Posts Tagged ‘linux’

Fedora 11: you might as well quit guys

I thought I’d give Fedora 11 a spin, cos they’ve made some changes to power management, and my battery has been screwy since Ubuntu Feisty.

But what a mistake!

I don’t expect any distro to recognise all my hardware, nor do I expect any to be exactly tailored to my tastes.

But I do expect every distro to at least:

  • have installation docs that were not out of date two releases ago
  • get the time right when pointed to an NTP server
  • recognise my PS/2 trackpad
  • not clobber the contents of /boot
  • warn me before installing a non-backwards-compatible upgrade to Grub

It’ll be a very long time before I try Fedora again. :-(

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Filed under tech : Comments (2) : Jun 20th, 2009

How not to get bored while installing an operating system

Traditionally, installing (or re-installing) an operating system was a dull job. You’d feed your machine with floppy disks (or a single floppy and a single CD if you were lucky) and wait for ages while an hourglass twizzled around. And the screen would be full of platitudes, in a retro-VGA-style, about how much better your life would be. And a chorus of Angels would sing to hail the new computing experience. (Or they would if there were any sound drivers which worked by default).

But now things are different. I give you Ubuntu 8.10.

I must admit, I’m a long-time Linux zealot, having started with Slackware 1.something with (I think) a 1.3.20 kernel. I did install it from floppy disks. I did cycle from home to University campus several times with bundles of floppies containing XFree86. I did rashly install Netscape Navigator and wondered if I’d miss NCSA Mosaic. *sigh*

Back to the present. I’m installing Ubuntu on this laptop. I’m also browsing the web and writing this blog post. On the same machine. It booted from a USB stick into a usable system and is installing in the background.

And here’s the inspiration for this post, an example of how polished the system is:
Migrating stuff from other OSes

Yep, I know. Hardly earth-shattering. But these are the missing bits of fluff that Gnu/Linux distros have been missing.

Anyway… while it’s installing, I’ve got some web-browsing to do. (Did I mention that I can do that? Wirelessly? Oh…)

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Filed under tech : Comments (0) : Nov 4th, 2008

Psion Wavefinder works on Linux!

It’s so long since I signed up for the Yahoo group about linux support for the Psion Wavefinder that I’d almost forgotten I ever did. And the messages (just five in the past 18 months) didn’t give me much hope that the Wavefinder would ever work under Linux.

But on Friday, a post appeared from one David Crawley, who has got the device going and released a lump of code under the name OpenDAB. This is utterly cool. I hadn’t ever bought a Wavefinder, because of the lack of drivers, but resolved to get one if Linux support was ever achieved. It’s long-since out of production, but they pop up on eBay every so often.

So I’m a happy camper – and will be even happier if I win an eBay auction soon.

(And congratulations to David on such a great hack)

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Filed under tech : Comments (2) : Feb 10th, 2008