Category Archives: Software

I finally got around to putting SuSE on the blank partition on the family computer, the fastest machine in the house. Now Junior Junior has Ubuntu in his room, Junior Senior has SuSE (both on old PII/400s) in his room, the router turns off their Internet access at hours when we don’t want them online, and the family machine is dual-booting SuSE and XP. My desktop is next, but that will require repartitioning, which means some backing up first.

The basic SuSE install was painless, and while it’s a close call so far I think I like KDE better than Gnome.

Setting up printers was not anything close to painless. I have a Laserjet printer running off a network print server, and I took the default printer type SuSE offers, which was CUPS when (thank you Google and linux.org) what I should have done was specify it as an LPR printer. In my defense, I was fooled: As part of its default CUPS printer install SuSE tests to see if it can see a printer, and by giving it the IP number and the (non-standard) port I passed that test. It just flunked the actual printing thing. But it’s finally all sorted, and now Junior Senior’s machine can print to the LaserJet too. (In contrast, printing to the LaserJet from Ubuntu had been seamless and painless: it took about three minutes to set up.)

Getting 3D to run on the ATI Radeon x800 has been a different sort of adventure. Having carefully followed the directions I found online, I find that my own user has 3D, but the kids’ users do not. I can more or less overcome this by manually changing a 660 to a 666 in an obscure file, but often it changes itself back. I suppose I’ll have to figure out how to program SuSE to modify the file every time a user logs in. That will require the program to have superuser rights, which requires a password I am not giving my kids, so I have to find a way to do that which doesn’t expose the password either. It not that I don’t trust them, I just want my kids to hack into the guts of this machine rather than waltz into it. Why deny them the pleasures I had as a teenager?

We do have a second network printer, a very nice color printer, a handsome housewarming gift from my parents, one which has proved invaluable for homework projects. It seems, however, that SuSE isn’t going to be printing to the Canon iP5000 any time soon:

Dear Mr. Froomkin:

Thank you for contacting Canon product support regarding Linux drivers
for the iP5000. We value you as a Canon customer and appreciate the
opportunity to assist you.

While considering the desire to provide the best possible support for
Canon’s products, Canon must make decisions on which products to support
when new operating systems are introduced. Currently, Canon has decided
to support only the Microsoft Windows and the Macintosh operating
systems. We understand, and sincerely apologize for any frustration you
have experienced if your operating system falls outside of these
categories, but we hope that you understand our rationale.

Please let us know if we can be of any further assistance with your
iP5000.

Sincerely,

Raymond

Somehow, I bet it prints just fine from Ubuntu…

Via Bruce Schneier, here’s one of the great bug reports of all time.

via Boing Boing comes news of a Firefox plugin converts dollars to barrels of oil.

Click one of those links for the broccoli action picture.

(Although, now that I think of it, if it updated in real time and worked for any currency, it might actually be useful….)

reBlog by Eyebeam R looks like something I am going to use when it gets out of beta.

It’s another fork of feed on feeds, with an attempt at a fancy front end that both succeeds and yet makes me want to get in and do my own RSS because it’s just not the way I want it.

But in addition to being a moderately classy server-side feed aggregator, reBlog offers the potential of creating a link blog with ease, so I can make a feed of all the posts I wanted to blog about but didn’t get around to, and run it as a sidebar, or a separate page. There’s a full-text quoting feature too, which I can see incorporating into some classroom blogs, and just to make it super-easy reBlog integrates with WordPress, Movable Type, and soon with Drupal and other goodies. Alas, the MT integration is for versions 3.1 and up, and this blog is still at 2.6.x. But all my other blogs are wordpress, and someday, in my copious free time, I may try to convert this one…

At the moment, however, there’s a bad bug in reBlog that’s dropping error messages like

Warning: Unknown class passed as parameter in …/reBlog/refeed/library/RF/ClientController.class.php on line 740

into places that they do not belong.

So unlike google’s gmail, this is a real beta, and I’m going to wait a version or two until they clean it up.

From the about ReBlog statement:

What is a reBlog?
A reBlog facilitates the process of filtering and republishing relevant content from many RSS feeds. reBloggers subscribe to their favorite feeds, preview the content, and select their favorite posts. These posts are automatically published through their favorite blogging software.

Why should you reBlog?
reBlogs are useful to individuals who want to maintain a weblog but prefer curating content to writing original posts. They can also enable organizations to tap the contributions of their employees, members, and communities-at-large in order to easily redistribute relevant content.

What if I don’t want to blog anything?
reFeed, the RSS aggregating component is damn sexy and worth using if you just want to read lots of content and not be constrained to one computer.

The small minority of you who care about such things will be overjoyed to learn, as I was, that the server-side rss newsreader feedonfeeds, which had become something of a moribund project, has been forked into FeedOnFeeds-Redux (FoFRedux).

FofRedux 0.2 offers small but noticable improvements over Fof 0.1.9, notably the introduction of category sorting for feeds, and FofRedux 0.3, due out RSN, sounds as if it’s gonna be great.

From what I’ve heard so far, Windows Vista, the planned successor to WinXP, is objectionable on moral grounds as it instantiates “DRM” and thus cripples your computer. But for those not entranced by arguments that having other people able to decide what your computer can do is a bad idea, here’s a more practical concern: Vista set to swallow 800MB of RAM. That’s just for the OS. Wait until you see how bloated the programs are.

Last week we installed SuSE on an Pentium II/400 we had gathering dust. So far it works great, although KDE is no speed demon with the limited RAM and tired old graphics card card on that one.

The next step is to turn a couple of the newer, faster XP machines into dual boot systems. Perhaps by the time Vista becomes a standard the whole family can be weaned onto some flavor of Linux?