Posts Tagged ‘Linux’
August 20th, 2009
So I downloaded and burned a copy of Fedora 11 Linux and found it won’t work at all on my Gateway laptop with the ATI built-in graphics card. The LiveCD wouldn’t work. Couldn’t even get to a desktop. I tried a bunch of different boot options (and yes, I tried “nomodeset”) and still it didn’t work.
Apparently, the latest bleeding edge Linux kernel doesn’t have ATI drivers that work with it. OK…why release a distro that won’t even work with a large number of graphics cards? That’s just strange to me.
I’ve downloaded Dreamlinux 3.5 instead. The LiveCD works perfectly and I’m installing it now, over a Linux Mint Elyssa installation, which was out of date. Review of Dreamlinux to come. (I still like Mint and I use it on my main computer.)
Thing is, I hate burning these CDs and then wasting them when they don’t work. A lot of useless techno-trash. I’ll give the Fedora CD to a friend who can hopefully use it.
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February 26th, 2009
I’ve been using Linux Mint instead of Ubuntu for a while, and overall I’m pleased with it. However, since upgrading from Linux Mint 5 (Elyssa) to 6 (Felicia), I’ve actually been a little less happy with it. A few irksome problems:
Flash: Seemingly minor but not really when a lot of your work requires you to be online a lot: Flash is screwed on Felicia. I’m not sure why, but there have been reports around the net from frustrated users who went to great lengths to reinstall the operating system just to get this minor feature to work. I did find that Flash in the Opera browser seems to work, but the browser is not very stable. This is enough of a hindrance that I find myself sticking to (ugh) Vista for most daily tasks. Waiting for an upgrade for this to be fixed.
New Software Manager: The new software manager actually removes features that made me prefer Mint to Ubuntu. Notably, I’m disappointed that I can’t use the graphical “apt-get” feature anymore. Bummer.
Menu: With the addition of separate buttons for shutting down and suspending, my menu has gotten bloated and I now have to scroll to see all the icons on the bottom left corner. I can’t seem to be able to resize the menu. Perhaps a minor complaint, but interface for me is important. I’m also getting less happy with Gnome’s flat, boring themes. I can’t seem to find a middle ground between KDE4′s bloatware and Gnome’s boringware.
ATI Drivers: Apparently, the new versions of xorg do not work well with ATI graphics cards. This is not really Mint’s fault, but really…can we just get ATI cards to work in Linux already? So many people have them, and they never work out of the box. I have held back on upgrading my ATI video laptop due to this issue.
On the positive: On my non-ATI laptop, I can finally get dual windows to work where the screen stretches across from one monitor to the other. Finally!
I still love Linux, but I really feel that basic things such as Flash need to work out of the box in order to make Linux something regular people can use. Right now, with all the little buggy things going on with my Linux distributions, I can’t really recommend the operating system to anyone who isn’t a bit of a nerd, and that’s a shame.
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January 21st, 2009
For all you green gearheads out there interested in the CherryPal platform, here’s an interesting comment by Jack Campbell on TG Daily:
I designed this product while VP/Strategic Development for Tsinghua Tongfang. It was temporary prototype housing made in a rush to show LimePC brand products at CES 2008 — never intended for mass production. The ports are actually on the back, with the logo (for some reason) put on backwards.
For the curious, the hardware platform was engineered in cooperation with Freescale’s Austin-based R&D team in their Infotainment Division. It was never intended as a production device, but as a “superset” proof of concept system from which future devices could be derived. Also, it was never intended as a “cloud” device, instead aimed at supporting a streamlined Linux OS based load for lightweight desktop and multimedia chores.
The “CherryPal” iteration of this thing is a scraped together, low-buck abomination of what this platform could have been. I left THTF just prior to this deal coming in the door, so can only guess at the bad decisions leading to its commercialization. We had a radically unique new user interface/desktop OS version sculpted for this project, one that would have minimized the UI load on the little MPC5121e CPU, and that had a super high level of optimization work done to make the graphics/framebuffer/display subsystems use as few clock ticks as possible. None of that has emerged in the CherryPal. Instead, it carries a bog slow standard Linux build with standard desktop apps, and a browser touted as being a portal to a few server based apps. It was supposed to have a 2.5″ HDD, not NAND flash for storage… oh well.
Weird, pointless, and sad. This project had such a higher level set of goals. What you are seeing is a crippled, 30% version of what the original LimePC project was intended to deliver.
I disagree that the project was pointless – and I hope that CherryPal, LimePC, or something similar can get off the ground by some savvy company.
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December 19th, 2008
As I’ll probably say here 100 times, it is much better to rescue an old computer and make it useful than to simply toss it out into the garbage. Linux makes this easy – er, well, kind of easy, depending on the distribution and your tolerance for troubleshooting. While more and more Linux versions are requiring more and more computing power, thankfully, not all of them suffer from the never ending quest for software progress.
Puppy Linux is one of the lean, mean Linux distributions specifically designed to work well on older as well as newer hardware. There’s an extremely small version without a lot of added software, and a more “bloated” version that includes Seamonkey browser and email suite.
I was looking for a new Linux distribution to try on my old Pentium III laptop. I had PCLinuxOS 2007 on it and it ran pretty well, but became concerned over the future usefulness of this distribution on my old hardware, due to KDE 4 looming as a potential future for PCLinuxOS. (Though, PCLinuxOS is actually sticking with KDE 3.5 I believe for the forseeable future.) I tried Linux Mint on my PIII, and it worked pretty well until it stopped recognizing my monitor resolution for some bizarre reason. Then it started to hang. Who knows why.
So I thought I’d give Puppy a try. Sure, there is “Damn Small Linux” but the Puppy logo is a lot cuter. OK, that wasn’t really the reason – I had just heard Puppy had a lot of fans and felt it was worth a shot. (more…)
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December 17th, 2008
I read with some amusement the CherryPal review over at TG Daily – the author’s biggest gripe was that she felt the CherryPal was really ugly because the ports faced in front. (Turns out, the direction of the cherry logo confused her, which is funny to me because I never even noticed the logo’s direction. I just set up the box with the ports facing back. Big deal!) There was also a complaint about the box seeming “flimsy,” which is not my experience whatsoever. And, oh, horror, there’s no CD/DVD drive!
Such reviews are truly missing the point of the CherryPal, which was conceived to be a low-power green computer that did not require moving parts or fans. Let’s just try to envision the world in maybe as little as five years, where DVDs are becoming obsolete with the increased use of digital downloads and flash drives. Let’s look ahead to a time where electricity costs are increasing due to increased power consumption and lowered reserves of natural gas. Perhaps at that time, a small desktop computer that consumes only 2 watts and doesn’t need a DVD drive would be ideal? Perhaps. (more…)
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December 7th, 2008
I’ve managed to “unbrick” my CherryPal – hurrah! – but it’s still not out of the woods yet. As I mentioned in my last post, I had tried the reset hole on the bottom of the machine, but it did not seem to do anything. Then Max Seybold told me to try the reset hole on the CherryPal boards, not knowing I’d already tried it. So I decided to try it again. Ah! There is a trick to it. I have discovered the secret of the CherryPal reset hole. Here it is:
Using a paperclip, push down in the hole right when you turn the machine on. Hold it there until you start seeing a bunch of boot-up information appear on the screen. This installs the Linux recovery firmware in the box.
For some reason, my machine hangs when “inetd” is being started, but if you press CTRL-C you will get to a prompt. This is not your actual CherryPal filesystem. It is a virtual filesystem and any changes you make to it will disappear when you reboot. There is a huge lost+found folder in there that obviously has the CherryPal data on it, but it’s inaccessible.
In order to rescue your CherryPal, you must mount the flash drive onto your virtual filesytem. Follow these commands:
mkdir /mnt/hda1
mount -t ext3 /dev/hda1 /mnt/hda1
Then you can go into the /mnt/hda1 directory and make any changes as necessary. PLEASE BE CAREFUL, because deleting anything important here will ruin your operating system!
(Note: When finished with your edits, you might want to unmount your drive manually to be on the safe side, so before rebooting, type in: umount /dev/hda1)
I discovered that in trying to add a new CherryPal user with the graphical interface, somehow my entire passwd file got hosed. The gdm user had been deleted, which is why I could not login. I manually entered in a gdm user (copying what was in my passwd, shadow, and group files from a Mint installation on my laptop). I rebooted and voila! I was able to login and see my CherryPal desktop again.
Unfortunately, I still have some clean-up to do. I only added the gdm user during my rescue and apparently all the users were hosed, including those automatic users that run important things like networking. Additionally, my default limeos user now no longer has sudo priveleges so I can’t make any changes to anything. I am going to go back into the failsafe Linux (using the reset hole) to manually reconstruct my passwd, shadow, and group files following what’s in my laptop Linux files. This may be painstaking but it should fix things. I’ll post an update when I have it all working again.
Moral of the story: Do not add users to CherryPal using the graphical interface!
UPDATE: I asked for copies of the default passwd, group, and shadow files on the CherryPal Ning boards. A kindly Brand Angel posted them and I used them to reconstruct my default files. Everything is working again. Phew! I am actually typing this update from my CherryPal. 
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December 5th, 2008
Yes, believe it or not, I am typing this from an actual CherryPal computer. It arrived today in a small black box similar in style and size to a classic iPod box. It is extremely small! The carefully folded CherryPal t-shirt took up most of the box. There is supposed to be a single sheet of directions (to save on paper) but I did not receive any with my package. Fortunately, I had gotten an email from CherryPal telling me how to login.
The CherryPal machine itself is super small and compact. It could have been a PDA circa 1995. (Remember the Apple Newtons?) It has two USB ports, a monitor port, and a headphone/speaker output. (Alas, no line-in or microphone input.) No CD/DVD or any other extras (this is, after all, supposed to be a lean, mean green machine).
When you first plug in the machine, a somewhat unfriendly looking login prompt greets you. This is where it’s helpful to have the email that tells you what the login is! Once logged in, you are greeted by a very plain Linux desktop. This is a apparently a specially-built Xubuntu distribution, which uses the lightweight Xfce desktop. The background is just a plain blue. Given the cute CherryPal packaging on the box and the machine itself, it would have been nice to carry that theme over to the desktop (a small wallpaper graphic would not have sacrificed too much disk space), but it’s not a deal-breaker. I’ll put my own background on there soon enough.
I immediately tried to break the machine by using not only a USB hub but a wireless mouse. The USB hub works fine; the wireless mouse does not. I have heard other reports that wireless mice and keyboards do not fare well with the CherryPal, so be forewarned. Perhaps there’s a setting or something; we shall see.
What did work right out of the box was the wi-fi. I immediately got the machine to recognize my wireless network and it connected very easily. I have to say, after fiddling with wi-fi on my various Linux laptops with much pain and grief involved, this was nothing short of miraculous to me. Score one for the CherryPal.
Using a USB hub, I was actually able to plug-in my digital camera and download the photos I just took of my new CherryPal onto the CherryPal. The operating system mounted the digital camera automatically and I was able to move the photos over manually. Not bad.
I have yet to try out any of the installed applications other than Firefox, but a good assortment of software is preinstalled, including Firefox (obviously), games, and a word processor. As with the Xubuntu distribution, AbiWord is the word processor provided and not OpenOffice.org’s word processor (my preference), but maybe I’ll give good ole AbiWord a try for once.
Firefox appears to be a bit slow on the CherryPal. I’m not sure if that’s my Internet connection or the memory that Firefox can take up. Some pages I’ve tried have been excrutiating to load. I’ll probably install another browser to see if it’s Firefox that’s being a memory hog: I find myself using Seamonkey on my Linux machines more often than Firefox lately due to the bloat. Firefox, for whatever the reason, is just not as good on Linux as it is on Windows.
I have yet to see any evidence of the “cloud computing” advertised with the CherryPal, but perhaps I’ll find out more about that later. One thing I was happy to see installed was the Synaptic Package Manager, which means I can easily install most open source software with the click of a button. With a Linux box, 8 gigs is more than enough to install most needed programs and still have some space left over for basic documents.
One thing I will say for the CherryPal – it sure is quiet. Quiet, as in, completely quiet. No moving parts really does mean it’s a silent machine. That may not mean much to some, but I’m one of those strange finicky people when it comes to noise. I have an Acer laptop with an insanely loud fan that likes to turn the laptop into a mini washing machine at times. I truly love the silence of the CherryPal. It’s so much more peaceful.
Well, those are my first impressions. I’ll be posting more here as I go along. If you are willing to plunk money down for a CherryPal, knowing that the company is still a bit unstable and the machine may still have some kinks, you can order one here. Use my promo code CPP235 to get $10 off the purchase price.
P.S. Just as I was getting ready to upload this article, my monitor turned all purple, and I can barely see the desktop with strange bands of darker purple blocking much of the screen. I’m wondering if it’s an issue with my monitor or the CherryPal, or combination of the two: Perhaps my monitor doesn’t like the low power output of the CherryPal. I’ll reboot and post an update soon. Update: Rebooting the machine did not fix the monitor, but unplugging it did. We’ll see if it happens again.
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September 21st, 2008
I’ve been using Ubuntu Linux for a while, but when two computers crashed in the same week, I thought I’d try a new distribution instead. I heard that Linux Mint was fantastic – it had the benefits of using Ubuntu’s vast repositories but some nice goodies as well as built-in media codecs.
Linux Mint comes in a LiveCD that doubles as an installer. It’s a lot more user-friendly than Ubuntu’s formidable installation menu. Click on the Install icon and Mint will do most of the work for you.
My main problem installing Mint is that it hosed my Vista boot record. (I had a new computer with Vista pre-installed and wanted to set up a dual boot on the same disk). After quite a bit of wrangling and googling, I discovered that the best way to set up a dual boot in Vista is through this terrific free utility called EasyBCD by NeoSmart. (You also have to tell Mint not to install a boot record under advanced options.) (more…)
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August 11th, 2008
I was fortunate enough to have the opportunity to become a brand angel for the new CherryPal green computer, which will be released within a few weeks. It needs only 2 watts of power, and runs on a flash drive without any moving parts. Linux is the operating system, and many of the apps will be available via free “cloud” computing online.
I will be getting my CherryPal to review soon, at which point I am going to run the computer through the motions to see how well it does. (The nice thing about being a brand angel is that they aren’t censoring honest opinion, though there is a financial incentive to write positive things, since we get a small referral bonus for the use of our promo codes. Rest assured, if I hated it, I would not promote it regardless.)
The CherryPal will be for sale on their website soon – use my promo code CPP235 to receive a discount on your purchase.
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July 29th, 2008
I’ll admit, something rubbed me the wrong way when I read “The Great Ubuntu-Girlfriend Experiment.” There seemed to be this underlying message that women weren’t naturally “geeky” enough to get Linux, and that anyone who does get Linux must just be a “geeky programmer or designer.” His suggestion to improve Linux?
I’d love to see a welcome screen for the first time you open up your desktop, with little videos explaining a few key concepts to how Linux and Ubuntu work. Maybe it could ask “What do you want to do?” and then explain how they could do this.
Oh God no. The first thing I do when I get into Windows is turn off that stupid animated paper clip. You know the one I’m talking about, the creepy one with the happy face. But even Windows doesn’t assault me with cheesy training videos upon login – why should Linux? (more…)
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