2 months ago I swapped my MacBook for a Dell Mini Inspiron 9 as my primary system.
Comparing my computer use now to then, I have a couple of comments to make:
I hate primarily using such a tiny screen. I have a separate screen I can attach the min to, but it’s too underpowered to make it a really nice experience and is only available when I’m at a desk
Having such a tiny system encourages you to use your computer in far more anti-social ways: it might seem more sociable to sit in the kitchen/living room with your system, but it’s *NOT*. You’re far better off using the computer less and dedicating yourself to each task that you do.
Free software runs fairly well on less powerful systems, but you’d be surprised at the number of online flash videos that play back *really* slowly, how much slower upgrades and software installation is
Writing an essay on a tiny screen and keyboard isn’t as bad as you’d think, while your notes are mostly spread out in physical books; when you start needing to reference PDFs etc it can get annoying.
Most websites fit in the screen without scrolling, some do not.
It sucks not having a DVD drive, I don’t think my house mates like it either as I have to always find them and persuade them to watch programs etc. Also, I can no longer add CDs I buy to my collection unless some kind soul helps me, neither can I burn various live CDs.
Modern interfaces are designed with big screens and plenty of space in mind! They don’t look good or work well on a relatively small display
It’s not as pleasant to use: all of these are little things and you can live with them, but it’s just not as nice to use.
It’s really nice to take home on weekends, the bag doesn’t weigh nearly so much
I can probably get over a lot of these, but from now on I’m saving until I can afford to buy a more powerful computer with a larger screen.
Having given the comment Re: anti-social computing, some consideration, I’m wondering whether my next system will actually be a laptop, or at least a laptop with a screen smaller than 15inches. I think being more tied to a desk will encourage me to use my computer in a much healthier way!
Just a very quick note on the communications data bill/intercept modernisation programme.
Here in the UK, partly through an EU directive and partly through soverign law, the government is planning to create a database recording the details of all electronic communications in the country. It is claimed that this will be useful in combatting serious organised crime and terrorism, but unless I’m mistaken this kind of monitoring is trivial to get around.
The bill states that the body of communications will not be recorded, just recepient/sender and time/date details. It seems to me then that anybody with a little common sense, for email at least, could simply sign up for a throw away address with Google or Yahoo via Tor or some other annonymising service, ruining the validity of any data collected by the database.
Obviously the ability for those people with extremely sensitive information to hide their activties is a minorr detail here: the main worry is that this data might be shared by the government with 3rd parties, accidentally lost (as has happened many times) etc, or worse, that this data might be used for mining purposes, to discover evidence of wrong doing when none (or very little) is suspected.
Anyway, my main comment was the uselessness of this with respect to its suggested primary goal, that of combatting organised crime and terrorism. Is this just crazy talk?
Around about this time 6 months ago, I wrote a post called 5 Reasons You’ll Love Fedora 9. This time around Fedora 10 is about to be released, and there are even more reasons you’ll love this release.
Fedora has long received a lot of criticism for not providing support for proprietary software and patented codecs out of the box, for all the reasons we’re so familiar with. In the past, to get access to these forbidden extras there were a number of third party repositories that you could access, some of which were incompatible with the main Fedora repositories as well as with each other.
Now, the teams behind the most common repositories have come together to create one new super repository: RPM Fusion. This is now the only repository you’ll need to get all multimedia codecs, hardware drivers etc.
The really cool thing about RPM Fusion is that thanks to Fedora’s open nature, they’re using exactly the same tools (e.g. build software) and processes to build their packages, so quality is guaranteed.
Better Printing
In Fedora 8 it became possible to plugin almost any printer and any missing drivers would be installed automatically and the printer configured, all without the user having to do anything.
In Fedora 10, the printer control application, system-config-printer, has been completely reworked and simplified. While some of the changes are small, it’s the little things that make all the difference, right? Some of the highlights include:
not prompting for a root password until it’s needed;
icons and status symbols for no paper, rejecting jobs etc;
users are notified if a job has failed, and offered the option of running a diagnostic tool to find out why;
dialogues have been simplified and de-cluttered
Initial Printer Dialouge
Better Remote Support
Enjoy using your computer to watch movies and listen to music? Want to use your remote to control these applications? Fedora now includes gnome-lirc-properties, which makes configuring and adding new remotes really easy, as well as allowing users to configure custom key press events for their remotes. All of the work done on this feature has been pushed upstream, not just to gnome-lirc-properties, but also to other popular applications to ensure they work correctly with the new configuration tools.
gnome-lirc-properties
Better And Faster Startup
Fedora 10 sees a number of huge improvements to its boot processes. From the very beginning the user will notice that there is no Grub splash anymore, saving time in the boot up process as well as removing some screen flicker to give a more polished finish. For any user who wants to access the boot menu, simply hold down any key during startup and it will appear.
Following on from Grub, users will notice that RHGB is no more. It has been replaced with a brand new application, Plymouth, that takes advantage of kernel based modesetting, allowing for a flicker free boot process, smooth transitions to GDM, and much prettier graphics. It’s not all about aesthetics either, Plymouth doesn’t need a seperate X server to run, and so boot up speed has been improved by this change.
Beyond this, other work has gone on to reduce boot time, including enabling readahead by default, taking advantage of Upstart’s parallel boot system, and much more. All in all, many users should see their system’s start up much quicker.
Connection Sharing
A feature that is sure to be extremely popular at hackfests around the world, connection sharing allows a user to easily setup an ad-hoc wireless network that will then route all traffic through an alternative, primary connection such as a second wi-fi card, a 3G data connection, or a plain old ethernet connection.
This feature relies on work done in Fedora 9 to ensure that all 3G data cards work out of the box, as well as work to allow support of multiple network devices under NetworkManager.
The improvements to NetworkManager don’t just end here either, with many users reporting a significant speed bump when connecting to wireless networks. It now seems to be on a par with Airport in Mac OS X.
Check out this link to see a video of developer Dan Williams explaining how to use the new technology.
First Aid Kit
“Firstaidkit is an automated recovery tool that brings together common recovery processes and applies them to a system. The way that Firstaidkit handles the recovery processes is by means of plugins. The idea being that a plugin will focus on a particular issue in the system, like grub, init scripts or Xserver. Firstaidkit is designed to automatically fix problems while focusing on maintaining user data integrity. In other words, Firstaidkit will try its best to fix your system while giving you the possibility to revert the changes.”
Glitch Free Audio
“The PulseAudio sound server has been rewritten to use timer-based audio scheduling instead of the traditional interrupt-driven approach. This is the approach that is taken by other systems such as Apples CoreAudio and the Windows Vista audio subsystem and has a number of advantages, not the least in reduced power consumption, minimization of drop-outs and flexible adjustment of the latency to the needs of the application.”
Sugar Desktop
From the very beginning, Red Hat and Fedora have worked closely with the OLPC project. And now, in an effort to help gain wider attention and use of the innovative, child focused Sugard desktop environment (which children prefer, by all accounts), Fedora Project members have worked hard to package it along with some useful activities so that you can easily use it on your Fedora system.
It’s a great way to get involved with the development of this project, and more activities are being packaged all the time. If you’d like to try it out, all you have to do is install the sugar-desktop group. If you’d like to help out with development, check out this wiki page.
Sugar home screen, from laptop.org
Improved Codec Support
This feature links very well with the arrival of RPM Fusion, and sees the addition of dependencies to GStreamer that will point to restricted codecs when they’re needed for playback. If the user has RPM Fusion enabled PackageKit will automatically find and install the appropriate codecs for the media you’re trying to play.
Fedora 10 codec installation
Better Webcam Support
Hans De Goede has been working extremely hard to make sure that if a driver that supports a webcam exists for Linux (and for most webcams, a driver does exist), it will work out of the box in Fedora. In the past this hasn’t always been the case, either because the drivers have been outside of the mainline kernel, or because they use V4L2, while many applications will only work with V4L1. Now, many more webcam drivers are in the upstream kernel, and huge numbers of random and esoteric applications will work with the drivers.
More!
These are only the features that have been developed by Fedora Project members, and are largely targeted at desktop users. Beyond these, there’s the usual array of the latest and greatest versions of upstream software, along with a significant number of features that are aimed at making the lives of developers and system administrators easier. You can check out the full feature list here, and you can download the preview release here.
Expect to see many of these features cropping up in other distributions in 6 months to a years time.
Excuse the title, but seriously, everyone needs to learn a lesson from me today. I had a deadline to hand an essay in by 4pm today, and all I had left to do was polish (e.g. replacing bad transliterations with proper Hebrew, tidy the references up) and I completed it all by 11am. Grabbed my computer, headed into campus to check one detail with my tutor and print the essay off, and what did I find when I opened the file!? All that was left was the bibliography! The rest of the essay had vanished. My most recent backup was taken when the essay was only 1/4 done, and I only had a few hours left before the deadline. Ultimately, I got a really shoddy version handed in, don’t really want to think about what the grade will be like.
How did this situation even occur though? Yeah, I should back up more regularly (I was using Dropbox with a symlink, which is where my most recent backup was but disabled that ‘cos it was throwing up an SELinux warning everytime I logged in – very annoying), but what about how the file contents went missing in the first place?
I can’t believe I accidentally deleted it, although I guess that’s possible. I guess it’s also possible that there’s some hideous bug in OpenOffice.org 3, but I have no idea how I’d reproduce it; this could be linked to the fact that the past few times I opened and closed it before the contents went missing it used the recovery feature rather than just plain old opening the file. But even if that’s the case, why don’t we have some kind of revision control built into our file systems? Maybe I should start keeping my home directory in git or something…
Gargh.
Brighter news, I know I haven’t been very active in Fedora lately (see the essay above + reading + note taking + general life), but a couple of people have stepped forward and offered to help with FM. It’s way too much for me to produce by myself, so hopefully with their help we’ll be able to form something a bit more sustainable.
Also, bonfires rock (remember, remember, the 5th November ). Glad Barack won, hoping he won’t let everyone down, although I realise it will be tougher given the current mess that the world is in. Would like to visit the US some time to get a feel for what it’s actually like as a country now, get past my overly cynical imaginings.
Do any other Fedora users use any of the Shiki Colour themes? I have been for the past month or two, and it looks pretty awesome with the Solar wallpaper. Here’s a screenshot showing the desktop, along with F-Spot showing off a few photos too … has anyone else noticed how a certain other desktop is always displayed in a marketing context with loads of user pictures, pretty files etc? I think it helps with the idea of selling a life style, rather than an operating system: “check this out, look at all these happy memories $OS lets me access!”. Maybe this is something we should push more ourselves.
). Glad Barack won, hoping he won’t let everyone down, although I realise it will be tougher given the current mess that the world is in. Would like to visit the US some time to get a feel for what it’s actually like as a country now, get past my overly cynical imaginings.
