Okie dokie... I've been poking around fairly seriously in Canonical's latest release of Ubuntu; 9.10, also known as Karmic Koala.
I'm impressed.
The number of obvious and marked improvements over previous releases is notable, most notable of these are the improvements in look and feel, boot speed and hardware support.
Starting things off with the "look and feel" aspect, or as I have started to call it, the "shock and awe" factor.
I'm glad to report massive improvements across the board when it comes to the texture and unity of the GUI. Most notable of this to me was the fact that screen only changes appearance twice in the boot process (after the BIOS and GRUB loader screen of course).
Yes, I know it's minor, but seeing loading screen after loading screen during the boot process is something that has bugged me about EVERY non-Apple OS since DOS stopped being popular.
Apple has long had a minimum of screen changes in the boot process, namely, one. Two at most.
Of course until Windows 7, Microsoft's OS's were the most flagrant violators of this with windows 2000 winning the "Fail" title by showing a staggering 5 different loading screens.
Past releases of Ubuntu weren't much better, usually showing 3-4, even if they were fairly brief.
However, now with the change in the boot up process introduced in 9.10 Linux joins in the rest of the OS world with a truly elegant boot appearance. A sincere bravo for tackling something that, while unimportant in functionality, adds to the appearance of refinement that open source software has rarely had in the past.
Add in that some playing around with Compiz settings will allow even an "ancient" laptop like mine produce UI visual effects that put Windows 7 to shame with 1/4 of the hardware requirements.
I'm not going to compare to Apple's Quartz because, unlike Windows, Apple's window manager CAN technologically provide all the effects that Compiz does, they simply are not offered... Compiz DOES have lighter hardware requirements though.
Adding on to the list of visual refinements is the new default Gnome theme which is still called "Human". It offers the smoothest and most modern style look that Ubuntu has had yet and I'm proud to say that this finally allows the default appearance of Ubuntu to easily contend with the polished look and, dare I say it, FEEL of Mac OS X and Windows 7.
Another important appearance note is that the new theme FINALLY loses the "Windows 95" era look for most of it's elements to gain a smooth, graduated and natural visual "feel" to it's user interface that is almost as pleasant as OS X. Now it's Microsoft's turn to do the same for Windows ;)
There was obviously a lot of attention and effort put into filing off the rougher edges of the Gnome UI in this release and it not only shows, but will likely pay off in terms of user acceptance.
The look and feel of the latest release of Ubuntu gets two enthusiastic thumbs up from me.
Second in my top three favorite changes is the radical decrease in boot time!
First numbers on the time required to boot fully on my T42 Thinkpad***:
- An install of Ubuntu 9.04 with a few modifications took just 1 minute 13 seconds
- A default install with drivers (and then fully patched to SP3) of Windows XP took 1 minute 43 seconds
- A highly tuned install (with drivers) of a completely up-to-date version of Windows XP takes 48 seconds.
**All these numbers are from the GRUB bootloader. Booting to the grub bootloader takes 12 seconds.
***IBM Thinkpad T42 Model: WMK2373 Specs: 1.5Ghz Pentium M, 2GB DDR 333 RAM, Western Digital 160GB Scorpio 5400RPM IDE Hard Drive, Radeon 7500 32MB Video.
Yes. That last number is correct, it takes 48 SECONDS to boot my Thinkpad into Windows XP. Granted, that is with a LOT of tweaking and tuning and trimming on my part, but still. 48 seconds. One minute from the press of the power button on a system going on 5 years old.
Ok, now for Ubuntu 9.10's out-of-the-box boot time:
43 seconds.
Smokin'!!
If they were looking to improve startup time they succeeded brilliantly! A 50% improvement in boot time over the previous release is a good reason to upgrade by itself!
The final item in my "top three favorite changes" list is 9.10 FINALLY functional out of the box with all of the hardware of my esoteric IBM T42 Thinkpad. All of the previous releases of Ubuntu had severe hardware issues that broke some functionality or another, especially after placing the system into standby or hibernate. These problems required manual workarounds or modifications, and a few I simply had to work around because there were no fixes.
There remains the higher power draw in standby problem (~4 watts instead of 1) but according to many reports, this might be an issue with my specific and fairly rare model of Thinkpad as most T42 Thinkpad users have reported this issue as resolved.
Aside from that one minor standby issue, I've had no other problems.
Near flawless hardware support top to bottom, it even worked when hot docking/undocking with the docking station (finally) with install defaults. Wireless network performance was increased by nearly 75%, massively improved EXA rendering support and performance for my old Radeon 7500, even the annoying inconsistency of the LCD backlight dimming on battery power is fixed!
Yes, some custom tweaks were still made, namely with Laptop-Mode but that's me being fussy ;)
All in all, Ubuntu 9.10 is a marked improvement over previous versions in not only technical ways and in hardware support, but in usability and appearance as well.
With improved performance, increased hardware support, an easier to use layout, painless install, refined UI and better isolation from the "scariness" of Linux, this is by FAR the most consumer friendly version of Linux ever.
If Ubuntu wasn't a major contender in the consumer OS field before, it is now.
I know Mark Shuttleworth stated that he wanted 9.10 to go head to head Windows 7, but I think he was aiming a little low. Even for "Joe Average", Ubuntu is now beyond Microsoft's offering in stability, speed, performance and, possibly most importantly, price.
I've been converting users over to Ubuntu where it was prudent and possible. I have not had one problem or complaint yet and I can't see the excellent quality of Karmic Koala doing anything less than making my life even easier and making users safer and happier.
Pardon this play on a saying, but If you haven't looked at Ubuntu lately, look again.
Great job to all those working on and who use Ubuntu, it truly is Linux for Human Beings...
If you haven't already, go get yourself a copy now and try it.
Saturday, November 21, 2009
Saturday, October 10, 2009
Scam of the Moment Alert
Wow... Just WOW.....
Computer and internet based scams and rip-off are attacking a new class of people and this time it could be more of a threat than ever before to the already straining wallets of "average Joe/Jane".
Into the picture comes "www.doublemyspeed.com".
Now the site in and itself is nothing special, typical "download a trial that reports hundreds and hundreds of false positives and forces you to buy it in order to 'clean' your system" scam. Nothing out of the ordinary in regard to typical scareware schemes that try and trick you into spending money to "fix" your system. Whether or not there actually is anything wrong with it in the first place. Of course I tried they crapware that was being hawked and it found THOUSANDS of "errors" in a mint system, freshly installed and custom tuned by me. Upon reviewing the logs, it was mostly fluff and false reports.
I digress however, this write up is NOT about crap software. Instead it's about HOW this junk is being hawked to the unwashed masses.
What is disturbing to me is that I heard this garbage being pumped out over my local RADIO station!
Oh man... this is something incredibly ugly because this is another conduit that will primarily target the most BLISSFULLY ignorant of users.
Hearing your computer might be "infected" on in the context of the radio either at work or on the road, will aid in planting the seeds of concern into the the minds of people like grandparents and the most gullible of those who click on ads, fall for phishing scams, open email attachments, download viruses and more...
I guess I wouldn't be so annoyed if the software that was being pushed actually WORKED.
This new path of hawking garbage on a "reputable" source such as the radio is surely going to rope many, MANY more suckers into parting with a fairly large chunk of $ for absolutely nothing in return.
I wish there was a way to inform people of such scams.
I suppose that's the price for using Windows.
Want a cheaper way to a safer, faster computer? It's free and not that hard, honest: Go and get Ubuntu and try it out!
Computer and internet based scams and rip-off are attacking a new class of people and this time it could be more of a threat than ever before to the already straining wallets of "average Joe/Jane".
Into the picture comes "www.doublemyspeed.com".
Now the site in and itself is nothing special, typical "download a trial that reports hundreds and hundreds of false positives and forces you to buy it in order to 'clean' your system" scam. Nothing out of the ordinary in regard to typical scareware schemes that try and trick you into spending money to "fix" your system. Whether or not there actually is anything wrong with it in the first place. Of course I tried they crapware that was being hawked and it found THOUSANDS of "errors" in a mint system, freshly installed and custom tuned by me. Upon reviewing the logs, it was mostly fluff and false reports.
I digress however, this write up is NOT about crap software. Instead it's about HOW this junk is being hawked to the unwashed masses.
What is disturbing to me is that I heard this garbage being pumped out over my local RADIO station!
Oh man... this is something incredibly ugly because this is another conduit that will primarily target the most BLISSFULLY ignorant of users.
Hearing your computer might be "infected" on in the context of the radio either at work or on the road, will aid in planting the seeds of concern into the the minds of people like grandparents and the most gullible of those who click on ads, fall for phishing scams, open email attachments, download viruses and more...
I guess I wouldn't be so annoyed if the software that was being pushed actually WORKED.
This new path of hawking garbage on a "reputable" source such as the radio is surely going to rope many, MANY more suckers into parting with a fairly large chunk of $ for absolutely nothing in return.
I wish there was a way to inform people of such scams.
I suppose that's the price for using Windows.
Want a cheaper way to a safer, faster computer? It's free and not that hard, honest: Go and get Ubuntu and try it out!
Thursday, October 01, 2009
Friday, September 18, 2009
Floppy....
I have a bit of a saying that in my own opinion, find is true more often than not. That saying is; "Those that do it first do it best."
Now, as I just said, I find this TRENDS toward true, not that the phrase always is.
With that out of the way, there are a number of examples such as Apple with providing the modern personal computing experience, Ford with cars, etc...
Well, today I have an example that is all but a shame to the company that crafted it.
How Microsoft handles formatting floppy disks.
It's sad really, they really made the floppy popular with consumers with DOS being the first consumer level OS shipped on the then new format. So, of course they had to have a solid way to prepare those new disks for work and erase old disks to be used again.
The result was the now nearly forgotten command "Format". This tool was then the best way to easily format a floppy disk and now has come full circle to claim that same title in modern times despite the floppy having gone the way of the Dodo.
That's right,the Modern Microsoft OS is currently the best thing I know of in the use of handling floppies, hands down. Way to win the award for a dead technology!
I know this whole spiel may sound a bit odd, so allow me to elaborate.
I wanted to modify my IBM T42 Thinkpad the other day and was having a bear of a time getting a modern USB flash drive bootable and even getting it to work the way I wished off of a less modern CD.
So I gave up and for the first time since 1997-98 I decided to use a 3.5" floppy drive & disk. (if you exclude one college class in 2002 where the professor just stopped using a stone tablet with a chisel and had no idea of the internet and email)
I peeled off the several inch thick layer of dust from my USB floppy drive that I had received free with my iBook around 2000 and have used a grand total of exactly 3 times, plugged it in, was surprised it still worked and did my thing.
Now, I found a few scratch disks in a case I had used for the previously mentioned college class and decided to see if any of them were still serviceable.
Hmmmm.... My trust Macintosh understood the drive and media just fine, and even was perfectly happy to let me quick erase the disk in Disk Utility, but lo, there was just no way I could find to actually VERIFY the format and check for bad sectors, something floppies are INFAMOUS for...
Not a problem, the floppy was declared dead by Apple more than a decade ago, I can understand the less than full support in an OS that was built 2 years AFTER Apple stopped supporting the said media.
On to my Thinkpad with Linux! To this end, I thought to myself that this task would be NO PROBLEM as Linux was built LONG before such things as booting from a CD were even possible so a simple legacy task of floppy handling should be a cinch!
Bulllllllshit, 20 minutes later I rebooted my Thinkpad into it's seldom used Windows XP partition.
A few minutes later I had 3 disks formatted, verified and ready for service. I could have done the same thing on Vista or Windows 7 after looking into it for this post.
I suppose the point of all this text is my complaining about what's actually wrong with Microsoft's mentality of never letting go of anything... ever.
Now, as I just said, I find this TRENDS toward true, not that the phrase always is.
With that out of the way, there are a number of examples such as Apple with providing the modern personal computing experience, Ford with cars, etc...
Well, today I have an example that is all but a shame to the company that crafted it.
How Microsoft handles formatting floppy disks.
It's sad really, they really made the floppy popular with consumers with DOS being the first consumer level OS shipped on the then new format. So, of course they had to have a solid way to prepare those new disks for work and erase old disks to be used again.
The result was the now nearly forgotten command "Format". This tool was then the best way to easily format a floppy disk and now has come full circle to claim that same title in modern times despite the floppy having gone the way of the Dodo.
That's right,the Modern Microsoft OS is currently the best thing I know of in the use of handling floppies, hands down. Way to win the award for a dead technology!
I know this whole spiel may sound a bit odd, so allow me to elaborate.
I wanted to modify my IBM T42 Thinkpad the other day and was having a bear of a time getting a modern USB flash drive bootable and even getting it to work the way I wished off of a less modern CD.
So I gave up and for the first time since 1997-98 I decided to use a 3.5" floppy drive & disk. (if you exclude one college class in 2002 where the professor just stopped using a stone tablet with a chisel and had no idea of the internet and email)
I peeled off the several inch thick layer of dust from my USB floppy drive that I had received free with my iBook around 2000 and have used a grand total of exactly 3 times, plugged it in, was surprised it still worked and did my thing.
Now, I found a few scratch disks in a case I had used for the previously mentioned college class and decided to see if any of them were still serviceable.
Hmmmm.... My trust Macintosh understood the drive and media just fine, and even was perfectly happy to let me quick erase the disk in Disk Utility, but lo, there was just no way I could find to actually VERIFY the format and check for bad sectors, something floppies are INFAMOUS for...
Not a problem, the floppy was declared dead by Apple more than a decade ago, I can understand the less than full support in an OS that was built 2 years AFTER Apple stopped supporting the said media.
On to my Thinkpad with Linux! To this end, I thought to myself that this task would be NO PROBLEM as Linux was built LONG before such things as booting from a CD were even possible so a simple legacy task of floppy handling should be a cinch!
Bulllllllshit, 20 minutes later I rebooted my Thinkpad into it's seldom used Windows XP partition.
A few minutes later I had 3 disks formatted, verified and ready for service. I could have done the same thing on Vista or Windows 7 after looking into it for this post.
I suppose the point of all this text is my complaining about what's actually wrong with Microsoft's mentality of never letting go of anything... ever.
Thursday, June 18, 2009
An Ode to PA.
This is an ode to the state of Pennsylvania that I have recently returned from touring with a geocaching buddy.
Ahem.
Oh PA, your towns are so small,
Your roads are simply horrible,
Your cell service is a fucking joke.
At least the view is nice.
Posted with LifeCast
Friday, June 12, 2009
A 7 Month Gap...
Well, I'm bringing a huge gap in my posting habits here. Granted the frequency of my attention to my little Internet based soapbox has always been sporadic at best, but this was something more.
I guess you could call it a disenchantment of sorts.
While I really do enjoy ranting and posting here, to just let out my true thoughts and opinions on an ever increasingly sanitised and insane world. Whether or not they are actually READ by anyone was and is a moot point. What wasn't a moot point was the sheer amount of time that it takes to get a good topic, piece together an opinion and/or solution and then actually WRITE about it.
Despite being unemployed, I'm busy, in fact I'm surprisingly busy.
To a point that I was more "idle" and found more time to do less important things that I enjoy, that encourage my creativity and artistic sides to stay agile and fresh, when I was employed and was siphoning off 9+ hours of my life everyday for 'X' dollars an hour.
Can this be chalked up to poor time management because I no longer have to structure my day around a job? Perhaps.
The fact remains that for a rather long while, I no longer enjoyed taking the time to write for this blog.
I'm not sure I will get over this feeling any time soon either. So, what now? Frankly, I REALLY don't wish to "abandon" a project that I've poured many dozens of hours working on and is all but a journal of sorts of one side of my written creativity and thoughts.
The answer might be simpler than I expected and was given to me by my good friend Jason.
Twitter. Micro Blogging.
I initially had dismissed Twitter as another pointless internet social networking fad that was going to pop up, get stupid popular overnight and then vaporize like Yahoo's 360 or Palm. So, when Jason informed me that he had not only signed up for a Twitter account but was actually USING it, I was gobstruck and harranged him about it.
I strongly believe now that I was wrong.
I made a deal with myself that I would use Twitter for at least a week and at the end of that week, if the mere thought of making another tweet made me want to puke my legs, I'd let it go.
It's been about a week and I'm enjoying it despite all expectations.
Why? I think it's because it is a very "concentrated" source of "frivolous" information that lets me follow as much or as little of the lives of people I know.
Yes there is a fair amount of poinlessness that many people, myself included, enjoy writing about but it's still a great way to keep up with friends and family (assuming I can get them to even consider using it...)
So, I think I'm certain I will NOT abandon this blog, but I'm going to continue to use it for what I always have. Longer, more thought provoking thoughts and rants of the multi-paragraph style. While I will continue to use Twitter for what it does best, short thoughts, events and opinions in a compact easy to digest format.
I'll embed a "Twitter Feed" on this page in the near future.
Tune in shortly for a bit of my old irritation about the H1N1 flu virus... It's gonna be a blast!
I guess you could call it a disenchantment of sorts.
While I really do enjoy ranting and posting here, to just let out my true thoughts and opinions on an ever increasingly sanitised and insane world. Whether or not they are actually READ by anyone was and is a moot point. What wasn't a moot point was the sheer amount of time that it takes to get a good topic, piece together an opinion and/or solution and then actually WRITE about it.
Despite being unemployed, I'm busy, in fact I'm surprisingly busy.
To a point that I was more "idle" and found more time to do less important things that I enjoy, that encourage my creativity and artistic sides to stay agile and fresh, when I was employed and was siphoning off 9+ hours of my life everyday for 'X' dollars an hour.
Can this be chalked up to poor time management because I no longer have to structure my day around a job? Perhaps.
The fact remains that for a rather long while, I no longer enjoyed taking the time to write for this blog.
I'm not sure I will get over this feeling any time soon either. So, what now? Frankly, I REALLY don't wish to "abandon" a project that I've poured many dozens of hours working on and is all but a journal of sorts of one side of my written creativity and thoughts.
The answer might be simpler than I expected and was given to me by my good friend Jason.
Twitter. Micro Blogging.
I initially had dismissed Twitter as another pointless internet social networking fad that was going to pop up, get stupid popular overnight and then vaporize like Yahoo's 360 or Palm. So, when Jason informed me that he had not only signed up for a Twitter account but was actually USING it, I was gobstruck and harranged him about it.
I strongly believe now that I was wrong.
I made a deal with myself that I would use Twitter for at least a week and at the end of that week, if the mere thought of making another tweet made me want to puke my legs, I'd let it go.
It's been about a week and I'm enjoying it despite all expectations.
Why? I think it's because it is a very "concentrated" source of "frivolous" information that lets me follow as much or as little of the lives of people I know.
Yes there is a fair amount of poinlessness that many people, myself included, enjoy writing about but it's still a great way to keep up with friends and family (assuming I can get them to even consider using it...)
So, I think I'm certain I will NOT abandon this blog, but I'm going to continue to use it for what I always have. Longer, more thought provoking thoughts and rants of the multi-paragraph style. While I will continue to use Twitter for what it does best, short thoughts, events and opinions in a compact easy to digest format.
I'll embed a "Twitter Feed" on this page in the near future.
Tune in shortly for a bit of my old irritation about the H1N1 flu virus... It's gonna be a blast!
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