This week, my daughter had severe pain in her stomach, so we took her to the hospital to get checked out. Since we didn't know how long we would be there, I took my usual assortment of gadgets, including my new ASUS EeePC. After an hour or so, I realized that my phone hadn't been charged for a while and the battery indicator was in the red.
Most people, don't tend to carry phone chargers around with them. I did however have my little laptop, and also a standard USB-mini cable. So I simply plugged the phone into the laptop which I was already using. A short time later and the phone is fully charged.
Such a simple thing could have easily been an extreme annoyance if I was without a phone and having to contact family members for news or assistance.
The simple fact that my phone uses a USB port for charging has been extremely useful. This is not the first time this has been handy. I can charge my phone almost anywhere. Even if you dont have a USB-mini cable on you, almost everyone has one, either with a camera or MP3 player.
The ability to also connect to the phone using a standard cable that I can buy anywhere instead of a proprietary cable that may or may not be provided with the phone means that I can leave a cable hooked up at work and at home so I don't have to reach behind a computer to plug the phone into it. So simple, and yet so convenient.
Also, I can still charge the phone with the supplied power adapter, or I can charge the phone from the computer.
I can only hope that this becomes more common, as I dont want a new phone unless it has a USB port, because it has been the most convenient and life-saving aspect of this entire phone.
Oh, and the daughter had her appendix removed the next day, is home now, and doing just fine.
Friday, February 15, 2008
Saturday, February 9, 2008
Ubuntu is great?
I'm a long-time linux user. In fact I've been using linux pretty much exclusively for years. My distro of choice has been ArchLinux. One of the great things about ArchLinux is that it has a very simple yet very powerful package management system and is designed to give you as much freedom as possible on configuring it the way you want to configure it. The down side of this is that it is not a very good distro for the average user. Its perfect for me and my servers, but I hesitate putting it on computers that I wont be directly managing.
So when I needed to do a reinstall on the family computer that the wife and kids use, I thought it was time to actually give Ubuntu a try. All throughout the media and internet I have heard over and over again about how wonderful ubuntu is, and how perfect it is for casual consumers. That sounded pretty good to me. In fact, even though I'd never actually tried it myself, when people asked me what distro they should try, I often recommended Ubuntu, purely on the hype that has surrounded it.
So I downloaded the Ubuntu LiveCD. The idea is that you boot off the CD and get to see a fully functioning version of Ubuntu and then get the opportunity to install it to the computer's hard drive. Thats a cool idea, and I've shown off LiveCD's in the past, but I really would have preferred an actual install CD, assuming that would allow me to avoid the 5 minutes of booting into the LiveCD. Anyway... no big deal.
The Ubuntu LiveCD automatically detected the sound card, and seemed to run ok (but understandably slow as it had to load files from the CD). So I initiated the hard drive installation process. I did this a week ago, and cant remember any specific details or questions asked, but the installation took over an hour. That surprised me. I can get a fully functioning ArchLinux install done in about 10 minutes, but I've done it a few times so I know what I'm doing, but still, it took way longer than I found acceptable. Oh well, maybe it was installing much more stuff than I normally do with ArchLinux, so I was willing to wait for it to complete.
When the initial installation was complete and rebooted I was glad to see that it noticed the Windows2000 installation taht was already on there for dual-booting, and it had added it automatically to the grub boot-up menu.
So I now had a running Ubuntu machine, but we're not finished there. Thats only the beginning. Whenever I do an ArchLinux install, the first thing I normally need to do it update any packages need it. So when Ubuntu started up and logged in, I saw in the top-right corner a text-bubble saying that there are updates available. Excellent. So I start that, and there are a lot of packages with updates.... its gonna take a while to download and install all those.
Two hours later, it finishes updating. It is now telling me the system is up-to-date. Alright, cool!. But wait, whats that little icon with blue arrows in a circle? That wasn't there before. I move the mouse over it, and some text pops up saying that the system needs to be rebooted. Hmm... would have been nice if it had of put something up a little bit more obvious than that. That could have been very confusing for the novice if things didn't work correctly after everything was updated. They might assume that the update failed and messed up their system.
To be fair, ArchLinux doesn't tell you if you need to reboot after updating or installing packages, but then, its not targeted to a consumer user.
So onto the next thing, some pop-up text in the top-right corner is telling me that there are some proprietary packages available for my hardware. I open that and see nVidia listed. Excellent, I had noticed that the graphics were sluggish, maybe installing the proper drivers will improve that.
Installation of the nvidia drivers seemed to be ok, except for that little icon change telling me that I need to reboot. Seriously guys, cant we make that step a bit more obvious for users?
So a quick reboot (not really, ArchLinux booted up in about 35-45 seconds, Ubuntu is more like 2 minutes), and immediately notice a difference. Its not hard to miss because everything is huge, the resolution is wrong. That would suck for joe consumer, but I'm a savy tech guy, I know that all I have to do is set the resolution correctly.
This is where I encounter the ubuntu (and gnome I guess since I've always been more of a KDE user) crazy menu system. Ok, 'System', that makes sence... but what is the difference between Preferences and Administration? In administration, I see something that mentions screens, ok, I'll try that. But it needs the super password. Sheesh, thats a bit stupid, why need that to change resolution. I go in there, and find that with the real nvidia drivers, the highest resolution I have is 800x600... that sucks. Almost unusable. Ok, I know how to roll my own xorg.conf file, but I really dont want to do that. Also, how would joe consumer be able to do that? Maybe he would just assume that it sucks and go back to windows?
So out of curiosity, I look in the Preferences menu, and see 'Screen Resolution' in there. Ahhh, ok. No password this time. Same resolution options available, and I dont want to stick with 800x600, so I revert back to the open nv drivers until I have time to fix the xorg.conf with the real nvidia drivers.
I must say, I'm pretty dissapointed at this stage. I'm a big fan of linux, but fear that if people are trying out ubuntu under the impression that it is heaps better than windows, they might come out of the experience thinking that linux pretty much sucks. I certainly don't want people getting that impression.
So I leave it for a couple of days as I'm pretty busy (we have a newborn baby in the house). My some complains that he cant play any of the flash-based games he normally plays, so I realize that Ubuntu mustn't have flash installed by default. Alright, thats normally a very simple fix. In archlinux, simply taking 5 seconds to install the flash package is all that is necessary. I figure that I will have the same experience here. No, I was wrong.
So, I've heard enough about Ubuntu to know that Synaptics is used to installing software, and find it in the Administration menu. Why did it take so long to load? Anyway, its there now. Hmm... how do I make sure the repository contents are up-to-date? Nothing obvious at all, nothing in the menus. There is a Reload button, but surely its not that. Click. Yep, it was that. Ok, now come on guys, thats just stupid. How is Joe user supposed to know that?
Anyway, back to what I was originally doing. Installing flash. While messing with synaptics I ended up closing the window. When I went to open it again, I this time went to the Applications menu, and noticed the Add/Remove... selection. I was pretty sure that wasnt what I did previously, but figured it might take me to where I wanted to go. It does look different, and it seemed to be synchronising against the repository.
Oh well, I type in 'flash' into the search field, ... no packages. What? How can there be no packages for flash? Hmm... Ok, now I remembered something about the latest firefox integrating better with Ubuntu and flash, so maybe I should try installing flash from firefox itself.
I go back to firefox and load up a page that has flash on it. Click on the download plugins thing when it comes up, and sure enough it asks me which version of flash I want to use. It has a choice for the non-free version, or the gnash version (which, based on the description, looks limited). So I choose the non-free version (joe user might assume that non-free meant that he had to pay for it).
It starts the install process... and tells me everything succeeded. I reload firefox, go to a flash page... wait! its not working. Hmm... Maybe I needed to reboot (no little blue arrow icon though). Reboot didn't fix it. So I try the process again. This time I expand the window and watch it doing the install. The install fails though due to an MD5 mismatch. I know what that means, but Joe user wont. It means that adobe must have updated the flash download, but the Ubuntu installer doesn't recognize it as valid. Joe user wouldn't understand that though, and would likely find it very frustrating.
So how do we get flash to work? We try the second option, the Gnash thing. Load up a site with flash, and it appears to be working at first, but then I noticed some of the fonts are about 100 times too big, and other elements are not drawing properly.... gnash does not work very well. So lets try and remove it and manually put the adobe one in.
Synaptics doesn't know that gnash is installed. In fact, it says that it isn't installed. Firefox must have installed it outside of synaptics even though it really did look like synaptics was installing it.
This is getting frustrating. And compared to ArchLinux, Ubuntu is very sluggish. ArchLinux by nature is a very fast distribution, and this machine really isnt very powerfull, so thats a little bit unfair, but its much slower than the Windows2000 installation that used to be on this machine. That hardly looks good at all.
I'm going to stop writing now, as I'm getting frustrated just re-living this experience. I have a lot of hope for Ubuntu, and if time permits, I might look at finding a forum or mailing list, to pass on these observations to the Ubuntu developers in the hopes that I can contribute to the project in some way.
As of now, I still don't have flash working on this machine, and quite frankly I am thinking about removing Ubuntu and starting it again from scratch just in case installing gnash has messed it up more than I can fix easily, but the prospect of it taking close to 5 hours has me re-considering, and maybe putting ArchLinux back on there.
I think I might re-do my steps, and will publish a retraction if I discover that I was just an idiot and missed a crucial step. Here's hoping...
So when I needed to do a reinstall on the family computer that the wife and kids use, I thought it was time to actually give Ubuntu a try. All throughout the media and internet I have heard over and over again about how wonderful ubuntu is, and how perfect it is for casual consumers. That sounded pretty good to me. In fact, even though I'd never actually tried it myself, when people asked me what distro they should try, I often recommended Ubuntu, purely on the hype that has surrounded it.
So I downloaded the Ubuntu LiveCD. The idea is that you boot off the CD and get to see a fully functioning version of Ubuntu and then get the opportunity to install it to the computer's hard drive. Thats a cool idea, and I've shown off LiveCD's in the past, but I really would have preferred an actual install CD, assuming that would allow me to avoid the 5 minutes of booting into the LiveCD. Anyway... no big deal.
The Ubuntu LiveCD automatically detected the sound card, and seemed to run ok (but understandably slow as it had to load files from the CD). So I initiated the hard drive installation process. I did this a week ago, and cant remember any specific details or questions asked, but the installation took over an hour. That surprised me. I can get a fully functioning ArchLinux install done in about 10 minutes, but I've done it a few times so I know what I'm doing, but still, it took way longer than I found acceptable. Oh well, maybe it was installing much more stuff than I normally do with ArchLinux, so I was willing to wait for it to complete.
When the initial installation was complete and rebooted I was glad to see that it noticed the Windows2000 installation taht was already on there for dual-booting, and it had added it automatically to the grub boot-up menu.
So I now had a running Ubuntu machine, but we're not finished there. Thats only the beginning. Whenever I do an ArchLinux install, the first thing I normally need to do it update any packages need it. So when Ubuntu started up and logged in, I saw in the top-right corner a text-bubble saying that there are updates available. Excellent. So I start that, and there are a lot of packages with updates.... its gonna take a while to download and install all those.
Two hours later, it finishes updating. It is now telling me the system is up-to-date. Alright, cool!. But wait, whats that little icon with blue arrows in a circle? That wasn't there before. I move the mouse over it, and some text pops up saying that the system needs to be rebooted. Hmm... would have been nice if it had of put something up a little bit more obvious than that. That could have been very confusing for the novice if things didn't work correctly after everything was updated. They might assume that the update failed and messed up their system.
To be fair, ArchLinux doesn't tell you if you need to reboot after updating or installing packages, but then, its not targeted to a consumer user.
So onto the next thing, some pop-up text in the top-right corner is telling me that there are some proprietary packages available for my hardware. I open that and see nVidia listed. Excellent, I had noticed that the graphics were sluggish, maybe installing the proper drivers will improve that.
Installation of the nvidia drivers seemed to be ok, except for that little icon change telling me that I need to reboot. Seriously guys, cant we make that step a bit more obvious for users?
So a quick reboot (not really, ArchLinux booted up in about 35-45 seconds, Ubuntu is more like 2 minutes), and immediately notice a difference. Its not hard to miss because everything is huge, the resolution is wrong. That would suck for joe consumer, but I'm a savy tech guy, I know that all I have to do is set the resolution correctly.
This is where I encounter the ubuntu (and gnome I guess since I've always been more of a KDE user) crazy menu system. Ok, 'System', that makes sence... but what is the difference between Preferences and Administration? In administration, I see something that mentions screens, ok, I'll try that. But it needs the super password. Sheesh, thats a bit stupid, why need that to change resolution. I go in there, and find that with the real nvidia drivers, the highest resolution I have is 800x600... that sucks. Almost unusable. Ok, I know how to roll my own xorg.conf file, but I really dont want to do that. Also, how would joe consumer be able to do that? Maybe he would just assume that it sucks and go back to windows?
So out of curiosity, I look in the Preferences menu, and see 'Screen Resolution' in there. Ahhh, ok. No password this time. Same resolution options available, and I dont want to stick with 800x600, so I revert back to the open nv drivers until I have time to fix the xorg.conf with the real nvidia drivers.
I must say, I'm pretty dissapointed at this stage. I'm a big fan of linux, but fear that if people are trying out ubuntu under the impression that it is heaps better than windows, they might come out of the experience thinking that linux pretty much sucks. I certainly don't want people getting that impression.
So I leave it for a couple of days as I'm pretty busy (we have a newborn baby in the house). My some complains that he cant play any of the flash-based games he normally plays, so I realize that Ubuntu mustn't have flash installed by default. Alright, thats normally a very simple fix. In archlinux, simply taking 5 seconds to install the flash package is all that is necessary. I figure that I will have the same experience here. No, I was wrong.
So, I've heard enough about Ubuntu to know that Synaptics is used to installing software, and find it in the Administration menu. Why did it take so long to load? Anyway, its there now. Hmm... how do I make sure the repository contents are up-to-date? Nothing obvious at all, nothing in the menus. There is a Reload button, but surely its not that. Click. Yep, it was that. Ok, now come on guys, thats just stupid. How is Joe user supposed to know that?
Anyway, back to what I was originally doing. Installing flash. While messing with synaptics I ended up closing the window. When I went to open it again, I this time went to the Applications menu, and noticed the Add/Remove... selection. I was pretty sure that wasnt what I did previously, but figured it might take me to where I wanted to go. It does look different, and it seemed to be synchronising against the repository.
Oh well, I type in 'flash' into the search field, ... no packages. What? How can there be no packages for flash? Hmm... Ok, now I remembered something about the latest firefox integrating better with Ubuntu and flash, so maybe I should try installing flash from firefox itself.
I go back to firefox and load up a page that has flash on it. Click on the download plugins thing when it comes up, and sure enough it asks me which version of flash I want to use. It has a choice for the non-free version, or the gnash version (which, based on the description, looks limited). So I choose the non-free version (joe user might assume that non-free meant that he had to pay for it).
It starts the install process... and tells me everything succeeded. I reload firefox, go to a flash page... wait! its not working. Hmm... Maybe I needed to reboot (no little blue arrow icon though). Reboot didn't fix it. So I try the process again. This time I expand the window and watch it doing the install. The install fails though due to an MD5 mismatch. I know what that means, but Joe user wont. It means that adobe must have updated the flash download, but the Ubuntu installer doesn't recognize it as valid. Joe user wouldn't understand that though, and would likely find it very frustrating.
So how do we get flash to work? We try the second option, the Gnash thing. Load up a site with flash, and it appears to be working at first, but then I noticed some of the fonts are about 100 times too big, and other elements are not drawing properly.... gnash does not work very well. So lets try and remove it and manually put the adobe one in.
Synaptics doesn't know that gnash is installed. In fact, it says that it isn't installed. Firefox must have installed it outside of synaptics even though it really did look like synaptics was installing it.
This is getting frustrating. And compared to ArchLinux, Ubuntu is very sluggish. ArchLinux by nature is a very fast distribution, and this machine really isnt very powerfull, so thats a little bit unfair, but its much slower than the Windows2000 installation that used to be on this machine. That hardly looks good at all.
I'm going to stop writing now, as I'm getting frustrated just re-living this experience. I have a lot of hope for Ubuntu, and if time permits, I might look at finding a forum or mailing list, to pass on these observations to the Ubuntu developers in the hopes that I can contribute to the project in some way.
As of now, I still don't have flash working on this machine, and quite frankly I am thinking about removing Ubuntu and starting it again from scratch just in case installing gnash has messed it up more than I can fix easily, but the prospect of it taking close to 5 hours has me re-considering, and maybe putting ArchLinux back on there.
I think I might re-do my steps, and will publish a retraction if I discover that I was just an idiot and missed a crucial step. Here's hoping...
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