Rodrigo A. Sepúlveda Schulz

Ubuntu 7.10 is out

Donwloading now. Will install in parallels on my mac...

Check it out on http://www.ubuntulinux.org.

From the press release:

"Highlighted Features of Ubuntu 7.10 Desktop Edition

 

The latest version of Ubuntu includes the following new features:

• Hardware management improvements - improved plug-and-play configuration for printers, as well as automatic firmware installation for Broadcom cards
• Improved support for display systems - For laptop users, full support external VGA (projector) support is available out-of-the-box with easy reconfiguration when hardware is switched. For power users this release includes the ability to manage multiple monitors
• Windows compatibility - Users with a dual partition can read from and and write to files that are on located in a Windows partition (including NTFS)
• Enhanced user interface – Simple 3D screen effects and graphics enhance the user experience 
• Desktop search – gives users the ability to search their entire desktop, whether for files, folders, chat logs or photos. This capability includes the deskbar applet, a central location on users' desktops for all local and web search operations
• Firefox plugins - automatic installation of popular Firefox plugins validated by Ubuntu for a richer, safer web-browsing experience"

Hasta la Vista, Microsoft - Linux wins!

(via Hack Attack)

Occam Capital takes Mandriva out of chapter 11

I had missed this announcement: just going through some old blog posts (I hardly read any now). Occam Capital has invested in Mandriva. Good stuff. I know the team at Occam pretty well, and the founder of Mandriva as well. Interesting mix.

And I remember discussing the possibility of this deal a very long while ago on the phone... The challenge is huge, but there are a few possible strategies to make Mandriva standout vs. Ubuntu (the main challenger) to the 2 US-based firms: Redhat and Suse / Novell. Not to forget of course the development of Redflag and other minor distributions.

Challenges include:
. proper positionning in the B2C, B2B or B2G (government) markets (Ubuntu is very B2C. Should Mandriva go B2B ?)
. simplicity of product offering, installation and support for a large-range of hardware
. proper support services, the killer B-model in open-source
. marketing efforts to develop the brand

Opportunities include:
. an alternative to US-based software vendors for international governments
. a low-cost alternative for new markets
. exclusive deals with manufacturers (not PCs... as they are mainly in the USA, but Asia, and also set top boxes, mobile devices...)

Any other thougths are welcome: I've stopped using Fedora and Mandriva, and have moved on to Ubuntu for its simplicity, but it's mainly a B2C proposition.

Update: Codor has more and Didier has mentionned it too.

forgot to mention Ubuntu 7.04 is out

Download your new Ubuntu linux copy from here.

I'm testing the new Nokia 770 linux tablet

It had to happen: Santa Claus brought me the latest Internet Tablet from Nokia, the 770. Anyone out there has tried it ? Any good pointer for software ? Let me know :)

Flock 0.7.7 maintenance release is out

This multimedia browser has just detected that it needed to upgrade from 0.7.5 to 0.7.6. Then I had to manually go to 'Check for updates' to get 0.7.7. I don't really know what's new, although I should be reading the maintenance releases notes n the official blog.

Flock has become my defacto browser, along with firefox (just upgraded to version 2.0), although I don't use any of it's new features... Any hint on all the productivity I'm missing ?

Recycling old computers

More and more of us have old computers or laptops laying around at home. Indeed, I just ordered a new laptop (Mac pro Pro 15") to use in a dual boot environement (MacOS X, Windows). So what do you do with the old computers. They have almost no market value (the old laptop I'm using at the moment is an Armada M700, Pentium III) that I bought in June 2000 ! (six years already). So putting them up for sale on eBay is not really an option, and throwing them away is not a good idea (there are some charities who would gladly receive your stuff though).

In addition, your kids might want to start owning their own computers ? Here is the perfect opportunity to recycle your old computer. My first recommendation:
- add as much memory as you can to your old computer (check www.kingston.com or www.crucial.com).
- you might need to get a new battery for your laptop.
- get a modern operating system (meaning linux), and a user-friendly distribution (Ubuntu is my preferred by now), and a fast and efficient graphical interface (I recommend xfce. Good, as there is a xubuntu distribution available).
- install it with as many options as you want. The Synaptic package is great to use. Lots of games available for your kids as well. You'll get the usual browsers (firefox or Opera 9) installed very easily. Flock is available but might require some extra work. You'll get the usual open-source package OpenOffice. And a number of email readers. You won't need anything else really, as all multimedia tools are also available (DVD, CDROM, music...)
- I was surprised to notice that GoogleEarth and Google's Picasa are also readily available on your linux box.
- finally, you might want to get hacking a bit, and turn your laptop into a wireless sniffer ?

And there you go, a new computer at home (or even the office), for a few bucks on hardware, and nothing on software. By the way, the latest issue of Make magazine has an article on how to upgrade all other components of your computer.

linux distro Fedora Core 5 is out

Somehow I missed the release of Fedora Core 5, but just got the RedHat magazine in my inbox. Stuff to play with over the upcoming weekend maybe.

Firefox 2.0 alpha is out

Did I mention it before ? Nope. Techcrunch has the links and the story. eeeer: the folks in the comments there are warning you that this is a pre-alpha. Use at your own risk.

RSS #030: Meet Olivier Rafal, deputy editor-in-chief of 'Le Monde Informatique' [French]

Download movie (.mov)

Olivier is a journalist with ‘Le Monde Informatique’, a weekly printed mazagine targeting IT executives. he started a blog about a year ago, where he posts the interviews of folks in the IT industry, feedback of conferences… He’s actually the deputy editor-in-chief of the magazine, that has a 50,000 circulation. He also recommends the blog of François Cointe, who publishes a cartoon every day here.

We had this nice chat about the printed media and blogs back on November 28, 2005.

64-bit linux anyone ?

 +

Guys, I’m being a total geek tonight. Just discovered that my latest workstation is 64–bit capable !

I actually have a bi-processor machine, running 2* Xeon CPUs 3,2 Ghz at 800Mhz with 2MB in L2 Cache, hyperthreading capable, and 64–bit capable (Intel 64T). They are not Multiple core capable (whatever that means, I’m reading off the BIOS screen).

Since my computer has been freezing every now and then after a power fault, I ran a complete hardware diagnostics test (veeeerrry long), no problem there. So my guess is that Windows got corrupted somehow. So I’m reinstalling ! But hey, my boot disk is a 60 GB SCSI 10,000 rpm disk. So what if I split that between my nice OOOOOLD 32–bit WindowsXP OS, and a nice linux ?

So my question to the world is: what 64–bit enabled linux distro should I install after I finish reinstalling Windows ? I’m leaving free a 20GB partition on my boot disk.

In the meantime, I’m watching old episodes of diggnation while I install windoze and while you type your answers! Thanks.

Best open source software for the Mac

"Open Source Mac is a simple list of the best free and open source software for Mac OS X. We aren't trying to be a comprehensive listing of every open-source mac app, instead we want to showcase the best, most important, and easiest to use."

(via digg)

anybody have more suggestions? I know Joi has a list here on his wiki.

OpenOffice 2.0 is out

Somehow I forgot to mention the other day that a great alternative to the other productivity suite is out: OpenOffice 2.0OpenOffice 2.0. It's available for *free*, in 36 languages, runs on Windows, Linux, Solaris, FreeBSD and Mac, and comes packed with software to create documents, presentations, spreadsheets, databases...

The press release came out about 3 weeks ago, and I’ve been running it on my new DELL desktop for the past 2 weeks with no problem.

You can download it here, and donate some money to the project along the way.

RSS #018: Meet Marc Fleury, founder & CEO, Jboss Inc. [French]

Did you know that French Boys can create global players ? We of course all know about Bernard Liautaud and Denis Payre who took Business Objects public about 10 years ago and created a 1 billion dollar company in revenues. At ETRE the other day, George Coelho of Benchmark Capital was counting on both his hands the number of European entrepreneurs who have made it on the global scene. Of course Pierre Chappaz of Kelkoo or Niklas Zennström of Skype join the list among a few others.

Today I bring you another fanstastic story. The general public might not know him quite well yet, but Marc Fleury, founder & CEO of Jboss Inc. started a company that has today a number ONE marketshare in the world. His competitors (in marketshare order) are IBM, BEA Systems, Orable, Sun… Not bad for a guy who started in pre-sales at Sun France back in 1997, in the first days of Java.

Marc was enthrilled with Java and wanted to start coding and developping with the Java framework, CORBA, etc. He had relocated by then to Sun in the USA with his family. Unfortunately Marc was trained as an engineer (and I can tell he’s got a very impressive academic background), and in his words, engineers are some sort of 2nd class citizens over there. So the only way he could get back to coding was to embrace the open source movement in 1998.

Inspired by the innovative work of Marten Mickos at MySQL, Marc embarked onto his new vision and ambition: professional open source. Now, what does his company do ? Middleware, as he puts it “boring for most people” but “fascinating plumbing” for him. In 2001 he was already doing training sessions around open source and that’s where he met his current business partner, Sacha Labourey.

Although he won’t disclose revenues, Marc openly acknowledges that all his products (including the JEMS and Jboss suite) have been downloaded a hefty 12 million times. The way he makes money ? Professional support for his products. Key customers include in Europe for instance Disney, the French tax authority (DGI) and the European Bank for Reconstruction & Development.

An amusing anecdote in this episode: Marc tells us about how he went to raise funds in February 2000 with the top shots in Silicon Valley. He remembers that one Sequioa partner told him: “your business plan is not bad, it’s horrible”! When the bubble burst a month later, the company went bankrupt, and they decided to move the business to Atlanta. Today, happy investors in the company include Accel Partners, Intel Capital, Bain Capital and Matrix Partners…

I asked him for his advice for aspiring entrepreneurs: “believe”, “keep at it”, “be paranoid” and “believe in yourself” because everyone is going to have an opinion different than yours.

Echoing Benoît Bergeret’s approach, there are really no barriers to building a fantastic company from your own backyard.

And by the way, this was shot very late at night, after one gin tonic too many probably

My open source tip of the day: a virtual KVM

My 3 computer screens, originally uploaded by rsepulveda.

A while ago, when I published a picture of my former desk at home (and all the mess), Yann Lechelle was kind enough to point me to an open source software that allows you to share mouse and keyboard between several computers, RUNNING DIFFERENT OPERATING SYSTEMS.

Until now, I really didn't get the point of it. Now look at the picture above: I've plugged the large keyboard and a laser mouse to the computer on the right (running linux). I can now use it to access the computer on the left that has an extra LCD screen attached to it.

The result ? I move my mouse as if on a single screen, but it moves between the 3 screens switly ! And it handles cut & paste between the machines as well. It runs on linux, a variety of Unices, Windows, Mac...
The setup is a bit cumbersome if you don't read the README file. You should, because all in all it takes about 5-10 minutes to have this running from downloading it to using it. Isn't it great ?

You can find the tool on http://synergy2.sourceforge.net.

CommandN was also talking about it last week, but it appeared first on this blog in the comments, right ;)  ?

Very impressive new AJAX webmail client: Zimbra

It’s popping up all over the very specialised sites today. Indeed, Zimbra keeps showcasing how a browser + AJAX technologies (ie runs on any platform) allows developers to build BEAUTIFUL + POWERFUL applications. We’ve talked about it here and here.

I’ll point you to the online flash demo of the app: see how they’ve built on gmail’s conversation concept, how they built a great search filter mechanism, and in particular how the client can be extended with 3rd party software, such as making skype calls directly from Zimbra. It’s the best webmail program I’ve seen, and I’ve used gazillions including hotmail, yahoo, Squirrelmail, gmail and the like.

And… it’s open source. Who’s going to be the first to offer a hosted email solution based on Zimbra ?

UPDATE: just noticed Benchmark Capital is an investor...

The Future of Mobility is Linux

So says Russell Beattie, blogosphered-yahood-mobile-guru. In a nutshell his arguments:

• “the power of an open environment and the draw of Linux and its fans” : “ yet the development pace for the 770 is way more rapid. In addition, there’s at least a half a dozen blogs and bloggers dedicated to the device, and it hasn’t even launched yet “
• “making decisions to base apps on Symbian a more expensive and risky operation for companies” : “ the Symbian platform has been difficut to impossible to understand, let alone develop for “
•  “developing for Linux is relatively fun and developing for Symbian is generally not”

etc. He also develops a few PRO arguments for Linuxmobile, and a few CON for windows mobile.

• “Linux is just as good, or maybe better, of a platform on which to have Java run. Java is the ruler of all mobile applications at the moment, and with more than half of all mobile phones running Java it will be for some time. Carriers want more compelling applications so they can bump up data ARPUs, and therefore will be looking at the platforms that can provide the most innovation and buying from the manufacturers that provide phones with those platforms. “

Read the whole argument here.

The extensions I really like on Firefox

Yeah… I know. You can google about them on this blog. But just as a recap, as I’ve jsut reinstalled my laptop:

• Gmail notifier
• Google Adsense notifier
• Adblock

And I’ve just added a new 2, awesome:

• it adds a little GreaseMonkey script to add a DELETE button to gmail ! waow…
• and Mozbackup, to backup your stuff.

ps: fancy a little funky PR vlogging with Scoble ? Check his interview of Microsoft interns on campus. It’s cute. I like the attacks on Stanford

A cute shared online calendar

Couldn’t agree more with Mike:

“Kiko (see our post below), an ajax calendar application, is working now and we were able to grab a screenshot. First impression: Kiko is a usable calendaring application with nice sharing features. Try it.“

Indeed, he goes on in a previous post (something I have also mentionned in the past)

“Writely is a highly specialized niche application built with ajax. Ajax allows this (and other applications) to act very much like desktop apps. Stuff like this must get Microsoft’s attention…How long will it be before a full suite of platform-independent ajax-enabled office applications becomes available? If all you need is a browser to open and edit these documents, the huge network effect enjoyed by Microsoft Office could simply vanish.”

What's wrong with my old Toshiba Tecra 8100?

 

Yep, I keep on changing laptops every now and then. My current thinking is making me lean towards a new tablet PC laptop. Or maybe a Mac laptop ? nah…

So… I have a couple of old laptops that I use for a number of things, including testing of new applications. I’m now trying to get my Tecra 8100 to work with a clean install of linux (not a tweaked version).

• I’ve tried Ubuntu 5.04: indeed my very favourite. It’s fast, works straight out of the CDROM, with one catch: absolutely impossible to make the sound card work, hence no music, no pandora.com, no skype… Seems a number of people are having the issue on the this specific model with Ubuntu.
• Then I tried installing my next to favourite distro: Fedora. They are now in version Fedora Core 4. Installs OK from the 4 CDs, and the sound works. But I don’t know why my PCMCIA network adapter don’t get recognized (wireless LAN and Ethernet). Very peculiar. So out as well.
• I therefore tried a compile from scratch version of Gentoo 2005.1 linux. Rather entertaining as you go manually through each step of setting up your linux box. In the end after 2,5 days of compiling, it was not working. I guess I did too much tweaking in the options and made a mistake somewhere. Out !
• So I tried that Linspire thing with their free distro this week. I have to say their install process is great, graphically very nice, very well integrated. Maybe a winner in some environments, because you almost felt like on a Mac at some points, although it eventually settles on KDE (I prefer Gnome or xfce). Somehow, it is very slow with network connections: launching a web page takes forever, and they want to make me pay for upgrades to the apps ? I’m so used to apt-get, yum or synaptic, that I’m not looking forward to new proprietary apps.
• So there I went, and downloaded one of the latest distributions of Mandriva: I got version 2005.1 Mini from an ftp site. Did the whole install over the network. It was OK, but as the hard disk on my laptop is small, it automatically selected a number of packages, and the launch was slow.
• OK, let’s start again (6th install over the weekend on the same box!), and downloaded the 4 CDs of the i586 version of Mandriva 2005.1 (I got a popup asking whether I wanted to upgrade to version 2006 beta 1 ??? or reinstall – I chose reinstall). The envrironment is up now, had to manually configure a couple of things after logging in. I’m not sure this is the winner, as I have not yet heard any sound on it. hum…

Summary:

• I know my network hardware works, because some distros pick it up, and I share my connection with my other computers
• I know my audio hardware works, because some distros pick it up.
• The install process on Linspire is probably the best: very well done. Next comes Mandriva, but why the *$*$”# do they ask for my keyboard layout (FR on an US install) at the last screen instead of at the beginning ?
• Some distros are compiled with more options than others, and I’m running either i586 or i686 binaries.
• Finally, I still don’t know on which version to settle on on this laptop. On my other laptop, I’m happy running either FC4 or Ubuntu (it’s an Armada M700).

So, how was your weekend ?

Get a free copy of a commercial linux distribution: Linspire 5.0

Another trend starting out? Software companies are making their software available for free for a very limited period these days. Opera offered its browser recently. Now Linspire is offering its latest distro for a few days. Get it here.

(via The Download Squad)

Now playing: Adam Curry - Daily Source Code for Thursday September 1st 2005 #233

Firefox beats IE hands up on my blog...

I was just going thru my stats, and look at this, on connections in % :

• Firefox = 30 + 14 + 8 + 1 = 53%
• Internet Explorer = 43+1+1 = 45%
• Safari = 2%

What do you think ? I only write for early adopters / geeks / nerds ? or thus reflects the broader Internet?

Build your WHOLE business on Open Source

Excellent pointer on Slashdot on how to build your ENTIRE business on Open Source. You can either read it online in different sections in InfoWorld, or download the whole report in PDF format. Go for it!

Here are the sections:

 A buyer's guide to open source  
Open source provides low-cost, community-supported alternatives to commercial enterprise apps 

Open source business intelligence  
Low-cost alternatives to costly reporting tools will arrive soon 

Open source business process management  
Orchestrating SOA is a heady task, but new projects are stepping up to the plate 

Open source content management  
The hardest part of choosing a CMS solution is narrowing down the choices 

Open source CRM  
Manage sales and customer relationships without spending a fortune on software 

Open source ERP  
The features of free ERP packages vary widely, but some gems can be found 

Open source enterprise service bus  
Middleware options proliferate, but jumping ship from commercial vendors may be premature 

Open source identity  
Free tools can give developers a head start on advanced security infrastructure 

Open source directory  
LDAP servers move closer to becoming commodity items 

Open source portals  
Competition in the open source Java portal space heats up 

Open source point of sale  
Free commerce terminals lend flexibility to businesses of all sizes 

Open source RFID  
Free tag and EPC data management software is in its infancy, but looks promising 

Open source VoIP/Telephony  
Options abound for PBX applications and interactive voice response 

Open source licensing offers many choices  
Before you use that code, make sure you understand its terms 

Will AJAX Threaten Windows Desktop?

"They are not your father's HTML pages anymore. AJAX interfaces are getting more complex and versatile, relieving the user of the necessity to reload the page, and thus are becoming more like your average desktop apps. The catch? AJAX apps work in any browser out there, making the OS layer a bit irrelevant. Will the trend threaten Microsoft desktop near-monopoly? Or are we hearing the story of poorly debugged device drivers again?"

I heard this from someone at Microsoft the other day. Indeed. Here's the Wikipedia entry on Ajax.
(via /.)

"My data is my life, and I won't keep it in a strongbox that someone else has the keys for."

Waow : it's been a while since I've read such a powerful statement. Cory Doctorow makes a case against Apple using Trusted Computing on Intel chips. Read more here.
Excerpt:

"The point of Trusted Computing is to make it hard -- impossible, if you believe the snake-oil salesmen from the Trusted Computing world -- to open a document in a player other than the one that wrote it in the first place, unless the application vendor authorizes it. It's like a blender that will only chop the food that Cuisinart says you're allowed to chop. It's like a car that will only take the brand of gas that Ford will let you fill it with. It's like a web-site that you can only load in the browser that the author intended it to be seen in.

What this means is that "open formats" is no longer meaningful. An application can write documents in "open formats" but use Trusted Computing to prevent competing applications from reading them. Apple may never implement this in their own apps (though I'll be shocked silly if it isn't used in iTunes and the DVD player), but Trusted Computing in the kernel is like a rifle on the mantelpiece: if it's present in act one, it'll go off by act three."

Very useful addon for firefox: adsense notifier

Earlier today I decided to get a little tool that I had read about a few months ago: it's a Google Adsense notifier for Firefox.

Basically it sits at the bottem of your browser and periodically checks for you:
- the number of page views on your site (GREAT to keep track of traffic on your site in a snap)
- number of clicks on adsense ads (yeah... who cares ;)
- CTR (click-thry rate = clicks/PV)
- eCPM (value of each click)
- MONEY you are making with Google's Adsense program.

This little tool might inspire some of us to write about stuff more often ;)

By they way, are the ads on this blog too intrusive ? Do you want me to reduce the size of them, get rid of them, or leave them just as they are ?

Mac-addict Joi Ito switching (maybe) to linux ;)

I couldn't resist re-posting this note by the great globe-trotter, VC and entrepreneur Joi Ito. If you read his blog or have met him at conferences, you know he is a devout Mac user, and has spured a whole group of fellow entrepreneurs to use a Mac.

Joi has been playing with VoIP for some time (he even has recently invested in a company in this space, PhoneGnome), and more recently with an open-source private PBX, Asterisk. I guess this had led him to use linux more often. In his most recent note, he claims he is going on travel this week only with a linux box. Waow!

His distribution of choice ? Ubuntu (and not one of the top 3: Mandriva, RedHat and Suse) from South Africa. I can only say that is an excellent choice, as it is the distro running on my desk for the whole family ;) Very simple to use, great menu selection, easy upgrades.

Still haven't given it a try ? You can just download a FREE live CD .ISO, burn it to a CD, and boot off the CD without touching anything on your current Windows install!

Of course, Ubuntu has already been mentionned on this blog a number of times before.

Nice review of Fedora Core 4 (linux)

The other distro I ran at home on another box is Fedora Core 4. I've been using a Redhat build since versions 4.x I think. Hence I'm so used to the commands and disk structure, that I have trouble switching to something else (except of course Ubuntu). I've tried Mandriva lately, but it lacks something that I can't describe. Switching cost maybe.

Anyways, there's a nice review here. I had announced the release here.

Has Ubuntu released version 5.10 ?

Weird. The main page of ubuntu linux only mentions version 5.04. But if you browse a bit on their site, you can actually download .ISOs (CD images) and torrent files for version 5.10 (codename breezy and colony ?).
Anyone know what this is all about ?

Ubunty is a linux distro from South Africa that is really user friendly (I ran it on one box at home). It's tag line is actually: "linux for human beings"...

Mandriva buys up Lycoris assets

Heavy weak in the open source space! Mandriva is buying up Lycoris assets, with it seems a particular focus on its really easy-to-use desktop. The linux distro market is really concentrating into what 4-5 big players ? Red Hat, Mandriva, Suse Novell, Ubuntu... and a few live CD distros that we've already talked about.

Read the press release here, and an analysis here.

Jacques, is this why you were trying to reach me all this week ? Promise, I'll return the call ASAP ;)

Fedora Core 4 (linux) available.

Cool: my Ubuntu 5.04 box needed a new upgrade. Remember I'm also running Mandriva 10.2 on another one (sometimes I feel like a complete nerd.). From their site:

Fedora Core 4 is now available from Red Hat and at distinguished mirror sites near you, and is also available in the torrent. Fedora Core is available for x86-64, i386, and ppc/ppc64. Please file bugs via Bugzilla, Product Fedora Core, Version 4, so that they are noticed and appropriately classified. Discuss this release on fedora-list.

OSNews has an early review. Redhat Magazine has a lenghty description.

Frenchmen can be movers and shakers as well

I had lunch last week with 2 very interesting folks.

To the right, Jacques Le Marois, co-founder of MandrakeSoft (now Mandriva), one of the top 3 linux distributions in the world, along with Novell's Suse (transaction facilitated by Arma Partners) and Redhat. Jacques recently merged (bought) Conectiva, a brazilian linux distro, making him the largest non-US distribution out there. Of course it appeals beautifully to all third-world countries (he mentions India as a great market), and all US-suspicious buyers. MandrakeSoft came out of receivership (bankruptcy) late last year, and is doing great now again.
They're a public company on the Marché Libre, so if you feel like supporting them, buy up some stock or get a DVD on their online shop. I guess their other 2 challengers are Ubuntu linux from South Africa (really great, simple and modular), and Red Flag linux (hey, they're still in China, but I wouldn't be surprised if one of the other 4 strikes a deal with them).

I installed Mandriva Limited Edition 2005 over the week-end (also known as MandrakeSoft 10.2): I downloaded the DVD ISO with bit torrent (they started the technology before everyone else!), and burned it onto a blank DVD. Installation was rather easy, although I prefer the graphical interface of Fedora Core, and I found Ubuntu's to be more user friendly. In particular, as I use a French Keyboard with an English install, I'd prefer to select my keyboard at the beginning, not at the end.
Updating all packages is simple, there are graphical tools for it. I'm used to synaptic by now, and apt-get. Here I got to learn another one: urpmi. Adding repositories for non official stuff and contribs was a bit more complicated; I had to google them, and cut & paste several lines of code.
Jacques: simplify this.
Finally, I had to recompile some code to get my Orinoco wifi card to work properly with some of the tools I use. Enough said. Mandrake should probably simplify this, or even offer an RPM for techies, instead of making me do it by hand. In a nutshell, it's a family friendly distro: I feel it's slightly slower than my previous Fedora, but hey, it's a secondary laptop. I'm not complaining. OSnews had a complete review recently.

To the left, Christophe Becker, MD of geneanet.org, a genealogy portal co-founded by Jacques. I've talked about geneanet in the past: it is a *free* service that allows you to share your family tree on line. It is powered by the really great geneweb software, designed by Daniel de Rauglaudre (version 5.00 featuring Unicode is coming out soon!).
That's where I 've stored my family tree for the past few years. With their club membership, you get for example rid of advertisments, have access to additional serach options (cross search all family trees with any of your data). Christophe wanted to talk about blogs, and ther he goes: he just launched a genealogy blog over the weekend: http://www.lebloggenealogie.com. I guess http://sepulveda.org is having some competition :)

The lunch was very funny, as we kept on finding common acquaintances. Jacques is a cousin of my wife by some not-so-remote link. He's worked with people I know. So has Christophe. Small world.
In addition, it was REALLY the first time I could talk openly about my genealogical research and about open source for over an hour without raising an eyebrow whatsoever. I would even say spooky...

Check them out:
http://www.mandriva.com
http://www.geneanet.org

Update on 8/6/05: great review of Mandriva here, as one of the best user friendly linux distro (via OSnews.com)

I wish more stuff went into beta under linux too

OK OK... I was declaring the coolness of my linux box earlier today. Never said it was superior though, except for price (I'm not even sure about total cost of ownership although each side would love to prove me wrong). Sure, linux fans have the great sourceforge repository where gazillions of new programs, projects, tools, etc. get posted, updated and tracked.

But, every now and then, you stumble on a piece of code that will just not run on your own operating system. Happens to Mac fans, happens to Windows dans, happens to linux fans. Scoble just points out again on Ant. I just can't use it!!! A number of other tools only run on Mac :(

I wish inventors/developers would develop on all three platforms. Skype managed to to it. But most don't. There's both extra cost and extra skills required. Java was supposed to solve that issue, it seems only Azureus made it so far. What about all the other software ?

I'll end up with 3 computers running with 3 OSes at home I suppose...

Update: of course I could have mentionned many other programs such as OpenOffice.org... This post was just to stress the irrelevance of artificial frontiers for consumers between different computing environements, even in the Internet era, when all should run seamlessly on IP...

Gaining productivity on my linux box

engFolks, just to let you know I dropped both the Gnome and KDE environements on my linux box: I am running Fedora Core 3 on an old Compaq Armada M700 laptop (Pentium III, 700Mhz) with a Orinoco Gold Wifi card. Although both these graphical environments are great (I tend to use Gnome most often because it has a simpler look, but KDE offers more configuration options), they tend to draw too much resources from my own box. I don't like the idea that most of the time, my processor is just trying to display stuff...

Hence I tried another simple graphical environment (very easy to install on your box, just use synaptic): Xfce. It's light, fast, and as handy as the previous graphical environments. It's nice to boost productivity on this box again.

And I'm using bluefish as an editor for programming and web page design. It's fast and simple, although still very convenient. Should I one day become a serious programmer, then I guess I'll give some more thought to Anjuta or eclipse.

In the meantime, I'd like once more to remind all of you that linux is a free operating system, that it is very easy to install, and that your everyday programs are as easy to use as on another operating system:
- graphical environment (see above)
- web browser for most stuff: firefox
- email program for most stuff: thunderbird (you can still use evolution if you are used to MS Outlook)
- music player: xmms (same as winamp)
- movie players: videolan (this program is under threat of some patent protection!) or xine
- office: openoffice (in 2.0beta stage by now)
- voice over IP: skype
- CD burning: k3b
- communicating with the Dark Force world for file sharing: samba
- instant messenger (works with MSN, YIM, AIM, ICQ...): gaim

What else do you really need ? Russ has just discovered the Ubuntu live CD that I have also been promoting since January. Linux has really become so easy to install, use and cheap to own...

ps: posted of course from my linux box... that's the only OS I use at home.