The Mandelbear's Musings

Interview: Mark Shuttleworth, founder of Ubuntu | Technology | The Guardian

TG: Will you be coming out with a tailored version of Ubuntu for the ultraportable sector?

MS We're announcing it in the first week of June. It's called the Netbook Remix. We're working with Intel, which produces chips custom-made for this sector.

TG: Do you think that GNU/Linux will ever become a significant force on the desktop?

MS I think that depends on how people define a desktop. If people continue to define a desktop as the thing that they run Microsoft Word on, then Windows will retain its position. My sense, though, is that people are increasingly defining the desktop as the thing that they get access to the internet from. In that case, there's a real possibility that we're able to shift people onto different platforms. I think it's the emergence of the internet as the killer application, the thing that describes what you want from the computer, that opens the door to us.

(via engadget

I'm having an intensely frustrating time getting the wireless card on pocketnaomi's computer working. It seems to be willing to work on either Windows (98) or Linux, but never twice in a row on the same machine. It actually connects in both OSs, but has problems with DNS; I'm beginning to suspect some oddity in either the access point or the router. The really frustrating thing, though, is that it *has worked* at one time or another on both OSs. Just not reproducibly.

Anyone remember whether Win98 uses UDP or TCP/IP for DNS? That might have something to do with it. If I had time I'd upgrade the AP to OpenWRT; as it is I may just haul out my travel router and see if I can get that working.

I've been spending some time this afternoon upgrading my Thinkpad T21, which I purchased several years ago at a surplus joint. One of my coworkers handed me a 60GB hard drive (removed from an upgraded laptop) that was flaky in his machine at home. We'll see. Replacing a drive on an IBM laptop is a cakewalk.

The install disk for the current Ubuntu, 7.10, boots but does something horrible to the display, making it basically uninstallable. Debian Etch does the same horrible thing, but at least it gets installed so you can flip the driver over to vesa, which is where I had it before. My alternate disk for 7.10 had an error on it, but I also downloaded Hardy alpha 5. That worked perfectly, and is currently installing.

I tried both my WiFi cards; neither worked. Hopefully a suitable driver will fix it. One of them (the 802-11g, oddly enough) actually recognized the network, but kept insisting on a password and wouldn't connect. It's an open network, damnit. Or do I have to kick the router? (9:08 that did it! Just fscking worked. I could really get to love Ubuntu.) (9:32 Still some flakiness -- unclear whether bugs or bad drive. Current thinking favors bugs.)

It's also an open question whether any of the usual laptop features will be recognized out of the box; Etch wouldn't even suspend properly.

Finally, I still have to copy over the old Windows 98SE partition; that will require a USB adapter and searching for the driver disk. The machine is going to a non-geek who's used to Windows; whether I can persuade her to switch over is an open question, so it's important to leave both options open. Hopefully I'll be able to do that with the partition manager once I find a USB enclosure to plop the old drive into.

For some reason Kat's monitor (an ageing 17" Hyundai) has lost the ability to tell the computer at the other end of its cable what its resolution is. We'd just installed a new KVM switch, so I spent quite a lot of time thinking the problem was in the switch. At first it seemed to be -- last time she had problems, I took out the switch, plugged the monitor directly into the computer, and it worked. This time it didn't.

Swapped it with the 17" Samsung on the public system in the office downstairs. Now everything is happy -- Debian Etch on the downstairs machine is set up for fixed resolution, so it ignores the stupid lying monitor and Just Works(TM).

Meanwhile the taxes aren't done and there's practicing to do.

And did I mention that crawling around under desks is bad for my knees?

From this post by technoshaman, we get

( a bumper-sticker for Cthulhubuntu )

This is one of the coolest hacks of all time. Browse to goodbye-microsoft.com, and click on the Debian logo image. It will download a Windows executable. Hopefully you are not so foolish as to allow IE to run programs you download off the internet without an explicit double-click, so go ahead and double-click it. It will ask you whether to run the graphical or text-based installer, download the appropriate one for your CPU, set it up as an option in the (Windows) boot manager, and triggers a reboot.

At this point you have the choice between restarting your stupid old Windows, or booting into the clever and friendly Debian installer. You can even make your system dual-boot. You might want to make backups first, unless it's a brand-new machine.

Ubuntu users can use the somewhat similar install.exe, which downloads Ubuntu using bittorrent and installs it into an image file so that you don't even have to repartition your disk.

Last night in a fit of boredom I upgraded my Debian Etch system (a major upgrade that included the modular X11R7 from x.org), then brought the machine down to play with my newly-downloaded Ubuntu 6.06 (Dapper Drake) and DeMuDi 1.3rc1 install disks. It's been a while since I logged in.

The first annoyance was that neither Ubuntu nor DeMuDi recognized my old-but-far-from-obsolete 3dfx video card. They both came up at 800x600, with no obvious way to change the screen resolution -- certainly Ubuntu's control panel didn't give me any other choices. Feh. But that's fixable, one way (drag over the config files from the Etch partition) or another (upgrade the card, which I've been meaning to do anyway).

Update: On closer examination it seems that DeMuDi, at least, recognized my video card just fine. So I'm guessing that what it didn't recognize is the capabilities of my monitor. That would probably be because my cheap KVM switch is blocking the newfangled monitor information signal path.

The second annoyance was that DeMuDi (Ubuntu as well, I think) still has Audacity 1.2 instead of the newer and sexier, but still beta, 1.3. Fixable again, since I've gotten 1.3 to build from source. I'll probably still wait until 1.3 is out of beta and supported in Debian.

The third, and more serious, annoyance was that somewhere in the sequence of upgrades the C preprocessor called by xrdb started putting a space after macro expansions. This is fine for C, but it's not a good thing when you're using macros to construct X geometries and font specs, as I was. GAAK! As it turns out, I had dealt with this a couple of weeks ago at work. I just didn't remember how, so I spent several hours removing most of the macros (which I won't miss, since they mostly parametrize things I've long since made permanent decisions about, like whether I want Emacs on the left or right side of the screen). But it's annoying.

Finally got to bed a little before midnight, with a once-again-mostly-working X configuration in my Etch partition. Grumbly bear, but at least things are reasonably stable again.