Linux

Well, really, it’s the result of updates to LibATA. Man, I really haven’t been keeping up my Linux knowledge. Anyway, I happened across this post about it and it’s worth reading if you have any confusion about how disks are named. A hint: all SCSI and ATA (PATA and SATA) are now /dev/sd* and ATAPI devices like CD and DVD drives are /dev/sr*

Hop over to andLinux.org and you can download an Ubuntu Linux distro that will install itself and run out of your Windows system tray. This isn’t Cygwin or a Linux emulation, but a real Linux that runs like an ordinary application on your Windows box.

Head to this Lifehacker post for an annotated installation guide with screenshots.

The Linutop 2 is available now for Eur 280.00 (a little over $400). Found this via Engadget.

You can get a whole bunch of good, free Linux eBooks here. He limits you to 10 per day but I don’t have a problem with that, especially since he only asks for donations. The Vim Book is 572 pages alone!

See this article in Information Week about the author’s attempt to install one of the most popular distributions, and a Linux distro that Dell’s shipping.

Novell’s SUSE anyone?

I’ve dual-booted both my old Dell C600 and my HP/Compaq N6125. The Dell’s running Ubuntu 6.06 and the Compaq is running Fedora Core 5 The Compaq is a Turion 64 ML34 with built-in Bluetooth and 802.11 a/b/g whereas the Dell is a Pentium III and I’ve got an add-on DLink card (don’t have the particulars handy right now but I’ll update this later with it).

Bottom line: Excellent! Got wireless WPA authentication working after “only” a couple of days 🙂 But, it’s fast and has just about everything I need. My only complaint so far: the music clients distributed with Fedora don’t support MP3 🙁

Yesterday I decided to finally install Ubuntu Linux on my Dell C600 laptop with its 700 MHz PIII. I’d just reinstalled XP a few months ago and figured that I could use Ubuntu instead of XP as a backup laptop. Well, was I surprised when the Ubuntu installer offered to resize one of my NTFS partitions to make room! I figured, what the heck, so I let it go. Well, guess what? — it worked! The NTFS partition is about 6GB smaller and still completely usable from within XP. So, my laptop now has both XP SP2 and Ubuntu Linux.

Sweet!

Took most of half of yesterday to figure out how to get wireless working. Ubuntu is based on Debian so I read a bit about it online and then figured out that I was reading the wrong stuff since I use WPA. So, I reset my brain and started reading a whole different set of documentation, some of which was out of date and some was just plain ole difficult to fathom. But, in the end, I got it running. Now, when I plug my wireless card it, wpa_supplicant starts up automatically and logs me into the correct access point on my home network.

Again, sweet!

My experiences, though, show me why Linux isn’t ready for the casual home user. I had to go through way too much techie stuff for the average user. My knowledge of Unix in general and Linux in particular along with my networking knowledge were the only things that saved me. It also reminds me why I gave up using VM under GNU Emacs to read my email. When you have the time, it’s great to customize your environment and have to rebuild it every time a new release comes out but when you don’t have the time … well, let’s just say it’s not the best.

OK, now that I’ve got that off my chest, let me say again about my Ubuntu installation:

SWEET!

Go to LinuxQuestions.org (from Digg).