Gambas, VB for linux

The other day I was browsing around for a VB-like app for ubuntu an I found Gambas, which was just what I wanted. It's simple, straightforward and thats's all. Gambas, Vb for ubuntu.

Karmic Koala: Yet Another Review

Ok, at 3:00(GMT) today, I refreshed the ubuntu website and found out that Ubuntu Karmic Koala had finally been released. I only started using ubuntu in jaunty so I was kid of exited at this one!

So, I got the ISO(took me two hours for 610mb!) and put it onto my EEEPC-900. It booted slow on first boot then it told me that my battery was a piece of ***(not exactly) so I tested and within two minutes it took away 20%. At first I thought is was the OS but then I found, when I booted into puppy, that my battery really was a piece of *** unless,...(haven't tried that yet!). Anyway, the theme is cool, it does boot up faster(contrary to several ubuntu forum members' reports) but(but....) the famous Ubuntu Software Centre and Ubuntu One have either one problem or another.

Empathy and Evolution work like clockwork(is that the proper expression?) and just about everything works a tiny hint faster than Jaunty. So, apart form Ubuntu One, Software Centre and my blooming battery, Karmic is better than jaunty on my eeepc-900(linux edition).

Puppy Linux after a Day Review

My previous post about puppy linux was posted just after I managed to get it working. But now that I have used it for day or two, I've formed a more refined opinion of it.

First of all, I love the apps. There are absolutely loads of them with about two of every type(to give yo some choice!). 100mb! Now that is a good OS fr 100mb! Secondly, it just works. WEP, WPA, WPA2... Games... Bowser... Everything. I admit, it an sometimes take a bit of experimenting, but, if you're a geek, it's what you can't live without!

Third of all(getting to the bad bit now), nobody has written any of the experiments down! How to get you're wireless working... There is some info, but not enough.

So, I created a wiki to help the situation, here it is I hope to be seeing some edits soon!

I'm in puppy right now using Seamonkey Web-browser running the OS of my SD card using about 500mb max(half or less). Now, that is cool!

Puppy Linux, with a how to!

I have been looking into puppy linux, the third smallest graphical linux out there. I downloaded pup-430.iso from the puppy linux website to see if I could install it onto my SD card.

At first I tried the 'Usb Startup disk creator' under Administration in Ubuntu 9.04 but it came up with the error "This is not a desktop install CD and thus cannot be used by this application"(word by word, exactly that!) so I wasn't sure what to do.

Later on I was browsing around and I found a pogram I had tried(not suceeded) to use a while back called 'unetbootin' which I then tried on my PC using it to put pup-430.iso onto a usb. It failed(I was gonna try it again but this 8gb xp died of a blue screen!)

So, I tried the linux version of it on my ubuntu machine(emergency hard disk!), it worked. I ran the wizard onto my 2 gig usb, plugged it into my eeepc 700 and it booted absolutely perfectly!

To be honest, it looked a bit crappy(windows 98) at first but in not long it was fine after I gave it a hair cut!

That's not all. I've been looking at boot speed on OSs lately and I decided to do a comparison of puppy (running of my SD card on my EP700) and xandros(on my EP900).

So, I turned on my ubuntu 9.04 desktop, and using the clock and notepad, I got these survey results:
(The puppy on my 700 EP was on an SD card, so I had to change the boot as fast as I could at startup, this would make puppy's startup speed 3-5 seconds slower. Keep that in mind!):

Xandros Power On to Cursor View: 20 seconds
Puppy Power On to Cursor View: 47 seconds

Xandros Power On to Full Load: 48 seconds
Puppy Power On to Full Load: 53 seconds

Xandros Shut Down to Power Down: 31seconds
Puppy Shut Down to Power Down: 16 seconds

Now, if you ask me, that was a good result for puppy saying as it's running from an SD card on a slower PC!

My conclusion of Puppy is that it's a very good operating system with good apps and a good size. That's all for this post!

Dead Power Button

Two weeks ago, my eeepc 900 stopped working. I turned it off and when I hit the power button to turn it on again it didn't work!

I wasn't sure what to do. I was about to open it up when I remembered the warranty. I looked at the warranty card and it looked ok so I managed to get a claim on the warranty.

After a bit of, email, text and sorting out ime and date, an ASUS man came to the door and picked up my EP and it's transformer and put it into a pink box.


Two days later(today), it came back and it worked! It had Xandros n it and I had lost my file. But by chance, I had backed up the files to my SD card a barely five hours before it broke. I had UNR on it then. In 7 days, when koala comes out, I'm gonna get loads of distros!

A Little Wiki Thing

The other day, somebody told me about wikia and showed me their wiki. I liked it for one big reason, you don't have to sign in to edit it so I decided to try it out and created this wiki.

At first, I thought it was OK and then I began to get annoyed that the control of the wiki was all spread out and not simple like blogger, google sites or the long gone geocities. The ADs began to get on my nerves but I decided to keep at it and create a wiki with some relative content.

Anyway after that, I wikied(like googled but for wikipedia!) wikia and stumbled upon something called wikimapia(completely by accident). I went onto it and it turned out to be an open map. I had heard of something like it before on an episode of floss weekly. But, I tried it anyway. It turned out brilliant. As soon as I got ther, I added places I know. wikimapia is waaaaaaaaaaay better than Gmaps in most ways and it's nice to edit it without having to log in!

The Tale of Two Hard Disks

A while back (not so long ago) I decided to try and add RAM to my ancient 'deb' machine and it didn't work out so well. I had three hard disks in it at the time, one 40gb with a dual boot of XP and ubuntu, another one an 8gb with XP only and the third was a 2 gig with some old backups on it(it was unplugged at the time because I wasn't in need of it). Ubuntu worked fine with the change of RAM and sped up as I had wanted it to. The Xp on the big hard drive died of a blue screen and the other XP wouldn't log on. (That just shows how capable ubuntu is doesn't it?)

So, I tried to fix the Blue Sceened XP by putting the RAM back exactly where I found it but it didn't work. So, I put it all back like it was in the end, two OS poorer.

Then, I used the ubuntu and played around with it a lot. But one day, I was playing around with the users and groups and I accidentally made all users guests (I don't have a clue!)!?!?!

So, it was then useless to me but I left it because I had other things to do at the time. The day before yesterday, I booted from the 8gb to see what would happen and it worked perfectly. I was happy then and so I switched to the other one and reinstalled ubuntu successfully therefore havin two OS back up and running.

Then, I did the stupidest thing in the world, I decided to copy the contents of the 8gig hard disk to the xp partition on the 40gb. It went OK at first(but for the fan that was spinning tons of RPS; Remember, this is an old computer though) and then I went out for a bit and when I came back, the fan was spinning at it's usual, slow rate and the screen was blank. Nothing I did could change it so I hit the turn off button and rebooted. Then, it said "Disk Reader Error" then nothing.

So, (I thought *!*!*!) I supposed that the cable connected to the hard disks had died. I unplugged the cd and dvd drives and plugged one of them into the 40gb. Nothing. The 8gb. Nothing. Then I left them both alone and went to bed!

The next morning, I got another cable from a bag of stored cables and I tried it. At first I only plugged it into the 40gb(for no particular reason) and booted. It worked. Perfectly. Straight back into the same old ubuntu(the xp was flat obviously!). So, as happy as an angel. I took the other cable out. I then plugged in both hard disks making the XP a slave and booted. "Disk Reader Error"(*!?) So, I unplugged the 8gb and booted, making it work fine again.

That was what it was like until I wrote this post, supposing that the 8gb was dead and diseased. Half way through the post though, I tried the 8gb seperately and it worked!

And that is the end of the tale of: TWO HARD DISKS!

In the back of a Computer

If you are a real tech, you would have been in the back of a computer swaring your head off trying to fix something and you broke a wire or you accidetialy left the power on when you were trying to fix the fan.

The only kind of person who never did this would have been someone who used macs. Even the early macs were only understood by the manufacturers.

But now, all computers are getting smaller (and cheaper) and more complex. Have you ever heard of a person who opened an I-pod shuffle, fixed it and put it back together again? or changed the hard-disk of their new nokia phone and survived? (we're talking about non-aliens by the way) I wouldn't think so.

Well, this new way, smaller and more complex can make you miss the way you used to clamber inside you're old dell machine to change the RAM, doesn't it? But the advantage is, people don't heve to fix things much, for two reasons. One, stuff usually works now and two, stuff is getting cheaper.

I still like to open up the old PC's and swap things, break things(not on purpose), or make them 20 times better than they were before. They should carry on making even the slim PCs the way they used to (updating of course) so that people have more of a chance of understanding these clever contraptions.

Google Wave: I'm dying for it!

Every single product that google has made has been brilliant: Gmail, Google Apps, Sketchup, Search(The Obvious One!), Earth... all of them are products that have been done by groups of clever people.

And now the new wave is coming, Google Wave, it sounds fantastic, it works in an entirely different way to mail, facebook, twitter and I bet that in one years time, there's going to be very few people not using it!

Here I'll tell you what I do know and have heard from places. First, it's going to be extremely popular(sorry for repeating), it'll bring out a completely new way to do it all using 'waves' of information instead of just small snippets sent to you which will mean that they'll be the only one, so unless someone makes an even better one at that time, there'll be no competition so it will become the only good 'waving' product.

I'm absotutely dying for it and seeing how it will affect Facebook, Twitter and All the others...

Ubuntu Moblin Remix Review

I just read a ton of stuff about Ubuntu Moblin Remix and it looks awesome. A new stylish appearance and whoever desighned it's UI has taken a big step(risk) in taking away the task managing effects of Operating Systems.
It's UI is a bit like the I-phone, no window management(unless you want to!). It's a pretty cool Idea. It has it's own browser (based on firefox) and it looks really cool.

One thing I'm wondering is how much memory it takes, because if I try running it on a 4gb netbook, I'm wondering if I'll atleast have a gb to spare or if it will be the end of my memory problems?

The people who desighned the look and feel of this thing must have been pre-maccy dueds, because it really does have a similar UI to the mac and the toolbar gives the same feel!

I'm gonna try running it sometime on an EP700(Bizarre I know!) and see if it runs at a bearable speed or not because that will really show how slick and cool this Operating System really is!