Practical Technology

for practical people.

December 3, 2012
by sjvn01
0 comments

Shimming your way to Linux on Windows 8 PCs

Getting Linux to boot and install on PCs locked down with Windows 8’s UEFI (Unified Extensible Firmware Interface) Secure Boot is still a major headache. However, Matthew Garrett, a well-known Linux developer who’s been working on fixing the Secure Boot problem, has just released a working UEFI boot solution for Linux distributors. This should enable many more versions of Linux to run on Secure Boot-imprisoned PCs.

Garrett, formerly a Red Hat programmer and now a security developer at Nebula, an OpenStack private-cloud company, announced on November 30th that he was “pleased to say that a usable version of shim is now available for download. … This is intended for distributions that want to support secure boot but don’t want to deal with Microsoft.”

This approach is not the same as the one that Garrett devised for use with Fedora Linux. That approach uses a Fedora-specific key that’s based on a Microsoft/Verisign-supplied Secure Boot key.

While that meant dealing with Microsoft, it was as Garrett had written earlier, “Easy enough for us [Red Hat] to do, but not necessarily practical for smaller distributions.” It’s also, as The Linux Foundation has found, in its so-far failed attempts to obtain a universal Secure Boot key for Linux distributions, really not that easy at all.

Shimming your way to Linux on Windows 8 PCs. More >

December 3, 2012
by sjvn01
0 comments

Windows 8: Desperately seeking mobile

For Steve Ballmer, the good news is that people are using Windows 8. Both StatCounter and NetMarketShare show Windows 8 has cracked the entry-level 1 percent of the desktop market barrier in its first full month of availability. Unfortunately for Microsoft, a close reading of its adoption numbers shows bad news as well.

First, here are the numbers. Windows 8 has popped up from from 0.41 percent to 1.09 percent, a gain of 0.68 percent. That’s not too surprising since, as anyone who went shopping on Black Friday knows, it was almost impossible to find PCs without Windows 8. However, Windows 7 hit a mark of 1.46 percent in its first full month out.

Thus, some of Windows 8’s gains came at Windows 7’s expense. Windows 7 barely moved up with a gain of 0.02 percent to reach 44.71 percent. Windows Vista–remember Vista?–continues to be the Windows that dare not speak its name with a loss of 0.10 percent to 5.70 percent, and XP dropped a quite large 0.84 percent to 39.82 percent. If you can do basic math, you can see the bad news for Microsoft here. Overall, Windows dropped 0.22 percent.

It’s a tiny decline, but with as much energy as Microsoft has been putting into marketing Windows 8, it still has to be disappointing. For PC vendors, who were already worried by desktop sales declines, it’s even worse news.

Windows 8: Desperately seeking mobile. More >

December 3, 2012
by sjvn01
0 comments

OSs are leaving the user out of user interfaces

We seem to have entered an age of computing that I didn’t see coming: the age of the terrible user interface. Windows 8 is leading the charge with not one, but two awful interfaces. That’s what I think, and so does the lord of all interface analysts, Jakob Nielsen. He said Windows 8 is “weak on tablets, terrible for PCs.”

But it’s not just Microsoft. GNOME, once the leading Linux desktop, is rapidly fading into the background because of bad design choices in GNOME 3.x. What’s going on?

I think the problem is that far too many people have forgotten UI 101 — make it easy — despite the availability of the handy acronym KISS (keep it simple, stupid).

Since back when Microsoft was still calling its brand-new interface Metro, I saw Windows 8 as a disaster in the making.

OSs are leaving the user out of user interfaces. More >

November 30, 2012
by sjvn01
0 comments

Surface Pro: Too much money for too little tablet?

The Surface Pro, Microsoft’s Windows 8 hybrid tablet/laptop for business, sounds good. But, at a starting price of $899 for the 64GB model, without a keyboard, is anyone going to want it?

The good news is that the Surface Pro runs full Windows 8, rather than the crippled Windows RT. While I have no use for Windows 8 on a desktop, I’ve also thought that its “Metro” interface might work well on a tablet.

In addition, with an Intel Core i5 processor the Surface Pro has the horsepower needs to run Windows 8 properly. The Surface RT, with its NVIDIA Tegra 3 ARM processor, is underpowered. So why do I think that the Surface Pro will be too little, too late?

In two words: the Apple iPad.

Surface Pro: Too much money for too little tablet? More >

November 30, 2012
by sjvn01
0 comments

5 reasons why the Roku is the best Internet TV streaming box choice

There are lots of ways to get Internet streaming TV networks, such as Amazon Prime Instant Video, Hulu Plus, and Netflix. But the single, best way is with a Roku.

Obviously, there are plenty of alternatives vying for your attention – and your hard-earned money. You can buy a Smart TV . But I’ve yet to find a Smart TV to which I can give a confident thumbs-up in regards to features and functionality; besides, they’re expensive. You can also get cord-cutter TV with an Internet-enabled DVD player, such as the Sony BDP-S590 or a DVR like the TiVo Premiere, but you probably already have a perfectly good DVR and DVD-player. You could also consider an Apple TV or a WD TV Live Media Player. But if you are going to get just one device to watch Internet TV – and how many of us need more than that? – then a Roku is hard to beat.

5 reasons why the Roku is the best Internet TV streaming box choice. More >

November 29, 2012
by sjvn01
0 comments

Dell XPS 13 laptop: The Ubuntu developer edition arrives

Several months ago, Dell told me about their plans for a killer Ubuntu Linux developer notebook computer, Project Sputnik. The planning is done and this top-of-the-line programmer’s laptop, the Dell XPS 13 Developer Edition is ready to ship for $1,549.

What you for get for that is an Intel Ivy Bridge i7 CPU, 8GBs of Dual Channel DDR3 1333MHz SDRAM, and a 256GB Solid State Drive (SSD). For a display it uses 13.3″ HD (720p) Truelife WLED Display with 1.3MP HD Web-cam backed up by Intel HD 4000 Graphics.

Behind the hardware, is Ubuntu 12.04.1 Long Term Support (LTS) with its usual assortment of open-source programs. It also comes ready to work with two beta community projects, Profile Tool and Cloud Launcher, that make it far more than just an extremely well-equipped, Linux-powered Ultrabook.

Dell XPS 13 laptop: The Ubuntu developer edition arrives. More >