New or Used?

I've always been a fan of the ThinkPad series of notebooks. Though I've heard people slag the little red button that acts as a mouse, I found that it had much better performance than any touchpad I tried. Out of curiousity I checked out the prices on Lenovo's (IBM sold the Thinkpad division to Lenovo) Thinkpads and was surprised to find them quite high, almost double what I bought my 1GHz Compaq Armada E500 notebook for.

My notebook was "refurbished," but I should note that the trackpad on the notebook didn't have ANY wear, there were no always on or always off pixels, it was in pristine condition when I bought it for $799CDN. Now the ThinkPads have more RAM, better video, but I'm not convinced the features are good enough to justify the almost double price, especially with other notebook makers (Dell) releasing sub-$800 CDN notebooks. And my notebook is now almost 1 year old since I bought it, surely the price has dropped at least $100 by now. The hard drive difference between mine and the ThankPad R51 is a measily 10GB. I manage to get by with less than half of that.

Buying used is a tricky business, one that can be difficult because there are so many things to watch for. When I went shopping for my notebook I brought along a Knoppix 3.7 CD (Ubuntu hadn't really exploded on the scene yet). The first store I went to, a dedicated used notebook store, refused to let me boot the Knoppix CD because of "boot viruses." I tried to explain that I'd burned the CD under Fedora Core, and that there was a zero chance of having a boot virus, but ignorance and fear kept him from trusting me. It ended up being fine because had he said yes I might have settled for one of the machines in this shop, all of which had a dead pixel, or always on pixel, somewhere on the screens. These "broken" machines were priced as high as machines I looked at elsewhere which didn't have problems.

I visited a few other places, finally ending up at a shop where the only salesperson a little reluctantly let me boot the Knoppix CD from the notebook and play with it for about 20 minutes. The Knoppix CD found the NIC, ran in 1024x768 (later I learned I could run in 1400x1050), and found everything except for the Lucent winmodem, which I later found out was supported, but not a part of most Linux distributions. I bought the Armada E500 (which has a few variants, mine happens to be the top end of that line) and I've been using it with few problems since.

Hot android coming to a booth near you!

BBC News has a story about a Japanese invented female android. From their photographs she looks pretty real. The story suggests that it's real enough to fool people for about 10 seconds, but she currently can't stand since most of the actuators are in her upper body.

It's not Linux, but it's pretty darn cool!

Faster Fedora Boot Times, FreeBSD on the XBox & PyRadar

What looks to be a new web site, ImprovedSource, has an article about booting Fedora Core faster. Fedora Core, along with many other Linux ISOs are available at Linuxiso.org.

BSD News reports that someone has ported the FreeBSD operating system to Microsoft's XBOX gaming console. Read the story at http://bsdnews.com/view_story.php3?story_id=5097.

Lastly, Freshmeat reported a new version of what looked to be a pretty cool application called pyRadar. PyRadar is a weather application that displays weather images over a wireframe map. It's worth checking out.

Getting out there

One of the best ways to learn more about Linux is to get out and see what other people are doing with Linux. Usually this involves attending local LUGs (Linux User Groups), volunteering at Installfests, taking a trip to Comdex, and checking out local web boards and USENET newsgroups for information about local events. Nothing happening in your area, get something going in a newsgroup or web board.

I first met John "Mad dog" Hall of Linux International a couple of years ago when he came to speak at The University of Waterloo. Being a punctual guy I came early. I'd never been in the room before and wanted to make sure I could find it. When I found the room it was completely empty so I found a spot and sat down. I expected a few people would arrive to set up, but to my surprise the next person who arrived was John himself. He spent about 20 minutes talking about various things before anyone else came. It was a very enlightening experience.

I met John again when he came to speak at RIM this year, but it wasn't the one on one experience from the year before. This time I met a cool guy who was giving out a few surplus copies of O'Reilly's Make magazine, a very cool magazine about hardware hacking.

SparcStation 5 revisited / operation update

A special thank you to "maal" on Sun's Support forums for answering the question that's been bugging me for a long time, whether or not my SparcStation 5 needed a keyboard in order to display something on the monitor. The answer is yes. Thanks again maal.

I'm still recovering from my sinus surgury. I'm getting better each passing day. The surgury was a bit more invasive than expected and I bled for a few days after the operation so I'm still not back to my regular self. So I'm still resting at my folks place. I can't wait to return home and start getting things in order again, but I know I've still got to take it easy for another week.

Cool Solutions for Novell Linux Desktop and SuSE Professional

If you haven't explored FireFox within SuSE Professional or Novell Linux Desktop you're missing out on a quick way to get some cool Linux solutions from Novell.

To access the solutions open FireFox, click on SUSE LINUX in the Bookmarks Toolbar, a menu of links will drop down, select SUSE LINUX Professional Cool Solutions, or simply click on the link I just provided.

Mandriva 2006-0.1.1 Beta Released

OSNews reports that Mandriva 2006-0.1.1 Beta has unofficially been released. Mandriva is the predecessor to Mandrake Linux. OSDir.com has some screenshots. The screenshots are pretty simple, and just seem to point out some of the features of KDE 3.4.

Sharp Zaurus SL-5500

TuxTops has a review of Sharp's new Zaurus SL-5500 Linux-based PDA. What's most significant about the new Zaurus is the sub-$200 price tag. Previous versions of the Zaurus were above $500, and didn't seem to provide the kind of whiz-bang features that would differentiate it from similar PalmOS and WinCE based devices.

On the down side, the SL-5500 still has a bad battery life, one of the key features in portable devices. No word if the device supports rechargeable batteries. But at the sub-$200 price level it's an attractive device.

Proprietary software lock in?

I was checking out Dell this morning, looking at what they were offering in 2GHz+ systems, and I was disappointed to find that there was no Linux install option on any of their base systems. I suppose I shouldn't be surprised, but if Dell did pre-install Linux on its base systems I might consider buying from them.

This got wondering if perhaps Microsoft is back to its old vendor lock-in tricks? Before the United States Department of Justice filed suit against Microsoft the big software company had exclusivity agreements with vendors. Vendors got a discount on Microsoft software provided vendors installed Microsoft software. This meant not just Microsoft Windows (versus OS/2 or Linux), but applications: Internet Explorer instead of Netscape, Microsoft Money instead of Quicken. And while Microsoft was found guilty and convicted of monopolistic practices, the impending breakup didn't happen, and Microsoft seems to be just as unrestrained as before.

Offline for a few days

I mentioned in my other web log, linux-games.ca, that I'll be under the knife for surgery tomorrow. The surgery is not serious, but as with all surgeries there's the remote potential that something could go wrong. I'm hoping to be well enough by Tuesday to be posting again.

Thanks for everyone's understanding.

Charles

Some results from Adobe

I'd heard awhile back that Adobe was starting to move some of its stuff to open source. All it seemed was talk, but this morning I came across a software release from Adobe - mind you it's MIT Licensing:

http://opensource.adobe.com/

The state of Linux art tools

I've never had any formal art training. I did take art in grade 9, but it was a tramatic experience at best. My art teacher for the class was semi-senile, and should have been retired long ago. She may have been a terrific artist, but when a teacher loses a student's work and then orders them to produce another by weeks end, they should be held accountable. I never took an art class after that experience.

I did hang on to my interest in art. Back when the web was still fairly static I worked with Corel's Photo-Paint product, it was a great package, with a very loyal fan following, though nothing the size of Adobe PhotoShop enthusiasts. Photo-Paint helped me through a few design jobs, both for the web and print. But when I moved to Linux, I found that The Gimp was quite different. I'd read the hype that it was powerful, and could do a lot of things Adobe PhotoShop could, not everything, but a lot.



It's only been recently that I latched on to the vector-based Inkscape, a program that lets you create some pretty amazing things, without a lot of skill or graphics experience. I found the Inkscape tutorials good enough that I managed to create the above ANIME image having never created anything like it before.

Get rid of dot files in gftp

If you do any publishing, chances are you use ftp to upload files to a ftp site. GFTP is an easy to use graphical ftp client for Gnome which is included in most Linux distributions. I've used gftp to upload a lot of projects, but one of the things that has always annoyed me is that by default, gftp enables showing of "dot files." Getting rid of dot files, aka hidden files, is a simple process:

cd ~/.gftp
vi gftprc

Look for the term hidden in gftprc and change it from 1 to 0.

Happy ftping!