AnandTech ran an inter­est­ing (and VERY thor­ough) review of Ubuntu 8.04. I wanted to high­light my favorite sec­tion.

Titled CPU Bench­marks, they test appli­ca­tions run­ning on both Win­dows Vista and Ubuntu. The amaz­ing thing is the appli­ca­tions run­ning on Ubuntu via Wine per­formed bet­ter than they did on Windows!

Let’s let that sink in for a moment…the open-source project writ­ten ½ by vol­un­teers and ½ by com­mer­cial inter­ests, intended to dupli­cate the Win­dows API on Linux, actu­ally out­per­forms the soft­ware it’s intended to mimic. That’s amaz­ing to me. Read the rest of this entry »

Meld is, by far, the best diff viewer & edi­tor that I have used. Ear­lier I posted about get­ting Meld up and run­ning on OSX and over­com­ing a cou­ple of issues. With the cur­rent ver­sion of Mac­Ports (1.7.1) and Meld 1.2, it’s much eas­ier :) Read the rest of this entry »

Humor works. Humor + Neg­a­tiv­ity works even bet­ter. Here’s how I found out.

While this post will cer­tainly not become viral, I have been study­ing viral mar­ket­ing and wanted to share about a small exper­i­ment I did. I read a book called World Wide Rave: Cre­at­ing Trig­gers that Get Mil­lions of Peo­ple to Spread Your Ideas and Share Your Sto­ries (Kin­dle Edi­tion) in which the author states

It turns out peo­ple react to neg­a­tives. Sev­eral years ago, I worked on a site where we included a link “For Exec­u­tives Only,” which gen­er­ated more traf­fic than other links. Words like worst, don’t, and only are inter­est­ing, and peo­ple want to know what’s there.

This got my cre­ative juices flow­ing and I decided to exper­i­ment. Con­tin­u­ing to read in the World Wide Rave we see an exam­ple of a blog­ger, Mark Hin­kle, who did a satir­i­cal arti­cle on Ubuntu. Just so hap­pens I have a blog on Ubuntu. I copied the idea by mak­ing a neg­a­tive arti­cle of “Top 10 Rea­sons I’ll Never Use Ubuntu.” This list was not seri­ous at all, actu­ally it was a list of 10 things I love about Ubuntu. And it was hastily writ­ten, jot­ted down in about 10 minutes.

It worked! The blog nor­mally receives 200 vis­i­tors per day. After 20 hours of my post being live it had 2764 vis­i­tors. It had been picked up by a cou­ple of Linux blogs, it got dugg, it was Stum­bled, it was twit­tered, it made it into Ubuntu forums, and it sparked some rather inter­est­ing con­ver­sa­tions in comments.

Only one other time have I had that kind of suc­cess on my Ubuntu blog, and it was an arti­cle that I spent hours on.

Yes­ter­day Steve Balmer made an inter­est­ing claim that Linux is a big­ger com­peti­tor than Apple. I would not have guessed that, but his pretty graph illus­trates the proof.

Steve Balmer shows us that unli­censed Win­dows and Linux are their two biggest competitors

So far the best diff viewer I have used is Meld, which up to now I could only use on my Ubuntu Linux par­ti­tion. But now, thanks to Mac­ports, I got it run­ning on OS X. Yeah!

Update

I wrote this arti­cle about a year ago. As usual, tech­nol­ogy advances, and this time it is in our favor. The hack for the .xini­trc is no longer nec­es­sary. On my machine I can install Meld straight from Mac­Ports and it runs straight away.

This took a bit of work, but I finally got Meld to run on OS X. The instal­la­tion is very easy…just tell Mac­ports to install Meld. In your ter­mi­nal type:

sudo port install meld

Get­ting Meld to run on OS X was a bit trick­ier. When launch­ing it nor­mally I kept get­ting this error: Read the rest of this entry »

One of the great ben­e­fits of Linux is the wealth of great open­source soft­ware. Prior to this exper­i­ment I thought all this soft­ware could only run on Linux, but recently I dis­cov­ered that this is not true. Much of my favorite soft­ware on Ubuntu Linux can be run on OS X :)

Geany run­ning on OS X

Read the rest of this entry »

This is a response to an arti­cle ask­ing why peo­ple switch from Win­dows to the Mac OS instead of Ubuntu. The author con­cludes “So why are peo­ple not going over to Ubuntu? Beats me.” He even resorts to call­ing these switch­ers stu­pid: “Is it the snob value or stu­pid­ity that make peo­ple con­sider a Mac over Win­dows and not Ubuntu?”

I started this blog in July as a pub­lic explo­ration of my exper­i­men­ta­tion with Ubuntu. In that time I have tried to use Ubuntu as my default OS in replace­ment of the Mac OS because I wanted to see how fea­si­ble it was. While the sim­ple answer to “can if be done?” is “yes,” it’s really not very easy. So my com­ments below come from some­one who truly enjoys using Ubuntu Linux (I still use it daily) but who has come to appre­ci­ate the finer nuances of the Mac OS.

While the author of the afore­men­tioned arti­cle does make a few good points about how far Ubuntu Linux has come he fails to rec­og­nize a few very basic advan­tages of the Mac plat­form that I have come to appre­ci­ate dur­ing my experiment:

Read the rest of this entry »

If Ubuntu Linux had not won me over yet then it cer­tainly has now. Ubuntu Net­book Remix is a fan­tas­tic set of tools for run­ning Linux on small screens and boost­ing pro­duc­tiv­ity in a lim­ited work­space. The offi­cial descrip­tion of the project says:

Ubuntu Net­book Remix is a ‘remix’ of the stan­dard Ubuntu Desk­top 8.04 release to enable it to work bet­ter on devices with small screens, such as Net­books (sub-notebooks), although these pack­ages will work on any 8.04 installation.

The Remix instantly cap­tured my atten­tion because of its focus on small screens. I have a 13″ Mac­Book lap­top. Its 1280 x 800 screen can feel cramped some­times, espe­cially com­pared to my dual-scren iMac setup at work.

Given that my entire Ubuntu exper­i­ment is about pro­duc­tiv­ity I had to give it a go. I have grown fond of how easy Linux makes exper­i­men­ta­tion. I knew that I could very eas­ily install the Remix, test it, and just as eas­ily unin­stall it when I was done. But I’m keep­ing it. Here’s why. Read the rest of this entry »

I thought this would be valu­able to some of you that are new to Ubuntu. Being rather new to this Ubuntu Linux thing myself, I have strug­gled to get the ter­mi­nal com­mands for fix­ing the .dmrc per­mis­sions issue just right.

The prob­lem

When log­ging into Ubuntu 8.04 I would see this error mes­sage. It explains that the per­mis­sions on my user’s hid­den .dmrc file and home direc­tory are wrong.

A photo of the .dmrc per­mis­sions error I was get­ting when log­ging into Ubuntu 8.04