Showing headlines posted by Steven_Rosenber

I've been using digiKam a bit more to edit images for Web publication. I still find it awkward as hell, I haven't yet figured out the "right" way to sharpen a photo, and I'm puzzled as to why you can't edit an image's metadata and the image itself at the same time. But edit the image's metadata — including the all-important IPTC data that each and every photojournalist in the world embeds into JPEGs — you can.

There have been a few upgrades a day popping into the Update Manager on my Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty Jackalope, for those keeping score on the animal names) installation, and have you noticed what I've noticed? Those updates are downloading very, very slowly.

Today I installed digiKam and the 62 other KDE packages that go with it in a GNOME-based Ubuntu box. I never like to add 63 packages for a single app. But I did it. Thus far digiKam is most unlike any image editor I've ever used before. Mostly because it's not really an image editor but can do most of the tasks one would associate with just such an application.

One of the reasons I haven't done almost any video editing is due to the relative lack of "mature" software for the job in Linux/Unix. Sure there are a half-dozen projects out there, and there is always the video-editing capability of 3D-animation app Blender (which gets a whole lot of developer attention), but when it comes to dedicated video-editing apps, there is the basic Kino and a bunch of others that don't seem ready for real, soup-to-nuts production work.

I laugh — LAUGH! — when a tech journalist writes something to the effect of, "for lightweight tasks such as Web browsing," when you know, and I know, that there ain't nothing light about using present-day Web browser on present-day Web pages filled with Javascript, Flash and enough CSS to fill a book.

I've stayed fairly quiet on the controversy over Mono, the open-source implementation of Microsoft's .NET protocol and C# programming language that's been grabbing a greater share of the desktop in various Linux distributions in recent years and months. ... Although I'm not a developer, this is a very real issue for me, and it should be for all who use Linux/Unix — and especially GNOME — on the desktop. Two of the biggest Linux distributions — Debian and the Debian-derived Ubuntu — are based on the GNOME desktop environment and seemingly have Mono apps taking a bigger chunk of the system with every release.

I resisted upgrading from Ubuntu 8.04 LTS — the project's "stable," long-term-support release — to version 9.04 because everything worked pretty well, my hardware was fairly well-recognized, there were no showstopping bugs. But upgrade I did, and here's a rundown of Ubuntu 9.04 compared to 8.04 on my rig.

I'm surprised that I forgot how this works: When you install Debian without using a network mirror (either from the first CD of the full set or, my preferred method, with the DVD image), /etc/apt/sources.list is set up with a Debian mirror for security updates. However, there is no entry for the Debian software repositories, and if you want to add applications from a network mirror, you'll need to modify /etc/apt/sources.list accordingly.

Since the CF card serving as the sole disk drive in the Self-Reliant Thin Client (Maxspeed Maxtor converted to use as a full desktop PC) checked out with fsck via a card reader on another PC, I decided to do a reinstall of Debian, this time Lenny instead of Etch.

I've been looking in on Tanner Helland's Ubuntu-rich blog for some time, and today I found a virtual motherlode of well-researched and -reasoned opinion on where Ubuntu should be headed. Helland hits it right on the head: While there's a whole lot right with open-source software, specifically the Linux operating system and the wildly popular (in an obscure, cultish kind of way) Ubuntu distribution, there's quite a bit that's not so right and needs both minor and major improvement before a free, open-source, Unix-based operating environment can really challenge Windows and Macintosh for significant share on the desktops of non-geeks and geeks alike.

I finally experienced my first "phantom" update notification in Ubuntu 9.04. In previous versions of the system, a little icon on the upper panel would notify me that updates were available. I could either click the icon and open the Update Manager, then do the update. But in this new system (I've been running 9.04 about a week), the icon is gone. At some interval that I don't understand, the Update Manager just opens, minimized. I brought the window up and did the updates.

I'm a big proponent of the long-term-release concept in operating systems because I think both the enterprise and the home user doesn't want things breaking and should have the option of sticking with a particular distribution longer than 6 or 12 months. And I stuck with the current long-term release of Ubuntu — 8.04 — for well over a year because it worked fairly well with the particular hardware I'm using. But often a new release can clear up problems and be more stable than the perceived "stable" release.

There has been some discussion recently about Mark Shuttleworth’s keynote at LinuxCon, in particular a comment he made in passing about the need to explain to “girls” about free software. I haven’t had much time for writing since then, but a few people have asked me what I thought about it, so I thought I should say something.

We’ve turned off comments on the original post; there were about 200 already and there’s only so much that can be said before people stop adding anything new. I wanted to let you know that I received a private response from Mark Shuttleworth, in which he says that he has no intention of apologising for his comment. I know that a number of other people have approached him in person and by email, both before and after I posted my open letter, to ask him to consider the effects of what he said, and I’m still hoping that he will come around. (Despite numerous assertions to the contrary, I do prefer to see the glass as half full when it comes to these issues.)

Yep, I used wireless to upgrade from Ubuntu 8.04 to 8.10 and finally 9.04, and NetworkManager lost control of my wired Ethernet interface in the transition from 8.04 to 8.10. I did manage to find a fix very quickly, and I can confirm that it does indeed work.

If you've been using operating systems that are not Windows (but come to think of it, I've had plenty of networking problems in Windows as well), you know that getting both wired and WiFi network adapters to work in Linux, the BSDs and even Mac OS X is a crapshoot at best and prelude to weeks of often-futile hackery at worst. The smart thing to do is figure out what works the easiest and best BEFORE you buy anything to add to your computers, especially when it comes to WiFi adapters.

While I've known about the free, open-source desktop publishing application Scribus, until I happened across this article today I didn't know that Scribus is a cross-platform program that runs not just in Linux/Unix but also on computers using the Macintosh OS X and Microsoft Windows operating systems. That raises my opinion of Scribus immediately. I strive to use as many cross-platform applications as possible because of the flexibility they afford me across the many operating systems I run.

A comment in one of my "backup" blogs (i.e. little used and just sitting there ... waiting) alerted me to a new blog, Tropic of Vector, which chronicles one guy's effort to find the right operating system for a Pentium III-era laptop. After trying everything from Xubuntu down to Puppy and Damn Small Linux, he settled on Vector Linux Light, which aims to make the already resource-sparing Vector Linux run even better with slower CPUs and smaller memory footprints.

Opera hasn't shipped an update of its fast (but not open-source) Web browser from its repository for quite some time, but today Opera 10 has been moved from beta to the main release of the browser, and if you're using Opera's repository (as opposed to one maintained by your distro), you might have the same problem I did in Debian or Ubuntu (in my case the 8.04 LTS version).

I plucked this from the noise on Twitter: A new project dubbed AerieBSD is starting, some say as a fork of OpenBSD (and from the looks of the planned architectures, I'd say they're right).