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Linux

Mac Mini First Impressions

I’ve had a Mac Mini for the last week. I am ecstatic about getting it for a couple of reasons:

  • Mac OS X is the only operating system I don’t own.

  • Max OS X is based on Unix, and I’m a big Linux guy.

  • Finder’s new functionality in Tiger is supposed to be similar to Beagle.

  • PowerPC processor – again, only processor architecture I don’t own (Pentium 4, AMD, AMD64).

Ok, so I’m bragging a little bit, but I’ve wanted a Mac for a long time, and they’ve just been too darn expensive. Even the Mac Mini I customized on Apple.com when they came out for over a $1000 (this one was a gift, it’s the entry level one).

Initial thoughts: Mac OS X is as well done as everyone says. It’s polished, the bundle iLife applications are very good, and the OS is very intuitive. It has it’s quirks – I still haven’t found where to launch Dashboard and play with the desktop widgets. I’ve looked in the software folder, I’ve looked in the dock, and I’m stumped.

The form factor is awesome. This thing is about 20% smaller than I really expected it to be. It’s just so darn cute.

The bad: The entry level Mac Mini is way too damn slow. 256 megs in a modern day operating system just doesn’t cut it. It feels sluggish. And for a real kick in the teeth, the Apple store offered to upgrade it to 512 megs for $150 with free installation. $150 for 512 meg DDR 333 stick? I can go to the local Best Buy store and get a 512 stick for $30-$40 on ad and have the Geek Squad install it for $30. I didn’t even bother to ask Apple how much 1 gig is.

Overall, I’m pretty impressed. The tiny, tiny footprint of the machine combined with a well done operating system bodes well for Apple as they switch to Intel over the next two years. I still won’t switch from Linux though.

TCLUG

I went to my first Twin Cities Linux User Group meeting Saturday. I’ve been to a few of the installfests, but was always too lazy to go downtown for a meeting.

It was pretty cool – held in the Computer Science building of the U of M, Jeff Price from Novell gave a talk on everything Novell is doing around Suse. While vague at times, Jeff gave a very good overview of how the entire suite of Novell products (Suse Linux Enterprise Server, Novell Linux Desktop, etc) work together, how NLD9 is different than Suse Professional 9.3 (corporate vs. hobbyist respectively), and various other topics.

His tone was conversational, and he skipped the slideware, which was just fine. Good participation from the audience, including sidebars on HDTV and MythTV. I’ve volunteered to burn some copies of Suse 9.3 Pro, so I’ll definitely be at the next one.

I love GNOME

I love GNOME. As I use Linux more and more these days (now averaging over 90%, the only exception these days seems to be some online music stuff), GNOME helps me do my stuff better.

Spent tonight catching up on GUADEC, the GNOME Users and Developers European Conference. All the hackers get together and listen to speeches, meet each other in person, and collaborate on GNOME.

Watched Miguel De Icaza’s keynote speech while reading a PDF document of the slides Glynn Foster presented on the 101 things to know about GNOME.

Miguel had some very interesting comments in his keynote about usability testing, and how users use a computer desktop. He threw out a challenge to the GNOME hackers, and it will be interesting to see over the 2.12 and 2.14 development cycles how the teams start to address usability, especially from a beginner standpoint. People who use GNOME every day, might miss some of the forest for the trees sometimes.

Glynn’s slides took me way back. It’s amazing to me now how long I’ve used GNOME on and off over the years. Going back to my first Red Hat Linux purchase (5.2) in January of 1997, where has the time gone. From the panel tiles, to Eazel, Helix, and how the look and feel has changed over the years to what I’m using today, it’s been revolutionary.

The donation is coming, it’s too bad the GNOME Foundation uses Paypal, as Paypal hates me. I have increased motivation to get my projects done around the house (music server, fixing 2 PCs, lots of cleaning and the basement) so I can dedicate some time to a GNOME project of some sort.

HP dv1000

I received a HP dv1000 as a gift from the Company last week, and quickly threw Ubuntu 5.04 on it.

It’s a gorgeous laptop – Centrino based, with an Intel 54g built in, built in 5 in 1 card reader, firewire, USB everywhere, and widescreen 1280×768 monitor. It’s pretty sexy for a notebook too, with a silver finish on the outside, and a shiny, glossy black finish on the inside.

Ubuntu worked great on it, other than the Centrino wireless, but Intel is starting to make a push in supporting Linux with their wireless cards. Following the How-To on the Ubuntu Forums helped, but it didn’t work until I changed my kernel from 2.6.10-5-386 to 2.6.10-5-686, and bam, everything worked.

Ubuntu works great on it, the card reader is supported, installation defaulted to the correct widescreen, DVD-RW, Synaptic touchpad worked, and battery life is excellent.

Need to throw some other applications on it before the weekend, including Tomboy, Bluefish, MP3, DVD playing, and Muine, and I’ll work on the blog layout while visiting the in-laws this weekend.

If you want to read a decent review and see pictures, click here.

The Future of Gnome

There is a brouhaha stirring on Planet Gnome, the aggregator web site for the blogs of Gnome developers.

First of all, I’d like to say, I am not a programmer, I am only a user, and I choose to use Gnome as my desktop.

I will save for another post why I choose to use Gnome on Linux, but suffice to say, I’ve been using Linux and Gnome on and off for almost 8 years, and this last year or two, almost exclusively on my personal desktop, and longer than that on the my productivity box for email, IRC, IM and storage.

A little background: Edd Dumbill kicked off the conversation a few weeks ago when he said his Gnome hacking had slowed because of lack of fun, and lack of direction of what language to code in within Gnome.

Everyone, including the big names like Havoc and Miguel have weighed in, and there have been some really good points made about the different development languages (mostly Java vs Python vs Mono/C#).

Alex summed up what the major vendors will do:

  • Novell will continue to ship Mono because it has a vested interest in its perpetuation.
  • RedHat will continue to not ship it for the foreseeable future, because they have a vested interest in not being sued.
  • Ubuntu and everyone else will eventually include Mono because users want the apps. And no matter what, the handful of apps I’ve half-started writing are all in C#.

And Paul Drain summed it up the best:

but in the end:

  • the end-user will eventually demand quality applications written in both of these languages on the desktop. And that’s the key for me. I’m just as freaked out about the Microsoft patent issue in Mono / C# that could raise it’s ugly head some day. With that said, most of the coolest and innovative applications that are being written right now for the Gnome Desktop are in Mono / C#. From Tomboy for notes taking (and let me tell you: keeping track via Tomboy as I rip my CD collection with one note on missing discs, another note on scratched discs has been a lifesaver) to Muine for listening to music (It blows Rhythmbox away in my opinion) to F-Spot for managing and tagging photos. All of these applications are applications I use daily, and just work. (Thank you Ubuntu Universe repository). I look forward to using Beagle in the future for desktop searching. In fact it was Beagle & Dashboard a few years ago when Nat was first brainstorming around Beagle that really grabbed me and sucked me back in to Linux.

I want innovation in the desktop, and applications that just work. Those, combined with Gnome’s remote desktop features, (and my passion for free software development) keep me using Gnome every day.

Learning curve

Tonight, I learned all about LVM (Logical Volume Manager) on Linux. How to take 2 hard drives, and tell Linux to look at them as one drive / directory.

Nailed it on the second attempt. Might try it on the server later in the week.

For Wed: Learning rsync. Then I can do incremental backups from the server to my dedicated backup box via cron and never worry about my data again.

What have I been up to? Jinzora!

I’ve been playing with Jinzora this week, as you could see in the screenshot in my previous post.

I’m very impressed. I still have some glitches to work out – my ID3 tags don’t seem to be importing correctly, and I downloaded Easytag to check, and they looked right. A light bulb just went on, and I’ll have to check to see if it’s using id3v1, instead of version 2. I’m 99% positive all my tags are v2.

I really like the layout, it’s one of the best install routines I’ve ever seen, the album art it automatically grabs and puts up random is cool, and it does everything else. My only complaint, is that it doesn’t seem (and I’m new to this, could be wrong) a recursive file scan after the initial import to check for changes. One of the cooler things about Netjuke was I could update my ID3 tags, scan for changes, and it would fix it in the database. That, and the web pages seem to load slow, even on my local lan.

I’m slowly re-encoding all my CDs after the great hard drive crash of ’04, and doing it in MP3 this time, instead of Ogg. My new MP3 player cheats, and won’t do Ogg (though it does Napster2Go, but I’m not signing up for that).

Could it be?

Could that be silwenae.net making a return? With the music server?

I have proof:

silwenae.net screenshot

And it’s streaming music as we speak.

There’s some kinks to work out, so if you had access to the old music server, I have some things to fix first. But progress is being made!

Ubuntu migration (almost) complete

I’ve upgraded 3 of my main machines to Ubuntu 5.04, aka the Hoary Hedgehog release. The laptop went flawlessly, as did my gaming machine, which is installed on a second hard drive. Most impressively, the ATI binary drivers, with the change to X.org, stayed and worked on my gaming box automagically. OpenGL is beautiful, the fonts are beautiful, and I’ve switched to the Clearlooks theme from Industrial.

My two major complaints are the Industrial theme disappearing and they’ve changed Nautilus’ spatial nature. Clearlooks is acceptable as a replacement, but I don’t understand why they’ve had to go and screw with Nautilus. Gnome’s default behavior for Nautilus is to open every window in a new window. I like it that way. Ubuntu, being a Gnome-centric distribution, and dedicated to releasing after every major Gnome release, should follow that direction. I can understand why some people don’t like it, but it strikes me as odd they’ve made this change.

Only the server is left to upgrade, and based on the 3 upgrades I’ve done from Warty to Hoary, should go flawless. Then it’s a matter of getting the server up on the network, which is a different story after my network rebuild last weekend.