications. The applications are available for wireless download to the device.
More details regarding the G1 can be found here. It should be available in the target markets at the end of Otcober. With a two year contract, the G1 should cost around about USD 180.
Mandriva 2009 RC1 available
3 years ago
by manfred
in Linux/Unix
Release candidate 1 of Mandriva 2009.0 is available for testing. The consumer-ready version should be made available during the second week of October.
The obvious reason to upgrade or install this release is the inclusion of the latest software, such as the latest version of OpenOffice. There are numerous improvements under hood, too. A new wireless network driver for Atheros cards should make connection to WLANs a lot easier and more stable and a new kernel will introduce better device support and various optimizations.
More details available at the official wiki.
Fedora 10 Alpha release available
3 years ago
by manfred
in Linux/Unix
The Fedora team has readied the alpha version of the follow-up to Fedora 9. It seems the lycanthropy theme has been ousted and something intellectual chosen for the codename: Fedora 10 has been christened Cambridge.
The final version should be available in a general release by the end of October. Look forward to a rewritten PulseAudio component, an upgrade to RPM 4.6, improvements to the printing subsystem and streamlined system startups. Of particular interest to me is the inclusion of OpenChange to enable seamless connection to Microsoft Exchange and the commitment to improve support for webcams. A better integration to Exchange would be highly beneficial for the adoption of Linux as a desktop operating system for office staff. The improvements to webcam handling would simply reduce the fiddling and hassle one has with trying to get those peripherals to work. Of all USB devices I’ve ever attached to a Linux system, nothing has proven more difficult to get going than my collection of Logitech QuickCams! The new KDE and GNOME will also find their way into Fedora 10.
If you have a virtual machine environment or a spare system, try out Fedora 10. Download it here.
Mandriva 2009.0 beta available
3 years ago
by manfred
in Linux/Unix
The first beta of Mandriva 2009.0 is available. Seemingly, the French have taken note of Fedora‘s odd naming scheme: the beta of 2009.0 has been christened thornicrofti. Whether that name has been chosen to indicate sympathy with the residents of a certain country in Southern Africa run by a guy with the name Bob is one question I would like to ask the project team…
New features include KDE 4.1 just officially released a short time ago. GNOME users will find the latest 2.23.5 release, with the intention that the final 2009.0 release will include GNOME 2.24. The inclusion of Firefox 3 is a no-brainer and the additional interesting feature to be added is native synchronization support for Windows Mobile devices.
More information on this release and links to the ISO can be found here.
KDE 4.1
3 years ago
by manfred
in Linux/Unix
Two days ago, the KDE Community finally released a significant update to the brand new KDE 4. KDE 4.1 is marketed with the slogan Don’t look back, an indication of the problems the 4.0 release brought along with it.
I’m still partial to GNOME, primarily since I consider it cleaner and easier to navigate. KDE reminds me too much of Windows…
Nonetheless, KDE 4.1 solves the most irritating issue users had with KDE 4.0: the integration of many applications into the desktop manager and the correction of many Plasma issues. New in the release is KDE-PIM including the mail client KMail, KOrganizer for scheduling, Akregator (RSS feed reader) and KNode (newsgroup reader). Based on the announcement, the new Plasma shell should now be usable by all users and will replace the older KDE 3 shell.
KDE 4.1 is dedicated to Uwe Thiem. As a long-time contributor and educator to users in Africa about Free Software, his untimely death is a great loss to the FOSS world.
Terminal – not a drag
3 years ago
by manfred
in Linux/Unix
Here’s a cool trick for Mac OS and Linux users: if you spend a lot of time using the Terminal, there may be times when navigating to a certain location in the directory structure or typing a file and path name is just too much hassle. Of course, you have the history of previously typed commands at your disposal, replete with editing functions. Simply use the arrow keys to recall previously entered commands. And yes, you can auto complete a path or filename by typing what you know and pressing the Tab key. Even command-line averse species like Windows users have access to that.
In Linux and Mac OS X, there is one additional handy trick, though. If you want to complete a command in the Terminal and have the file location open in the file manager of your choice, but don’t want to type out an entire filename,
simply drag and drop the relevant file onto the Terminal screen.
It’s useful if you often work side-by-side with the Terminal and the GUI file manager, and can be quite a timesaver.
Boxing – virtually
3 years ago
by manfred
in Linux/Unix
Of all virtualization packages for the desktop I like the erstwhile Innotek VirtualBox solution the best. German-developed, it boasts a tiny footprint and runs efficiently. Now, it is owned by Sun who have graciously maintained its open-source status. VMware has the advantage of being able to claim greater distribution and a huge library of downloadable virtual machines. In the end, the need decides the product, I guess. In any case, I constantly seem to battle with something when it comes to the installation of VirtualBox on Linux. Frankly, if I don’t write the solution down, I tend to forget it and start the solution search cycle again the next time I want to install the product. I haven’t bothered with the installation of VirtualBox on my Mandriva 2008.1 release yet and decided to get it going.
The downloaded rpm is roughly 21MB in size – get it here. A double-click and it’s installed. Up to the point where the virtual machine (in this case, for Windows XP) is being defined, everything works. Then, the first error:
It fails to find the appropriate driver, for some or other reason. Running the command vboxdrv setup as root from the /etc/init.d directory has little effect, other than showing another error. Basically, the required service for VirtualBox cannot be started and hence the hypervisor won’t run. The issue with my system was relatively easy to diagnose.
OpenSUSE 11 released
3 years ago
by manfred
in Linux/Unix
This week has seen the release of a new Firefox version and today, openSUSE 11 is available for download. openSUSE is a good distribution, building on the well-known and widely-used SUSE stack.
Release 11 includes all the modcons a new distribution in 2008 should contain, among them KDE 4 and Gnome 2.22. openSUSE 11 promises faster installation times and enhanced support for media playback. PulseAudio is included and should make multimedia easier and less of a hassle.
The software is available as a download for a host of target platforms and, if you’re testing the waters, you may be interested in the LiveCD version. The disk management tools are of interest to me: I intend running Vault on openSUSE. More on that some other time.
Get openSUSE 11 here.
Cry of the Banshee
3 years ago
by manfred
in Linux/Unix
There are many media players to choose from on Linux. Traditionally, I’ve relied on Amarok and have rarely given any one of the others much attention. The 1.0 release of Banshee does offer a fair number of improvements over older versions and is well worth checking out.
Not only does Banshee play music files, but now supports a variety of video content, too. There’s enhanced support for music players with an added twist: connect your iPod and drag an OGG file to it, for example, and Banshee will automatically recode the unsupported file to one appropriate for the target device. Of course there may be some loss of quality, but at least there’s no intervention and manual transcoding necessary.
The interface is clean and easy to navigate. I allowed Banshee to crawl my /home directory to find whatever media it could. The result: 16339 items, all neatly ordered and album art downloads started automatically.
There’s support for managing your collection of podcasts and Last.FM integration. The search function is speedy considering the large number of files I have in this collection and overall, Banshee is a robust music player.
Read more about Banshee here, or download it. Else, installation is easy with a modern distribution: you should find Banshee in the Install & Remove Software menu.
fortune
3 years ago
by manfred
in Linux/Unix
I enjoy the little addition to my terminal window in Linux: a small message printed out whenever it is opened or whenever I change to a different user account. The program that does this is called fortune.
I’ve added fortune into the bashrc to print a message everytime I log in. Modify the file bashrc in the /etc directory by simply adding the line
fortune
right at the very bottom. Save, and that should be it. You’ll probably want to edit the file as root. Check to see whether all users are able to execute it. The default location is /usr/games. Either add that to the path for everyone or take a chance and copy the fortune executable to the /usr/bin directory like so:
cp /usr/games/fortune /usr/bin/fortune
A coincidence this evening: the daily backup job has chomped up all the available space on my second drive in katana.
I was about to do something about that in a terminal session when fortune popped up this message:
Pause for storage relocation.
Quite appropriate, no 
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