Showing headlines posted by Steven_Rosenber

It kept nagging at me. Why was the "hot corner" in Debian's version of GNOME 3 so "sensitive," compared to the GNOME 3 desktop's hot corner in Fedora 19? I did a bit of searching and found out that "hot corner" sensitivity was something that the user can set, not in stock GNOME 3 but with the Activities Configurator extension.

My personal blog is run with the Perl-based Ode system. Ode doesn’t use a database. Instead it stores its entries as text files in “normal” directories on the server. I wanted to have exact copies of everything in my Ode documents directory on my local computer and the server. And I wanted the freedom to add to or modify anything in this directory on either side (server or laptop) and have everything track on both machines.

For one reason or another, I’ve been thinking about Movable Type. I went to both of the web sites associated with the blogging software — movabletype.org and movabletype.com — and found no mention of the formerly “free,” open-source Movable Type software I used for so many years. Instead, MT 6 is $595 for up to five users and $1,195 for unlimited users. Ouch. There’s quite a gap between $0 and $1,195.

I didn't expect the post-WordPress blogging system Ghost to ship with all of its promised features, but it's more basic than I thought it would be. It's basically entries tagged with Markdown and presented on the page.

Aaron Toponce is one of those insightful writers about Linux that I like to follow. Now he joins those publicly leaving Ubuntu after what he refers to as a long line of disappointments in the project and its parent company Canonical, the last of those being the "trademark aggression" exhibited over the Fix Ubuntu site, the heavy-handedness for which SABDFL Mark Shuttleworth has apologized.

I just read about the Whisker Menu for Xfce at OMG! Ubuntu and installed it on my system from the Fedora repositories. While I’m happy with my panel on the left and the traditional Xfce Application Finder, I thought the Whisker Menu would be worth a try.

Just to make sure that nothing suits my needs better than what I’m running right now (that being Fedora 19 with Xfce and GNOME), I did an Ubuntu 13.10 installation this week and have spent a bit of time putting the Unity-driven Linux distribution to the test.

I thought you could take care of turning off suspend when the laptop lid is shut under GNOME 3 by using GNOME Tweak Tool. That doesn’t work. Automatic suspend when the lid is closed doesn’t work for me because suspend/resume doesn’t function on my HP hardware, and I’d like to close the damn lid every once in awhile without having to do a hard boot afterward. It’s the little things.

It sounds screwy, but I’m taking some of the elements I like in GNOME 3 and Unity and implementing them in Xfce.

I was reading today about how the Korora spin on Fedora includes Handbrake, the popular cross-platform video transcoding/DVD-ripping utility. But I am running regular Fedora 19, albeit with proprietary-package assistance from RPM Fusion and a few other repositories. Still, Handbrake isn’t in any of those repos.

I’m not surprised about the failure of Canonical/Ubuntu’s $32 million “give us $700, we promise to give you a phone packed with unproven, yet-to-be-seen technology sometime next year” campaign. And it’s not success wrapped in failure. It’s just failure.

The AMD Catalyst 13.8 beta driver for Linux was released about a week ago and finally came into my Fedora 19 system via RPM Fusion. And it broke X. Login is fine, but most applications — including Firefox — cause X to quit and send me back to the login prompt.

Fedora has shipped a new kernel — 3.10.3-300. But the kmod-catalyst package is still at 3.9.9-302 on my system; in the RPM Fusion repository, it’s at 3.9.11, and I can’t successfully run the 3.10 kernel without removing kmod-catalyst and giving up all that the Catalyst driver has brought to this very new hardware.

The newish AMD Catalyst 13.6 driver — now in beta — handles my AMD APU and its AMD Radeon HD 7420g graphics perfectly.

Here is the first video in my Tout-powered 40 Seconds of Linux series in which I talk about Linux until the rooster crows. And the rooster always crows at the 40-second mark.

Given that my still-shiny, still-new HP Pavilion G6-2210-us laptop with an AMD A4-4300M APU that features AMD Radeon HD 7420G graphics is not well-supported in Linux’s current open-source Radeon driver, I’ve been looking to AMD’s proprietary Catalyst video driver for help.

After a shaky start with Fedora’s fedup update tool to bring my Fedora 18 with Xfce system to Fedora 19, I did manage to successfully upgrade my HP Pavilion g6-2210us.

It didn't take me days to figure it out, but getting this Fedora 18 system to recognize and actually print on my el-cheapo HP LaserJet 1020 should have been a whole lot easier than it turned out to be.

Ubuntu’s SABDFL (“self-appointed benevolent dictator for life,” as he’s known) Mark Shuttleworth just added comment No. 1834 to Ubuntu’s Bug No. 1 — “Microsoft Has a Majority Market Share” — and closed the bug.

I’ve spent just about a month with this new HP Pavilion g6-2210us laptop that shipped with Windows 8. That means UEFI and Secure Boot. And new hardware. We all know how difficult Linux can be with new hardware.