Tag Archives: linux

Ubuntu – why didn’t I use it in the first place?

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OK I have a bit of an apology to make to a few people, as I told them that I don’t use Ubuntu because it is a pain to get going and isn’t simple to use. Clearly, I realize now that I was talking utter rubbish!

It was only Friday night that I thought I’d try it with my new PC. I could never get it to work on the laptop, so I thought I might stand a fighting chance with the PC. I installed 9.10 from an image I had (which I’d burnt to CD) and what do you know – it worked absolutely perfectly.

You’d be amazed at how quickly I came to like it as well. The Software Centre is fantastic for getting any applications you might need. There’s plenty of applications that cater for music and video playback, MSN, Skype – the lot.

For those of us who are glued to Windows, WINE makes it easy to use Windows applications not yet available to Linux. Programs such as Spotify work really well through WINE which is great.

Drivers aren’t terribly easy to get hold of – which I find the only real issue. Ubuntu will pick up many basic hardware products and install them, but the less common hardware is sometimes quite hard to install.

Nevertheless, I love it. The graphics are awesome (I’ve never seen such a practical, simple GUI) and it works seamlessly.

I’ts not quite enough to wean me off Windows 7, but it will definitely remain as a dualboot on my system!

Google release first developement test of Chrome for Mac and Linux

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Google has today released the development build of Google Chrome available for Mac and Linux.

Google has posted a blog post about this here.

It’s not even a beta build so I wouldn’t recommend testing it unless you are absolutely desperate. Google has said the features are very limited – there isn’t a print feature yet. It really is very limited. You’ll be nagged with warnings that the program is not for general use as well, so consider whether you really want to use it.

If you are dieing to have a play with it, use the link above and download it from the Chromium blog. Have a go and see what you think, but if I were you I’d wait for a beta build rather than a development build.

Freecom Network Drive and Linux (Ubuntu to be specific)

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I get a lot of Google searches relating to the Freecom Network Drive and Linux. They seem to relate to not being able to get it work properly, but I haven’t really posted much about the FND on Linux because… I just don’t use Linux. So for the benefit of my readers, I decided I’d take a leap of faith and download an ISO of Ubuntu just to see whether I could get it going.

And, frankly, I’m not totally sure what all the fuss is about. People seem to claim that they can’t access the drive or the config panel for it. But I didn’t have any problem at all – I just got Ubuntu working and connected to my wifi and it almost worked immediately. I could get to my network drive config panel at 192.168.1.2 (in my case, different users have different IPs) – just logged in as normal and it went easy peasy. Then as for getting to files, the Network window detected my drive most of the time and displayed all the folders and if not I could just do a local FTP and that worked just fine.

I’m not sure if people were/are having problems with other versions of Linux… but I mean it shouldn’t really make much difference. If you want to drop me a line or leave a comment with your Network Drive Ubuntu related problem and I’ll happily investigate for you. At the moment, I just don’t see much of a problem, so I need some more details.

If you are having problems, let me know and I’ll look into it for you.