Debian Lenny works ok on my desktop computer, an Asus Pundit AH1 box with dual core AMD processors and nvidia graphics and sound. The Lenny release is the current ‘stable’ and so has slightly old packages (Firefox 3.0xx and OpenOffice 2.4) but runs fast. I can always upgrade to Squeeze (the current ‘testing’) when I find a vital reason to.

A lot of things just worked once I did a ‘net install’ from the ‘small’ cd image (just the base system and a package manager) and chose the desktop and standard options. The rest was downloaded over the hard wired internet connection, so I have the up to date packages, rather than installing from a ‘large’ cd and then updating most of the system.

I managed to find work-rounds for all the issues that have arisen so far, mostly from the Debian forums. Below is a quick list of my findings

• nvidia graphics drivers, the module assistant just worked
• British keyboard, had to fiddle with xorg.conf and also set the language to British English at the log in screen
• Printing, my Samsung ML1640 didn’t work with the instructions from open printing, but using the feature in the edit printers dialogue to manually find a ppd did get printing working. You download the linux driver from Samsung to find the ppd file.
• Sound, you have to add an option in one of the initialisation files to get the sound working properly. Then you have to reduce the ‘inline’ volume using alsamixer. This was the most time consuming fiddle.
• Running Java applications (freemind, jUploadr, HotPotatoes), you have to install the Sun Java Virtual Machine then make sure that the Sun JVM is the default.
• Update the flashplayer to version 10, I just used the direct method, downloading the linux binary from Adobe
• Make the screen rendition of fonts a little smoother, by carefull choice of settings.

The scanner just worked with Xsane, and Rhythmbox automatically downloaded the codecs for a couple of mp4 and aac tracks I have on my music player.

Just bought a cheap laser printer (first time I’ve had a printer at home for around 10 years). Settled on what they had in PC World, a monochrome Samsung ML1640. Installed on my College laptop running Windows XP - put CD in, click some buttons, navigate some menus, restart and then prints. Plugged it into my desktop PC running Ubuntu 9.04. Just found it. Worked.

More maths coming soon! By the way, I’ve been using WordPress to publish this site for just over 5 years now. It was 1.4 I started with I think. Tried 1.22 before then.

Linux allows you to use old hardware with a current, relatively secure operating system and the usual applications. I’ve put Ubuntu 9.04 on the Linux partition of my old Dell laptop mainly because of the Network Manager that has appeared in Ubuntu since 8.10. Networking Just Works with a range of WiFi cards and, importantly for me, G3 data modems over which I’m posting this. The Netgear USB WiFi adapter seems to be very slow on the laptop (works fine on desktop).

I originally installed Xubuntu on the Dell over the previous Debian Etch installation and found sluggish performance and a lot of hard drive activity compared to Debian with XCFE. After some discussion on the Ubuntu support forums, I added lxde as the window manager and that change cut the fresh boot RAM use from 130Mb to around 70Mb, so much less swapping. With 384Mb or 512Mb, Xubuntu becomes much nicer, but laptops of this age have a maximum RAM of 256 Mb usually. The fans work properly, and hibernate to swap partition works, but I need to load an applet to trigger the hibernation when I close the lid.

I’ve been using the EeePC with my t-mobile modem in class to show selected YouTube videos and slide share presentations about GCSE / level 2 maths. Individuals can see an exposition of a topic to remind themselves, but the main outcome is increased use of the access maths blog.

There is loads of stuff on YouTube and similar sites, enough to allow choices of approach for different students. Using the modem means that I can access YouTube in the classroom, like most UK Colleges, we block YouTube on the College network because of inappropriate content in the comments left on videos and some videos themselves. I am using pre-selected videos ‘embedded’ on a blog with mature students so there is little risk of misuse, and once students see the material they seem more likely to use the blog.

Update on Ubuntu 9.04 on EeePC: A stock install of Ubuntu 9.04 Beta is working great on the Asus 701 EeePC with most functions working. There is very little storage space left on the 4Gb SSD, and the 512Mb of RAM means that I had to allow for a small swap partition – Firefox and the OS take around 200Mb of Ram increasing as you pull in the flash player and multimedia functions. Running OpenOffice Writer on top of that puts you well into swap. Using a recent Ubuntu means that wifi and my t-mobile modem ‘just work’. I’ve not yet cracked getting the projector recognised by Ubuntu – others are having problems with this, and I need to spend a bit of time trying some xserver configuration.

GTK-RecordMyDesktop does what it says on the packet, and the YouTube above provides the evidence. Using 640 by 480 screen resolution, and setting the audio quality to 50%, 3 minutes of screen recording produced an OGG Theora file that was 21 Mb in size. The image quality is good enough for making screencasts using OpenOffice Impress (or PowerPoint) presentations. Numeracy screencasts on the way…

I’m using Ubuntu 8.10, and the version of gtk-RecordMyDesktop is the one in the Ubuntu repositories for Ibex. I’m using a dynamic microphone, a Maycom MicTube preamplifier, and the analogue Mic input on the NVIDIA integrated sound card on my Asus Pundit P1 box. It all seems to work with plenty of gain in reserve.

Record My Desktop is a program available in the Ubuntu repositories that, well, makes an OGG video of your desktop. YouTube can handle OGG theora format video files, so the YouTube above shows me taking the walrus in vain. Just a test, expect more once I have cracked sound and how to get Ubuntu to recognise my usb microphone so I can ‘screencast’ Impress presentations.

I booted a bog standard 15.5 inch Windows laptop from the Ubuntu 8.10 live session cd, then put my Web’n’Walk modem into a usb socket. The notification icon popped up, I clicked on the ‘configure’ option, and chose my country (from a long list). The lower part of the configuration window gave me a choice of networks, so I selected t-mobile. A new connection icon appeared in the upper panel, and I selected the web’n’walk modem. It dialled up and here we are.

My lower vertebrae are going to love this: I can use a cheap and light Web book style computer with the modem when moving around…

I’m still trying to work out how to switch between WiFi and the G3 modem…

I’ve been using Ubuntu on a variety of desktop and old laptop computers for the last few years at home. Less virus hassle, no big issues converting documents between platforms since OpenOffice became available, and the ‘desktop experience’ is getting better all the time.

I installed version 8.10 this morning on this Asus Pundit P1 box complete with the dreaded NVIDIA integrated graphics and the whole process took about one hour. Video ‘card’ recognised and a choice of NVIDIA drivers offered. I installed the recommended one, and switched on the graphic effects. I now have bouncing windows and genie like minimisation without too much flicker on the no name 1280 by 1024 monitor.

The flash plug in installed from within Firefox when I went to a Web page that used a flash animation. I installed Java 6 from the Synaptic Package Manager, and found that I need to do restart Ubuntu, not just the Web browser, to ensure that Firefox could find the Java run time engine. I’m not sure why a restart is needed. Before I worked out what was going on, navigating to a page with an embedded Java applet provoked the “Plugin Missing” pop up in Firefox. When clicking on Install Plugin, Firefox then told me that the plug in was already installed… Loops like this confuse people. I also installed the wonderful Liberation font family using Synaptic so that my Open Office documents will open without any changes on Windows or the iBook.

Ubuntu 8.10 required a total of 203 updates (around 220 Mb worth) after installing from the ISO, and so a boadband internet connection remains essential with Linux I think. Once you have caught up with the updates, there are only a few per week.

Now, I’ll see if I can keep this installation for the whole of 2009! As the Winter Solstice has now passed, the days will lengthen again and the sun is coming back. Happy New Year.

gOS is a version of Linux that is intended to be easy to use and designed around what most computer users want to do (Web, photos, music, e-mail, documents). The distribution is based on Ubuntu, in turn based on Debian, but the gOS people have made an honest attempt to make the desktop easy to use and nice looking (if you are into snot green that is). Like Ubuntu, gOS can be downloaded, burned to an .ISO format CR-ROM, and then run as a ‘live’ CD by booting your computer. The hard drive of your computer is not changed at all. You need at least 512Mb of RAM to run the live CD, and the more RAM the better it runs. gOS is aimed at small laptops like the Asus – many PC manufacturers have realised that there is a market for simple cheap Web clients.

Above is the snot green desktop, and you may notice a slight resemblance to a well known commercial operating system. On my Asus Pundit with an AMD processor, the live disc runs in 800 by 600 screen resolution, probably because it can’t find drivers for the nvidia integrated graphics on this machine.

The dock panel at the bottom of the screen has animated icons that represent programs and shortcuts to Google Mail and Google Docs. The screenshot above shows me editing a Google document, and you will see how the windows look like normal windows, not like the Firefox Web browser. Mozilla Prism allows Web based applications to use the Gecko rendering engine that is part of Firefox to run applications in windows that appear with the ‘usual’ window look on that OS. I think this is a good idea, and lets face it, if students were using Google Docs more, on balance they would loose less work! I’m having a real push on ‘safe data’ this year as we had so many damaged or lost USB stick issues last year.

I don’t like the current implementation of the dock panel at the bottom of the screen. As you can see, when you do the ‘animation’ thing by running your mouse over the icons, they expand under the window with focus. The panel should be ‘always on top’ but I haven’t found any settings that allow this yet. Worse, when you maximise an application window, it covers the panel at the bottom of the screen completely, and you can’t access the panel except by resizing the application window. Other desktop managers like Xfce and Gnome manage to prevent application windows from covering the panels – they ‘protect’ a region of the screen for the panel when you maximise the window. These issues would be annoying over time, and detract from the simple and bold desktop.

This is a beta release and I hope that there will be fixes. The basic idea of a desktop integrated to Web services and a few local applications (OpenOffice, Thunderbird for mail) is very interesting.

• Review of gOS v2 on a cheap PC from Walmart. Walmart stopped selling these, perhaps because people were put off by the non-windowness
• Review of gOS version 3 with some information on the heavily tweaked window manager
• LXDE: Light weight X11 desktop. This is the window manager used as the basis for gOS. This window manager is designed to “run well even on older machines produced in 1999”, which also makes it ideal as a Window manager for the lower power small laptops.

Hardy Heron 8.04.1 appears to work fine on my Asus Pundit P1 box (AMD dual core, integrated graphics, very quiet). Installed easily and the NVIDIA drivers were downloaded and recognised my no name monitor. Bling works including the wobbly windows (but I tend to use ‘medium’ bling settings in the appearance tab). The ‘buy from magnatune’ button does not work in Rhythmbox, but I have been listening to CBC for the last 10 minutes.

8.04 beta 2 was a little rough around the edges although it ran fine on the Pundit. A clean install of this patch appears to have smoothed off a lot of the burrs. Having separate home and root partitions helps to preserve my data and preferences while installing different flavours of linux.