Practical Technology

for practical people.

January 1, 2013
by sjvn01
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Canonical, Ubuntu Linux’s parent company, is hinting in big, bright letters that’s its about to release a fully touch-enabled version of Ubuntu Unity. The site’s banner headline now reads “So close, you can almost touch it.” with a clock counting down to 1 PM Eastern time, January 2nd. If this is indeed what Canonical is planning, can Ubuntu-powered tablet and smartphones be far behind?

Canonical has been planning to bring Ubuntu to tablets since it first introduced its controversial Unity interface in 2010. Then, in conversations with Mark Shuttleworth, Ubuntu’s founder, I was told that Unity was meant to be Ubuntu’s master interface for desktops, netbooks, and tablets.

At the time, while a tablet version of Ubuntu wasn’t in Canonical’s immediate plans, Jono Bacon, the Ubuntu Community Manager, told me that “all the pieces are in place to create an Ubuntu tablet.” Even then, before Unity was launched, I was shown the first baby steps to multi-touch Unity.

2013: The year of the Ubuntu Linux tablet and smartphone? More >

December 31, 2012
by sjvn01
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2013: Installing Linux on Windows 8 PC is still a pain

In security’s name, Microsoft has made it difficult to install Linux, or any other operating system, including older versions of Windows, on Windows 8 PCS. In addition, Microsoft has made it all but impossible to install Linux on Windows RT devices such as the Surface RT.

Microsoft has done this by adding a feature to UEFI (Unified Extensible Firmware Interface), the next generation of BIOS, called secure boot. Its avowed purpose is to prevent rootkits, malicious programs that run before the operating system boots, from running.

2013: Installing Linux on Windows 8 PC is still a pain. More >

December 28, 2012
by sjvn01
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2012’s 5 Most popular Linux stories

Taken as a whole, 2012 was a great year for Linux. The most popular stories, however, were more about the day-to-day happenings of Linux then the big picture.

2012’s top Linux story was The truth about Goobuntu: Google’s in-house desktop Ubuntu Linux. The title said it all. We’d long known that Google uses its own house-blend of Ubuntu on its PCs, but it wasn’t until this summer that Google finally revealed exactly how its workers use Ubuntu,

The next most popular tale was about the popular Linux Mint distribution. I declared that 2012’s Best Linux desktop was Linux Mint 13. I’ve changed my mind since then. Now, I think the best desktop Linux is Linux Mint 14.1. I’ll be telling you more about it in the next few days.

2012’s 5 Most popular Linux stories. More >

December 27, 2012
by sjvn01
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Good-bye books, hello e-books

Readers. it’s time to turn a page. In a December 27, 2012 report entitled, “E-book Reading Jumps; Print Book Reading Declines,” the Pew Research Center found that “the number of those who read e-books increased from 16% of all Americans ages 16 and older to 23%.” At the same time, the report says, the number of people who read printed books in the previous 12 months “fell from 72% of the population ages 16 and older to 67%.”

It’s not a sharp decline. The survey of 2,252 Americans (ages 16 and older), found that 89% of the book readers had read a printed book (or 67% of all those ages 16 and older). At the same time, 30% of the book readers said they had read an e-book, which translates into 23% of all those ages 16 and older. An April Pew research project  showed that “in mid-December 2011, 17% of American adults had reported they read an e-book in the previous year; by February, 2012, the share increased to 21%.

Good-bye books, hello e-books. More >

December 27, 2012
by sjvn01
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Netflix staggers

Twas the night before Christmas and all through the house, people were screaming and it wasn’t at a mouse. The in-laws were staring at the TV with care, in hopes that Netflix soon would be returned there. Alas, it wasn’t to be. Netflix wouldn’t be playing again until December 25th.

So what happened? It turns out it was still another Amazon Web Services outage. This one was centered at the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Elastic Load Balancers (ELB), in the US-East-Region1 data-center in Northern Virginia. Other cloud services went down as well, but let’s face it, on Christmas eve no one noticed much of the others. Curiously though, Amazon Instant Video kept going. 

To be exact, trouble developed with the Elastic Load Balancers’ application programming interfaces (API)s. New load balancers would go up but they wouldn’t properly report their status to the overall ELB service. This, as Netflix users quickly found out, lead to “significant levels of traffic loss.”

Netflix staggers. More >

December 26, 2012
by sjvn01
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2012’s Top five Linux stories with one big conclusion

2012 didn’t see any single large Linux news story. Instead, we saw many small Linux stories that, when added together, led to Linux becoming the single most important operating system of all. Here’s the count-down to the top of the operating system stack.

5) Raspberry Pi is as popular as apple pie

People love their polished hardware devices such as the Apple iPad, but some still love do-it-yourself *DIY) gear and nothing says DIY quite so much as the Raspberry Pi. This Linux-powered credit-card sized computer is as bare-bones as it comes, but it still had over 250,000 people on its buyers waiting list before its launch. Months later it’s still insanely popular. 

2012’s Top five Linux stories with one big conclusion. More >