Green Tech Girl

Biofuels are a “crime against humanity,” according to one United Nations adviser who was quoted in a BBC article on biofuels and poverty. It seems that biofuels are raising food prices so much that upwards of 30 million people have been “dragged into poverty.” While I’m not a huge fan of biofuels, I do feel that some of the non-food based ones are going to be important to our future.

A total world economic collapse due to a lack of fuel is certainly not going to help ease poverty in the long run. So I hope that people can try to take a more measured view of things, rather than making blanket statements likening biofuels to a holocaust. Food prices will also go up if food can’t be transported cheaply. And that’s a direction correlation to our dimishing fuel supplies.  We cannot just stop making biofuels and rely on oil – that’s a recipe for total disaster. We’re going to experience pain either way, but I think the pain will be worse if we have no fuel whatsoever.

I have to say I am quite happy with my new Linux desktop. I have most of it set up now. Just can’t seem to get the printer to work…there’s always something. I’m playing around with Linux’s freeware music composition tools and seeing how far I can get setting up a virtual music studio in this manner.

The KDE4 desktop has settled down and appears to be working fine except for a few minor quirks. (And where can I edit my menu items?) So a big thumbs up for Kubuntu.

In spite of concerns over Novell’s patent deal with Microsoft, I still wanted to give Novell’s openSUSE Linux a try. I wanted to put Linux on my desktop, as part of my “weaning myself off of Microsoft” plan, and I had this idea that a corporate-backed open source distribution might be “safer” for my system. Boy, was I wrong about that. (more…)

Now that I have Linux running successfully on my two laptops, I am gearing up to run it on my desktop as a dual boot system with my existing Windows XP. I have two hard drives, so it should be easy enough (riiight)…just having to clean off the hard drives to make room for it all.

I had tried the “Live CD” option (to run Linux off a CD or DVD), with OK results. But I found I couldn’t save any files to my hard drive, so what was the point? The Live CDs were also a bit slower than running something off a hard disk. (I will review some of the Live CDs later.)

Since my desktop is my primary computer for my work, if I can get myself into the habit of using Linux for most everything, then I will be able to finally say I kicked the Microsoft habit!

Wish me luck!

I have an old Sony Vaio laptop, a Pentium III. I had installed the Ubuntu distribution of Linux on it back in December. It was working OK but the computer was starting to freeze at odd moments. The breakdown would inevitably occur after a very ominous KACHUNG KACHUNG sound from the hard drive.

I wasn’t sure if it was the Linux distribution causing the problems. I had heard from a friend that PCLinuxOS was a very good Linux distribution that happened to run very fast, particularly on older computers. So I downloaded it (Linux is, after all, free) and installed it. No go. The computer was now worse off. (more…)

Windows XP is officially dead. Microsoft will no longer offer XP on new computers as of June 29, 2008. Now, you can still get copies of XP if you really need them, but the operating system is pretty much dead.

As I’ve mentioned before, Windows Vista is an absolute resource hog, and will only work well on brand new computers with lots of processing speed and memory. If you have an old computer that needs a new operating system (for whatever the reason…perhaps a virus wiped out your hard drive), Vista is not an option.

If you’re not too keen on wrangling with Linux, another option may soon be available. ReactOS is an open source Windows clone that is being developed by a hardy group of volunteers hoping to provide a real alternative to Windows.

The great thing about ReactOS is not just that it will look and act like Windows. It will be able to run Windows programs. And that’s an important feature that may just put this baby ahead of Linux someday, if they can actually get a full release done soon.

I’m excited to see an open source alternative to Windows being developed. I love Linux, but I know from experience it’s just not for the average computer user at this time. An open source operating system that can run like Windows is exactly what we need.

ReactOS is still in the alpha stage, meaning it’s not really ready to be used on a daily basis. Right now, it’s at version 3, which does not even have support for USB. Alpha version 4, however, will start bringing ReactOS into reach for many. Assuming the development continues at a decent pace, you may expect to see some sort of usable version of ReactOS within a year. Right now, it seems the system requirements are more than reasonable, and the OS can be run on older machines.

At that point, you may have something to install on that old laptop, so you can give it to grandpa instead of just tossing it.

Poor biofuel. It’s just not getting any good press lately. Biofuel is now up to $6/gallon and it’s getting blamed for rising food prices.