Ubuntu 9.10

Well, its been a while, hasn't it? Since I last talked on here, Ubuntu 9.10 has been released. As some of you may know, there were some problems early on with 9.04 that sort of turned me off to Ubuntu. I've been running OS X on my Aspire one, and Puppy Linux 4.1.2 on my Gateway Solo. My desktop has always had Ubuntu on it, but it's become my shop computer, just being used for listening to music and looking at radio schematics.

I hate to say it, but I was almost to the point of putting OS X on my desktop. :O

But, since 9.10 came out, Ubuntu is back in my heart for good. One of my main problems with 9.04 was that the Pidgin developers caused issues with Pidgin, so that after updates, it no longer worked.

9.10 has Empathy, which so far is beating Pidgin, hands down. I had a couple other issues that couldn't be resolved without compiling my own kernel, so they were left alone and lived with.

A couple days ago, I decided to give 9.10 a try on my desktop. 9.04 had gotten so buggy that it was almost unusable. I barely was able to save everything before it went down for good.

I'll just be honest about the initial boot of the LiveCD. I was completely amazed! I've never really been more that ok with any Linux Distro, let alone Ubuntu in stock for, but Canonical has outdone themselves. The look and feel of Ubuntu 9.10 is great! No more orange everything. Brown looks better, but as I always do, I'll be changing that soon on both my desktop and Aspire one.

So far, all I've done on either is install Skype. On the desktop, Compaq AMD Athlon 64, the install went without a hitch, but on the Aspire One, had to manually install libqt4-core package. No big deal though.

Well, that's all for now. Soon as I figure out some neat things to do with Ubuntu, I'll be sure to keep all of you updated.

See you soon!

RaLink RT2500

This thing is a POS. It's supposed to work out of the box, but it's yet to do much of anything for me in my Compaq Presario desktop. I'm going to try compiling the driver myself, but I doubt it will help much. In my HP Pavillion desktop it worked fine in the same spot, but I had Ubuntu 9.04 on it, which may be the difference. Who knows. I'll figure it out though. Just felt like ranting before the fiance got home.

Closed minded people

Why is it most Windows users act like they have their head stuck up their ass? A now ex-friend, had her head so far up there, she could smell dinner from 3 nights ago. I showed her an article about how Microsoft is admitting Linux is becoming a threat. Her response was "I'm not afraid of Linux. Why would anyone want Linux anyway? It doesn't ever work, and you need to be a tech geek to keep it working. I like being able to just get on my computer and it work without having to work for it."
She's obviously someone who has never touched Linux, and seems to think she can have an opinion about how bad it is. First of all, how is it even possible to have an opinion about something you know nothing about? That would be like me saying writing a program in C+ is hard. I've never tried, so I know I can't say anything.
Obviously Linux (Canonical and Redhat, to be specific) are becoming a threat to Microsoft. I may not be fond of Microsoft's practices, but I seriously don't think they would file a claim stating that, if they really didn't believe it to be so. To me, that's good and bad at the same time, but I'm not going to get into that right now. That's for another day.
Well, I'm done. I'm going to end this before I put her name and IM name on here for everyone to see. If someone wants it, feel free to message me, though. :D

    I don't really have much to say about Ubuntu today. I've been catching up with my Linux news all day, and there is a lot on my mind. I've seen a lot of Windows or Mac people talking trash about Linux. Also, Linux people talking trash right back. Notice I didn't group these "people" with their respective communities. 

    Let's start with the Windows people. I read on one site, someone (with 20+ years experience with a computer) saying with Windows it's click install, and go, but when they used Linux, it took hours to install a basic program. Because of that, Linux is a "geek toy". Ok, I have to somewhat agree there. Linux can be a geek toy. But for most it isn't. My fiance, who was an avid Windows user, and after installing Linux Mint on her laptop, she caught on rather fast. And she never really asked questions much different than she would using Windows. But why does the Linux community knowing it isn't that hard to do that, have to flame the fire? Just let it go.

    If someone who is determined to use Windows, and Windows only, tries to say something about Linux, ignore them people. I've seen the same thing a thousand times in forums too. A person new to Linux joins, has a decent question about running a Windows program in Linux, but the community says there's a Linux program that does the same thing. The newbie is determined to run the Windows app., and people start to flame them.

    How does this look for the community? I know of several people that have seen threads like that and thought the Linux community was like that if you weren't a Linux geek. I do mean that in a good way, BTW. I was one of those few in the beginning. When Vista crashed, I tried Ubuntu, but my Atheros wireless card wasn't supported then. I asked for help on the Ubuntu Forums, and got no help, was flamed for not understanding every word I was told. If I had the money at the time, I probably would have gone back to Vista. 

    But that's one of the many things that give Linux a bad vibe. I seriously believe that there would be more people using linux if it weren't for the bad things.

OSx86 & Ubuntu 8.10 on the Aspire One

Well, I finally did it. I'm running OSx86 and Ubuntu together on my Aspire One. It was actually rather hard, to be honest. There aren't any tutorials that really tell you much other than the software needed and to install the 2 systems. Anyway, it's much simpler than it sounds. Check out the Venera 7 tutorial for the software needed. Google "osx on aspire one" to find it.

I used the Kalyway 10.5.2 disc to do all this. Start by booting your disc, and select english, the go to the Disk Utility. You'll need to partition your HD with 2 partitions. 1 in Mac OS extended Journaled, and don't use the other. Reboot, remove the disc, and insert your Ubuntu disc.

Do your ubuntu install on the partition you left alone in the OSx86 installer. Do a 1GB Swap partition, and do the rest in EXT 3 and set it for "/". Let it do it's thing and then log into Ubuntu so we can get ready for OSx86. Once you are logged in, get the PC EFI you downloaded to your home directory. Open up Terminal and get ready to enter this:

$ sudo mkdir /boot/pc_efi
$ sudo cp ~/boot_v8 /boot/pc_efi

Ok. Now, press Alt+F2. Enter "gksudo nautilus". This let's you browse your computer as a super user. Go to System>Boot and put the "boot_v5" file there, and clost the window before anything gets messed with.

Next, open up a Terminal again. Enter "sudo gedit /etc/grub/menu.lst". Enter this at the bottom of the file:



title Mac OS X
root (hd0,1)
kernel /boot/pc_efi/boot_v8

Save it, and your done. Shut down, boot up the Kalyway disc, and go through the steps till you can click "Customize".

• Completely uncheck ‘Language Translations’.
• Expand ‘Kernels’ and select ONLY ‘kernel_9.2speedstep’.
• Expand ‘Graphics_Drivers’, expand ‘Intel_GMA’ and select ONLY ‘GMA950′.
• Completely uncheck ‘Audio_Drivers’.
• Expand ‘Networks_Drivers’. and select ONLY ‘RTL1000′.
• Completely uncheck ‘Mobo_Chipsets’.
• completely uncheck ‘Patches’.

You can select some of the Thirds Apps. Get Adium, and Transmission at a minimum.

Now click install, and skip the disc check so things will do faster. Now go grab a smoke, and find something to do for a while.

Now that is finished, we get to have some fun. Open up a Terminal and enter this:

sudo vi /Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration/com.apple.Boot.plist

It'll show the file, press "i" to edit it, and under kernel flags, enter cpus=1 between the ><. Press Esc, and then hold Shift and then press "Z Z". That's done. Now run the Kalyway 10.5.3 combo update. DO NOT restart after it finishes. open the other installer you got with it and run it. Select the vanilla kernel, and install it. Now restart When you reboot, press escape to see the grub menu. Select Mac OS X and after that, let it go through that menu, then press F8 when you can. Type "update -v" and hit enter. It will reboot, and do thqt aagain. Once your back in OSX, Google Mac 10.5.4 and 10.5.5 updates. ONLY get them from the Apple site! the combo updates will brick your system! For the other 2 updates, before you run them in Terminal enter :

$ sudo su -
$ while sleep 1 ; do rm -rf /System/Library/Extensions/AppleIntelCPUPowerManagement.kext ; done

leave that in the terminal while doing the updates each time. Press Ctrl+C to exit it to be able to reboot. Do that for both. After you do that, just follow any of the tuts for OSX on the Aspire One. BTW, there is a kext for the left SD card slot. Just Google it. Hopefully that will help out since every other tut I tried kept bricking OSX. If you have a question, message me at my new e-mail: andy@thevintageattic.net . Good Luck !