Author: Andy Ferguson

A few words on Operating Systems

To me, Windows 7 doesn’t seem much of an improvement on Vista. What is does do is return to making me think that the look and feel was modelled on a child’s toy. With XP it was Fisher Price, with Vista it was some flashy Japanese toy that looked good but no-one played with. And with 7 it is Lego. Just look at the dock and tell me I’m not right.

What with Snow Leopard being underwhelming, and Windows 7 not exactly making me want to switch back, I think Ubuntu 9.10 has me totally sold in the Autumn 2009 OS wars.

But there again, I’m ever so slightly biased.

The Art of Community

I’ve written about this before, but after reading the whole book this weekend I thought it was worth another mention.

It’s a book about communities, written by Jono Bacon (Ubuntu’s Community Manager). What I like about it is that it gives a great insight on what it is like to be part of a community where creative people work together to make something great, but where the reward is not financial. I think anyone who is involved in any sort of voluntary activity would get something out of it, and I’m certainly looking at my own community involvement in a new light as a result of reading it.

The Art of Community is available to buy (or to download for free) from http://www.artofcommunityonline.org/.

A brief history of love

I’m really taken with the debut album by The Big Pink. It reminds me of all sorts of other things, but above all it sounds like a record that really belongs on 4AD records. I’m partly reminded of The Wolfgang Press and Dif Juz, but also a lot of 90’s shoegazing bands.

It’s certainly well worth 11 emusic credits, and probably worth a lot more than that.

Listening habits and Mercury disappointment

I’ve been back at work a week now, and it really does change the way I listen to music. Over the past week or so I’ve actually only really listened to things whilst travelling to and from work, so at least half of my listening time is taking place quite early in the morning (where I prefer to listen to quieter and slower music). This has lead to me spending a lot of time with the new Yo La Tengo album (which I’d recommend as a good starting point), and also with the (still) brilliant Wilco album, which gets better with every listen, and which might even be my favourite album of theirs now.

I didn’t watch the Mercury Music ceremony in the end (Dollhouse was more pressing this week), but I’m slightly disappointed with the result. I’ve heard bits of the winning album, and I don’t think it offers anything I’ve not heard before. I’d like to have seen Florence winning, but it doesn’t change the fact that “Lungs” is a great album that would appeal to most people who can appreciate music made by someone who gives a damn.

Interesting things from Mozilla Labs

I rave a fair bit about Ubiquity, but there are also a few other things from Mozilla labs that look promising. Last night I installed Weave on a couple of my computers, and am actually very impressed. Weave takes your Firefox history, bookmarks and tabs and syncs them across multiple machines. It worked flawlessly for me, and I would certainly recommend it to people who move between computers a lot.

I may have to try a couple of their other offerings, although I’m not exactly sure what all of them are meant to do.

Sensible window sizes on Dell’s version of Ubuntu

I love my Dell Mini, but there are a couple of “features” added by Dell that drive me mad. One of these is called Maximus. It’s an application that tells any window that opens on the desktop to open full-screen. It’s particularly annoying with applications I’ve added myself (like Empathy), as the default applications seem preconfigured to ignore it. I’ve had a poke around in gconf-editor (install it with sudo apt-get install gconf-editor if it doesn’t exist already), and the key that needs editing is called /apps/maximus/exclude_class (see below for details):

Screenshot

It’s basically a list of applications that open with the same window size they closed with rather than open in full-screen.

Double click on the key, and you should get the following dialogue:

Screenshot-Edit Key

Click on the plus button, and add whatever applications you need as shown below:

Screenshot-Add New List Entry

Then click on OK. Next time you open the applications in question they should honour your desired window size.

An easier way to share

Despite the fact that I don’t use Gmail as my primary point of contact, I do use most of Google’s other tools quite a lot. In particular, I’m a big fan of Google Calendar, Docs and Groups, and I use all of them for various work and non work projects. It’s now possible to share documents and calendars with all members of a particular group, which makes administering sharing a whole lot easier.

So yes, if you’re still using yahoo groups for your project, or you still rely on a word document emailed around with “tracked changes”, then there is a viable (and easier) alternative.

Exploring Suse Studio

I’ve had an account on http://susestudio.com/ for a few weeks now, but have only really had a couple of chances to play with it. The basic idea behind the site is that anyone should be able to create a customised Linux distribution that perfectly suits their needs (providing those needs involve openSUSE 11.1 or SUSE Linux Enterprise 10 or 11). Normally I do this sort of work on Ubuntu, using Ubuntu Customisation Kit, as detailed in a previous post. This suits me, because I use Ubuntu in a production environment and it makes things easy. But I was interested in how this new software would work for someone who had never used openSUSE for more than a few minutes.

Ubuntu Customisation Kit does everything on the host machine, and only uses the Internet to pull new/updated packages in. This is light on bandwidth for tweaks, but heavier if you’re making major changes. Suse Studio does things the opposite way round, in that all the building and updating is done on the web, and you then download the finished .iso image. It’s slightly heavier on bandwidth overall, but did allow me to do a lot of the build work from my netbook in the foyer of a hotel in London, as all you need is a web browser and a net connection.

I ended up building three different versions of openSUSE, to suit three specific needs I occasionally have:

  1. Gnome, with a web browser (firefox), a terminal (gnome-terminal), dropbox preinstalled, and a couple of work-specific scripts for mounting drives and backing up data. This is a configuration we use at work for data recovery (currently based on Ubuntu 8.04). This was painless to set up, came in at 348Mb, and worked well.
  2. A showcase for KDE4. I’m not a big fan of KDE, but it’s always useful to have a VM kicking around to show people what it is like. This was on the same level of detail as the Gnome one, and came in at 350mb. I think I might actually be able to use this to get things done, as it takes away a lot of the un-instinctive KDE apps whilst leaving the very pretty and functional base.
  3. An image containing the applications I use every day, which would act as a basis for reinstalling my home or work laptop (both currently running Ubuntu 9.04). This contains Firefox, Thunderbird, OpenOffice.org, Empathy, Rhythmbox, Gedit and gnome-terminal, and was still only 484mb (300Mb less than the version of Ubuntu I install from usually).

So yes, all three experiments worked, and while I’ve not tried to use them to get things done yet, I have successfully installed all three as virtual machines and they seem to work as expected.

I think most people could use Suse Studio, and it acts as a good way to learn the basics of how a distribution is put together. I very much expect to see the code base from this project move in interesting directions in the next few months, and I’d be surprised if we don’t see similar projects getting off the ground soon.