New Hardware, More Ubuntu

My Phenom II X3 720 (Heka core, 2.8 GHZ) Black Edition is now running with all 4 cores in Ubuntu. I purchased a new motherboard, ram and the X3 all at the same time last month. Some of the older steppings of this processor may not allow this procedure. My CPU has a product number (OPN) of HDZ720WFGIBOX. The serial number should begin with a 9. It is Socket AM3.

The motherboard is a Gigabyte MA785GM-US2H. It has a dual bios built in. It also allows you to image the bios to disk (make sure you have an NTFS or FAT32 partition) so you can easily undo this if problems arise.

Here’s how to do it.

Restart your computer and enter the BIOS. Look for a setting called Advanced Clock Calibration. My board uses an Award BIOS and I found it in the MB Intelligent Tweaker (M.I.T.) menus. It so happens it is the first item selectable in the M.I.T.

Open Advanced Clock Calibration. There you will find the two pertinent options, EC Firmware Selection and Advanced Clock Calibration again. To enable the fourth core, change EC Firmware Selection to Hybrid (normal is default) and Advanced Clock Calibration needs to be set to All Cores (disabled is default).

That’s all there is to it. Back out by pressing esc until you get back to the Main Menu. Select Save & Exit Setup, answer Y to save your changes and the system will reboot.

This procedure will work with some other motherboards as well. Just do your research. There is reported success unlocking additional cores with the Phenom II 550 BE as well.

Next, we have the latest release of Ubuntu, Karmic Koala, 9.10. While at first I had problems on older hardware, it turns out the best thing to do is get your best kit and have a go at upgrading. Better yet, if you can, do a clean install, as Ubuntu now supports the Ext4 filesystem by default. Upgrades will retain their Ext3 filesystems.

I was a little leery of Ubuntu 9.10. Previous experience with the last intermediate release before a new Long Term Support release was no fun. When they rolled out previous intermediates, I had the impression it was really an extension of beta testing. I’ve had my share of things “breaking” with these. In one case I got rid of the Ubuntu install and installed the latest stable Debian. But then I got tired of Debian being so slow to offer improvements and went back to Ubuntu.

Adrian Kingsley-Hughes wrote a piece back on October 2 and I responded to his article with what you read in the previous paragraph. But Canonical has evidently improved its process and has made a technological leap with this release. Even though it’s six months until the release of Lucid Lynx, the next LTS release set for next April, it looks to be the finest Linux release ever in my estimation. Karmic promised much and delivered as long as you are running relatively new hardware. Canonical is positioning itself as a major supplier of modern operating system software.

But don’t take my word for it. Try it yourself. If you’re running windows, you can install Ubuntu and, if need be, remove as you do any other Windows application. Use Wubi to do this. Or download the live CD from Ubuntu. You won’t believe what you can get for no more than the effort of a download.

If you don’t have broadband access, you can purchase a full set of the release. Make sure you understand the upgrade process before you do though. It may make more sense to wait until next April for the release of Ubuntu 10.4.

New Build, Not Re-installing the OS

After yet another surgery last December, I was finally able to do something I actually like doing about six weeks ago. Things are slowly but surely beginning to resemble normalcy.

After getting our tax refund, it seemed a good time to build a new computer. As I always have pieces and parts about, it’s not too expensive. I had a case already, but it only accepts a micro-ATX board. It seemed like a good excuse to try AMD’s 780G chipset. This chipset integrates ATI HD 3200 graphics on the north bridge, and allows adding a graphics card in a PCIe x 16 slot to achieve crossfire performance.

My choices included: a Gigabyte MA78GM-US2H mother board, AMD Athlon X2 7750 cpu (Kuma core, AM2+), and 4 GB of OCZ Gold 1066 DDR2 RAM. I ended up replacing a power supply too before the build was stable, so I bought an OCZ StealthXStream 500w PS. All of this stuff went into a nice black mATX case along with a 250 GB WD SATAII drive (with Ubuntu 8.04 already installed on it) and a Samsung OEM DVD-RW that were in the original Ubuntu box I had.

Now you might be asking whatever possessed me to use a drive with a pre-installed OS on it. It was kind of a test of the stability of Ubuntu. Could it handle all the hardware changes, including going from an Nvidia FX 5500 AGP discrete graphics card to the ATI built-in graphics. This transition seemed easier than a motherboard swap I did on my wife’s computer last fall under XP without a fresh install. Even though all data was backed-up first in both cases, it was still less labor intensive than having to re-install all software and reload that data. But with Windows, I had to back-step service packs first, then re-install SP 3 and all the updates subsequent to that. What a pain!

Additionally, we have lots of data, some over 25 years old that has crossed from an Atari 8-bit, to an Atari ST, then a Mac+ (System 6.0.x), Mac II (System 7.1), then to Windows 3.x, through ‘95, ‘98, NT 3.51, NT 4.0, XP, and now Linux. I know what you’re thinking̶–what kind of fool does that? My answer is: just a fool that can’t let go of the first BASIC code he ever wrote.

After 2 incremental upgrades to Ubuntu, I now have Ubuntu 9.04 as my main platform on fairly modern hardware. So far, I like it, and without having to do an OS re-install. Only problem is the ATI 3D driver doesn’t fully support Compiz. But I can live without all the bells and whistles Compiz adds. Yes, Compiz looks nice when it works, but I can’t see the benefit in terms of functionality over the plain Gnome desktop, now at version 2.26.1 with Ubuntu 9.04. That’s good enough for me.

Ubuntu 9.04 is great! My wife will continue being a Windows user (it helps pay the bills), but I see no reason for me to ever go back. And I’m not going to need to purchase Windows 7 twice for our separate personal computers. Goodbye to Microsoft and their intrusive Genuine Advantage or whatever they’re going to call it now. And goodbye for now to the hassles of anti-virus worries.

Ubuntu Update—Gutsy Gibbon, Version 7.10

Gutsy Gibbon, Ubuntu 7.10, appears to finally be stable on my computer. The desktop box in question is not cutting edge, but surely must be somewhere in the middle of the technological continuum of computers running this newest incarnation of Ubuntu Linux. A computer with an Athlon 64, Nvidia GeForce FX5500, 160 gb hard drive, with 512 mb of ram installed should not be obsolete, but was made to seem so. Just as I thought Ubuntu was getting too easy, Gutsy came along and shattered that notion

For those of you hoping that Linux could surge into the vacuum created by the shortcomings of Microsoft Vista, don’t hold your breath. Your lungs will implode. Although Ubuntu is oft touted as the easiest Linux, it’s far from perfect. Ubuntu again requires a skilled technician to diagnose and stabilize a problematic installation. The previous version, 7.04, seemed to be more stable and easier to diagnose. There were few fixes this time around.

First of all, the upgrade from Feisty Fawn, 7.04, did not go as planned. It should have gone without a hitch, but Update Manager hung at the point of re-writing the boot sectors for GRUB, the boot manager, to find the new installation, or the old one for that matter. I was left with an unbootable hard disk. Hopefully this has been addressed, but I cannot guarantee that it has. Just make sure any data you want saved has been backed up somewhere before trying to update from Feisty. My solution to the problem was a freshly installing from the Gutsy Live CD, which necessitated re-formatting the boot hard disk.

My second problem is with Gutsy installing Compiz Fusion as part of the default GUI. This is where my Linux box began to look like it wasn’t up to the task of running Ubuntu 7.10. The first thing I noticed is that any games using Open GL wouldn’t work at all. Open GL was non-existent apparently, because the Open GL screensavers installed by default only would give me a blank screen. Ultimately this was resolved by removing Compiz and using the unrestricted driver for the Nvidia graphics card. Unfortunately, advanced features of Compiz Fusion require the use of the restricted drivers. If you haven’t tried to use those features yet, then your workload is cut in half. But revamping of the user interface to adjust the desktop appearance has made turning on those features practically irresistible. It was only after the restricted driver was installed that I learned that my video card still wouldn’t support these so-called advanced features, even after switching out the old Geforce 2 MX 400 and putting in the FX 5500 I had laying around. To say the least, Canonical did not use a user-friendly approach. It was only after several months of trial and error and a multitude of application crashes (everything crashed) that I discerned that going back to the unrestricted video driver was the solution for stability.

So now I have a stable Ubuntu installation. I hope Canonical improves its approach in the future. This release was somewhat delayed as it was, but that seems to be the norm these days. I was considering evaluating a home network server based upon Linux, but the release of Gutsy set my projects back a bit. I’m also recovering from another surgery that restricted my ability to type, but I’m on the mend.

Next time, instead of upgrading Ubuntu, I think I’ll give Debian Etch a try on this dedicated Linux box. I already have it running in MS Virtual PC under Windows XP on my other computer. Stay tuned for details.

If I Have Windows XP, Why Do I Use Linux

This is the uncensored version of what I posted to a long-running thread on the Ubuntu Forum that is paraphrased as this article’s title. It was difficult not bashing Microsoft in the process of responding, but that’s the rule on the Ubuntu Forum, although it’s okay to bash the United States. Ubuntu is more scared of Microsoft then the United States, as they should be, and as you might consider. It is Microsoft’s bad attitude towards end-users, legal or otherwise, that has spawned the interest in Linux for home and small office users.

To start with, let me say this. The only reason I must run Windows XP at all is the necessity of using certain Adobe products to fulfill my customers’ requests, especially in the area of desktop design and publishing. If it was not for that, and my customers would accept my end product as a PDF file, Windows would be gone. I do not dual-boot any computer, by the way. Windows XP is segregated, on it’s own computer, just like a quarantined patient with an incurable infectious disease is in a hospital. I don’t get infected with viruses or bots, or anything else on that box, but you never know. I do take business email from my clients on it.

Now let me tell you what my attraction is to Linux. Let’s assume you wouldn’t be reading this unless you want to learn more about computers, so no offense is directed towards anybody reading this.

Windows has been bloated since the release of Windows 95, to start with, besides all the software that runs on it. If I had raw numbers for you, I’d love to provide them, but the amount of space left for your stuff on a hard drive after a Linux installation, complete with GUI, seems to be a lot greater than after installing any flavor of Windows since 1995.

Secondly, there are very few viruses in the wild to affect Linux/Unix users, and quite frankly I can’t think of a one. Furthermore, Linux users are generally more knowledgeable about their own computers’ operating environments, and take measures to guard against intrusion of any sort. The firewall is up by default after installation in Ubuntu, and many of us are behind NAT firewalls built into routers. There’s not a target painted on our backs because of the lack of precautions or knowledge.

We’re not abused by script-kiddies that know Windows, because that’s what their parents provide for them. We’re not harassed by adware, spyware, botware, trojans, and browser hijackers, because our numbers are too small and disparate to be worth the time of the thieves and miscreants that bombard Windows’ users.

When we install applications, like media players (Apple?) and pdf viewers (Adobe?) and other useful software, they do not try to steal processor time and ram at boot-up so they supposedly load faster when they are needed. Now that’s a joke and a real load of [expletive deleted]! They’re probably just spying on you like everybody else tries to do. It’s amazing how arrogant some Windows software vendors are, as if their software is the only thing that’s ever going to run on your computer(s).

It’s just one irritant after another with Windows. General internet access is one reason I use Linux. Secondly there is the fact that there’s no need to use Windows for everyday, run-of-the-mill tasks that nearly all computer users do. This blog gets updated and edited in Linux. Everything I need for this can be run in Linux. And there are many Windows programs that will run under the WINE, which is a compatibility layer for Windows applications in Linux. Thus Linux serves as virtually impenetrable layer of protection against a multitude of plagues and invaders that Windows Users must deal with.

The third reason I use Linux is that I would like a final and permanent solution from ever having to use Microsoft’s operating systems at all anymore. Steve Ballmer and his rants has finally pushed me over the edge. Microsoft has no respect for the everyday home customer in the least. They believe you are stealing from them before you’ve done anything with their software anymore. They built their empire on the backs of hardware builders like Gateway, Dell, and others, as well as end-users like me who like to build our own computers. They’ve taken one step in the right direction by officially recognizing people like me as OEMs, but it’s too little, too late.

They craftily bamboozled their way into ownership of DOS to begin with. First Digital Research Inc. and founder Gary Kildall, who were in the process of converting Z-80/8080 CP/M code to run on the 8088/8086 Intel architecture, botched a meeting with IBM executives because Kildall “wanted to go flying” instead. Then Bill Gates bought a version of DOS, QDOS, that was being “cloned” from Digital Research’s CP/M 2.2, by a fellow named Tim Paterson, for $50,000, and a job at Microsoft to continue his work. “Legalities aside, Microsoft’s original DOS was based in part on Kildall’s CP/M.” Supposedly the deal, originally to be with DRI, included a non-disclosure agreement, which was the deal breaker with Kildall. So after making a windfall profit to provide DOS to IBM for IBM’s first personal computers, Microsoft took virtually the same OS and released it, virtually giving it away for a time, as a competitor to PC-DOS to IBM-clone makers under the name MS-DOS. And then they have the nerve to talk about intellectual property. We won’t even broach the subject of the theft of the GUI from Xerox. Apple at least licensed the concept first from Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center.

So, there you have it. This is why I support Linux, and open source software in general. It creates at the very least a baseline of what commercial products must do to be considered worthy of your money. So from that view point, it actually pays to know what’s available in the open source world. And most of the time, I have to say I’m very impressed with what’s out there. And you’ll never encounter buyer’s remorse. The upside is control. You can build your very own computer from components of your choice, making the trade-offs of strengths and weaknesses tailored to your needs and budget if you wish, or buy a system from Dell with Ubuntu already loaded and ready to go. Once you’ve learned Linux, you can tweak source code to your heart’s content, or actually contribute to building the software you want. It’s all up to you.

Great Tip For Vista Upgrade Owners

It’s been a long time since I’ve even thought about putting a new article here, as I’ve been a bit tied up with personal health issues. What computer time I’ve had has been spent getting support for my health issues as well as getting and providing support for Ubuntu Linux users at the official support site, Ubuntu Forums.

Several days ago, a user wanted to wipe his hard disk drive and re-install Windows Vista. The trouble was, he no longer seemed to be able to locate his Windows XP install CD, and only had the upgrade CD handy. Here’s a method that allows you to re-install from the Vista Upgrade CD to a blank hard disk drive. The original author, an ex-Microsoft support employee, wishes to remain anonymous for reasons that will be apparent as you read the rest of this post.

I have nothing to add or subtract, or make any editorial remark other than to state the following disclaimers.

I, D. J. Chandler, and the original anonymous author, have no wish for, nor do we support, anyone using this information in a manner that could be construed as illegal, or in any way a violation of the copyright or intellectual property rights of Microsoft Corporation. The following information is provided as is, and I and the original author are in no way responsible for its misuse or damages that could occur because of its use and/or misuse. Support for problems appears in the body of the following information. Please do not make posts for support to this blog, as they will be ignored. To the best of my knowledge, this is the first time for this information to be made public in a distributable form. The following is not my intellectual property, and may be reprinted and distributed under the Creative Commons License at the bottom of the article. Please include this license anytime this work is re-published, in any way, shape, or form. Derivative works are unrestricted otherwise.

Great Tip For Vista Upgrade Owners

When Vista first loads up, you’re going to see a big box, and it has the button you want in the middle, the one that says “Install Now”. Click that.

Next up, it comes up with a screen that says “Enter your product key for activation”, with an example sticker, and a blank box that will allow you to type your product key. We don’t want to do this just yet, so uncheck the box below that which says “Automatically activate windows when I’m online”, make sure the box is blank, and click next in the bottom right hand corner.

It’s going to say “Do you want to enter your product key now” and give a reason why you should, including the fact that IF you do not, you may have to reinstall.

Click “No”.

Select the edition of Windows Vista you have purchased, (in this example I will use Home Premium), and click the box in the bottom right hand corner that says “I have selected the edition of Windows Vista that I purchased”.

**NOTE**: It is important to never select HomeBasicN, BusinessN, or Starter.
None of these products are available in North America, and will REQUIRE you to reinstall your OS, as you won’t have a product key and/or way of activating it without the key. HomeBasicN and BusinessN are only available in Europe due to AntiTrust laws (Windows Media Player and DRM, look it up if you want more info), and Vista Starter is for developing nations (it has less features than Home Basic).

Click Next.

It will ask you if you accept the terms of the License agreement (only installable on one partition of one computer legally, includes refund/warranty information as well.

If you accept click the check-box which says “I accept the license terms”, and then Click Next.

For our first install, click “Custom (advanced) on this screen, as the Upgrade option should be grayed out.

Then the list of hard drives/partitions will show up as to what is available for you to install upon. Click the drive you wish to install it on (it will also provide advanced, but easy to follow options if you wish to delete/format or create a new partition. When you’re done, click next, and it will go through the install.

Upon first boot, remove the dvd, and restart.

**Post Clean-Install**

Upon the desktop loading, insert the Vista disc, and click “run setup.exe”.

It will ask you for your permission to run an identified program, click “Allow”.

Click “Install now”.

it will ask you if you wish to get the latest security updates before installation, you can choose whichever you prefer, but an active internet connection is required for the updates options.

At this point, it will request that you put in your product key, and put it in this time.

**Product Key Info**

A product key is on a sticker with your Vista disc, and is 25 characters alpha-numeric (letters and numbers). The following characters are not found in product keys: A, E, I, O, U, L, S, Z, N, 1, 5, 0.

The most commonly confused characters are B’s (as in Bravo) & 8’s, and D’s (as in Delta) and Q’s (as in Québec).

**End Product Key Info**

Once you have entered your product key (it will put the dashes in for you, it’s at least courteous), you can choose to have it activate Vista for you upon connection to the internet. Then click next, and it will go about the “upgrade”.

Upon boot into the OS again, you should be able to activate without having installed XP.

**NOTES**

1. This walkthrough was made by a former MS employee, who is now wishing to be anonymous. If you find any major faults (I’m thinking mostly in what is and is not in product keys), I blame it on brainwashing, and the fact that it’s been a while since I worked there

2. Was before a lot of updates happened, so this hasn’t been tested on a fully updated version of Vista, as I refuse to have it on this (Ubuntu Linux) computer except as a Virtual Machine, so it would be ideal to do it before updating, also Vista SP1 may fix this as well, I’m expecting it will.

3. Any feedback (positive or negative) can be sent to
upgradewithoutxp (at) gmail (dot) com.

Great Tip For Vista Upgrade Owners is licensed under a
Creative Commons Public Domain License.

Building Computers, Cheap

There’s a new cpu coming in today, but the UPS guy hasn’t arrived yet, so I decided to bring the blog up to date. There’s not a whole lot new going on. Dell is really selling computers with Ubuntu and the Ubuntu Forums are picking up a lot of new members, so I’ve been spending lots of time helping the newbies starting out for the first time with Linux.

My wife’s computer is getting a “new” build. It’s not going to be entirely new, but it’s probably time to make sure she’s ready for Vista. Roberta, my wife, is a certified Microsoft Office User Specialist, or MOUS. It’s probably only a matter of time that the IT department has to make way for Office 2007, which means they will have to roll out Vista for Business as well, reluctant though they may be. One of her perks is getting a copy of MS Office to install on her home computer. She’s not in the IT department, but the IT guys lean on her heavily to help others in her office with MS Office issues, so it’s mandatory that her computer is ready for Vista and Office 2007 fairly soon. My last hand-me-down won’t do for Vista, but it will be great for Ubuntu Feisty Fawn. A 1.3 ghz cpu will be a huge improvement over the 550 mhz PIII I’m using now, and I’ll have a full gigabyte of ram as I’ll be able to recycle some of the ram from the PIII box.

PC means personal computer. To me, that means nobody should have to share their computer with anybody, just like you shouldn’t have to share your underwear drawer with anybody. It’s for your stuff, and you should have it set up just the way you like it. So, she ’s getting a motherboard with onboard graphics, sound, and networking I picked up in the returns area at MicroCenter, the CPU from this computer, an Athlon 64, because I get the new faster one that I got at a huge discount that only just arrived from Newegg via UPS, and some new PC 3200 ram I got at MicroCenter. They had a rebate thing going on, so she’s getting the 512 mb of ram I bought last Sunday for $24.99 after the rebate. That’s all she really needs, and I believe in doing things a bit cheaply, but not too cheap. My method is to wait for the really new stuff to come out, and buy the stuff they are trying to get rid of at deep discount, but hardware that has already stood up to the beatings the bleeding edgers give it. You still end up with something that will keep up with the new operating systems and office software, but neither one of us needs to be on the leading edge, let alone the bleeding edge, of technology. At 55 and 49 years of age, we’re not big game players. We just want to be able to do our work on the platform our offices need us to work with. I telecommute, hence my huge amounts of free time, plus I do all my work at home. I can still get away with using Office 2000, but I need to run Adobe InDesign and other graphics software and have tons of high quality fonts for the design aspects of the work I do. So I need the greater speed due to the graphics, video, and presentations I work with. She brings work home occasionally, usually to work on a .NET routine to automate some process in her department. It’s a lot easier to think about stuff like that when you’re not being interrupted with questions every couple of minutes about MS Excel or Word. So we each have our own computers.

I highly recommend this to every family, even if somebody has to settle for something a little older and slower. The adults can usually get by with the older stuff. If monitoring children is a problem, just don’t let them have computers in their bedroom or some out of the way part of the house. Make them use the computer where you can watch, and whatever you do, never let them get administrative privileges unless they’ve earned your full trust. Another thing is that if the kids know you’ll inherit their computer in a year or two, they’ll need to be more careful about what they do with their computers. We can talk about networking, recovering data and snooping in browsing histories some other time.

Right know, it’s time to break out the toolkit! Fun, fun, fun, at least for this geeky guy.

Do You Need Photoshop?

When you have Adobe’s Photoshop among your software tools, you know you’ve arrived as a computer graphics/design professional. Photoshop puts tools on your desktop that allow you to do just about anything conceivable with a digital photo. And if someway you need to manipulate a photo isn’t built into Photoshop, somebody somewhere has written a plug-in to make it happen. If you can’t do what you need to do in Photoshop, chances are it’s just that you don’t know how.

I’ve been using Photoshop since version 3.0. I would say that means about 13 years. The copyright date in my original Photoshop manual is 1994. I obtained my first copy when Adobe absorbed Aldus back in 1994. Up to that time I was an Aldus customer, as they were the publishers of PageMaker, and I was using Aldus PhotoStyler for image manipulation. When Adobe took over, they offered some great deals to all us former Aldus customers, which were way too good to pass up. I’m not necessarily an Adobe fanboy, but after they bought out Frame (who published FrameMaker, commercial desktop publishing software for Unix, Mac,  and Windows, which I also owned, Mac and Windows versions) as well, my choices became extremely limited. I’ve therefore owned a lot of Adobe software in the past 13 years, most recently having upgraded to InDesign CS2. With the exception of Quark Express for desktop publishing, Adobe is the prime source for desktop publishing tools, with fonts and font management, great prepress tools, InDesign, and great tools for image design and manipulation with Illustrator and Photoshop. And then of course there’s Acrobat, the de facto standard for document exchange and sharing. There is virtually no way to be a graphics professional without having some contact with Adobe and their software products. And along with Microsoft and Intel, they form the triumvirate that dictates the current standards of personal computing.

Well, I’ve been using a couple of products that are Open Source instead of using Photoshop. When you already know how to use Photoshop pretty well and it’s already installed on your computer, it’s difficult to make yourself use anything else. But I’ve resisted just so I could learn enough about The Gimp (Linux, Mac OSX, and Windows) and Paint.NET (Windows only) just so I could tell you they’re good enough to do all your image and photo processing. The Gimp is available under the Gnu General Public License, and Paint.NET is available under the MIT License. (License information corrected per comment of Rick Brewster. Paint.NET’s logo and icon(s) are licensed under Creative Commons. Thanks, Rick.) Now that I’ve used both of these products, I’ll go out on a limb and say that you really DON’T need Photoshop. Anything I’ve needed to do in the past two months in terms of photo or bit-mapped graphic manipulation has been done in one or the other of these Open Source applications. In fact I’ve been able to do things that aren’t possible trying to use the combination of Photoshop and Acrobat, but had no trouble doing using PDF Creator and Paint.NET.

I’m sure this could cause a great deal of disagreement from Photoshop users, but I’m equally sure that those who would argue loudest haven’t even tried to use anything else,  except maybe MacPaint or Windows Paint. And there’s great resistence to Open Source from people who’ve spent lots of money for their preferred commercial software tools.  A high level of pride is common among those who have invested both time and money in order to master software tools such as Photoshop. Because of the cost and learning curve, there’s a lack of belief that something can be free AND good, especially so in The Gimp’s case due to the association with Open Source operating systems. Yet these will be the same people who’ll toss away that commercial software whenever their publisher comes out with a new version, even though that software has not lost one bit of capability. I know of some people who upgrade just to upgrade, just because there’s something new out there, disregarding the fact that publishers put out a new version with at least part of the equation being revenue enhancement. One could argue that Microsoft in at least one particular case released a product purely for increasing cash flow. Remember Windows ME? You’re fortunate if you avoided that mess. The jury is still out on Vista.

I’ll get off my soapbox now. But my point is that Open Source upgrades that are free obviously have some other purpose.  Upgrades of Paint.NET or The Gimp and other Open Source applications mean enhanced functionality, pure and simple, either by way of bug fixes and/or increased capability for the end user. This is one aspect of the Open Source philosophy that makes it such a beautiful thing.

Give The Gimp or Paint.NET a try.

Ubuntu Upgrade Update

The Feisty Fawn has finally arrived.

I hate waiting for things. But I hate even more waiting for something that could normally be done in a very short time. So, eleven days after the official release of Ubuntu 7.04, I gritted my teeth and invoked Update Manager from the root terminal window. If that sounds intimidating, I have to tell you it’s at least as easy as downloading a CD ISO file, burning the image to CD, and then letting the upgrade run from the CD. You can do it that way if you want, but I just typed one short line into a good old-fashioned command line interface. All I did was hit “Alt-F2″, waited a couple of seconds for the command line dialog box to come up, entered
gksu “update-manager -c”
and waited a second or two more for the administrative password dialog box to appear. Then I entered my main account password, pressed enter, and we were off to the races.

Now I do need to give a couple of short words of caution here. If you don’t have reliable broadband access this is probably not a good idea. But since I have a solid ISP  and a 3.0 mb/sec dsl hook-up, this only took about an hour and half. The other caveat is that you can’t skip upgrades. So if you have Ubuntu 6.06 LTS (Dapper Drake) on your computer, you need to upgrade to 6.10 (Edgy Eft) before you can go on to 7.04.

After just an hour or so playing around with the desktop, I have to say I’m impressed. One of the best things about Feisty is you also get the latest Gnome Desktop, version 2.18. Something that bugged me in previous versions of Gnome was the inability to individually select colors for window borders, dialog boxes, application windows, selections, and fonts. It’s not quite as flexible as Windows XP in that regard, but it’s a giant step in the right direction. The default color schemes are ok, but I’m one of those people that just can’t resist tweaking things.

And everything seems faster too, unlike what happens when you upgrade to Vista. There’s no need for new graphics cards or more memory. Things feel tighter and quicker. And feel is what’s most important in a user interface. A good user interface gives you a sense of control. How many times Windows has gone off to Never Never Land on me I can’t count, let alone the many BSODs (Blue Screens Of Death) I’ve encountered. That just doesn’t happen in Linux. No single application can hog the whole cpu. There’s always a way to intervene if things go awry. You always have the ability to start the system monitor and see what’s going on, and can kill a process if necessary. I think that’s only happened to me once in the five years I’ve used Linux, and I know that was my fault.

So here we have an economical (FREE) method of enhancing an existing set of hardware’s performance with an enhanced user interface that provides greater control to the end-user. And you get updates of all the applications bundled with the operating system distribution. What more can you ask for?

D.J.’s Resources—Free & Open Source Software For You

What sets me apart from a lot of computer users is my experience in the publishing business, so I decided to start my first weblog. Although that experience was in layout, editing and proofreading, this is my first time writing for the public. But that experience also gave me a lot of exposure to the tools of the trade. Remember Xerox’s Ventura Publisher? Remember when RTF files were the standard format for document exchange, and serious writers only used WordPerfect or WordStar? There’s even a continuing education credit on my resumé for learning to write macros in WordPerfect. Since then I’ve also learned and used InDesign, PageMaker, FrameMaker, PhotoShop, Microsoft Office and more.

Here I offer opinions and reviews on free software that I actually use now, with my emphasis on free software available under the GNU public license, Mozilla, AFPL, etc. With these tools, anyone can configure their own computing platform at little cost, customized any way they would like. There are links to these software resources as well to help my readers enhance their library of software tools. My experiences building my own computers and adding new hardware to existing systems will also be covered.

The operating systems I currently use include Ubuntu Linux 7.10 and Windows XP Professional, SP2 on separate computers. I try to only use applications that run under both systems so I have a basis of comparison cross-platform. I also have Debian Edgy available in a Windows Virtual Machine. Sorry, but I haven’t used a Mac since System 7.5.3.

I hope you enjoy the material I present here. Please register and submit your comments. I’ll do my best to respect your privacy and secure things from my end.

D.J.