Practical Technology

for practical people.

February 13, 2009
by sjvn01
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Vista to XP charge leads to lawsuit

Emma Alvarado is mad as heck and she’s not going to take it anymore. Alvarado purchased a PC from Lenovo on June 20, 2008, it came with Windows Vista Business and she to pay an additional $59.25 in order to “‘downgrade’ her operating system to Windows XP Professional.”

Most people would have just complained about it and moved on. Not Alvarado. She decided she wasn’t going to take it. Though the law firm of Arias, Ozzello, & Gignac, in Santa Barbara Calif., a law firm specializing in class action and consumer rights litigation, Alvarado is suing Microsoft, both on her own behalf and for other users who have been stuck with Vista and want XP. In short, she’s started a class-action suit against Microsoft.

Linux users are long familiar with variations on this theme. Desktop Linux users usually have no use for Windows, but still have to pay for it on most PCs. You can get around paying the Microsoft “tax,” but it’s not easy.

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February 12, 2009
by sjvn01
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The first dual Windows/Linux PCs arrive

You won’t find a word about it on Dell’s sales site for the Dell Latitude E4200 laptop or the Latitude E4300, but these Windows Vista, or optionally XP, notebooks come not only with Windows but with an embedded Linux desktop as well.

Dell calls this embedded Linux, Dell Latitude ON. The Austin, Texas computer giant describes Latitude ON as, a “communication module,” that “enables bi-directional remote access to your Microsoft Exchange data with the single touch of a button without booting or waking your entire laptop-lowering power consumption and extending battery life.”

Yes, it is that, but, it’s also a Linux desktop, based on Novell’s SLED (SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop) 10. This runs on system-on-a-chip subsystem that comes with its own ARM processor and flash memory that runs without needing to call on the E4200’s 1.4GHz Intel Core2 Duo ULV (Ultra Low Voltage) or the E4300’s 2.26/2.4GHz Intel Core 2 Duo SP9300 CPUs or the system’s drives and memory.

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February 11, 2009
by sjvn01
1 Comment

Novell layoffs still less than 100

Rumors just won’t die that Novell will be laying off more employees. The rumor mill has Novell laying off everything from simply more than the announced 100 staffers to a retracted story of about 1,000 employees. The reality is, drum-roll please, it’s still less than 100 employees out of about 4,000 employees.

According to Ian Bruce, Novell’s PR director, Novell has no plans for future layoffs and the layoffs of not quite 100 individuals out of Novell’s worldwide employees are now completed. Bruce was not able to say whether these layoffs were focused in any one geographical or technical area.

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February 11, 2009
by sjvn01
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Silverlight, via Moonlight, comes to Linux

f you’re like me, you don’t like proprietary video and audio codecs. Be that as it may, some sites, like NBC’s Olympics site, use Microsoft’s proprietary Silverlight streaming technology. Until recently, if you were using Linux that meant you couldn’t watch videos from these sites at all. Until now The Mono Project, a Novell sponsored open-source initiative to bring .NET code to Linux, has just released an open-source, Firefox add-in Moonlight 1.0 that enables Linux desktop users to view Moonlight content.

Moonlight not only brings Silverlight content to Linux users, though, it also brings Microsoft’s WMV (Windows Media Video), WMA (Windows Media Audio) and MP3 files to Linux via the Microsoft Media Pack. This is a Microsoft blessed set of Microsoft’s proprietary media codecs.

To get Moonlight, you download it as a Firefox add-on from the Go-Mono site. This is a straightforward operation and will be familiar to anyone who’s downloaded Firefox add-ons. The one possible mis-step is that you must be sure to give the site permission to download and install Moonlight on your browser.

Officially, Moonlight supports SLED (SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop) 10, the latest versions of openSUSE, Fedora and Ubuntu on 32-bit architectures and SLED and openSUSE on 64-bit chips. In practice, I’ve installed and used it without any trouble at all on not only those operating systems but on MEPIS 8, which is based on Debian 5, Lenny, and Mint 5, which is built on top of Ubuntu 8.10.

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February 10, 2009
by sjvn01
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Minty fresh Linux

In case you haven’t guessed by now, I like desktop Linux. I admit though that Linux is stuck between a rock and a hard place when it comes to deal with proprietary media formats. These formats are designed to lock users into a particular video or audio player and those programs seldom come in a Linux version. There are answers though to this problem and that’s one of the reasons why I like the Linux Mint distribution. It makes listening to proprietary audio and viewing restricted video as easy as it’s ever going to get on Linux.

Mint isn’t well known outside of Linux fan circles, and that’s a pity because it’s an outstanding distribution. It’s based on Ubuntu, and it tracks Ubuntu quite closely. So, the latest version, Linux Mint 6 Felicia, is based on Ubuntu 8.10, aka Intrepid Ibex.

As such, Mint is an up-to-date desktop Linux. It’s based on the Linux 2.6.27 kernel and uses Gnome 2.24 and X.org 7.4 for its graphical interface. Mint comes in two versions. The first, the Main Edition, is the one that comes with support for multimedia codices and drivers for proprietary hardware. The other, the Universal Edition, doesn’t include any proprietary multimedia or hardware support.

The Main Edition is the one that has the goodies in it. Right off the disc, Mint Main Edition can play WMV (Windows Media Video), WMA (Windows Media Audio), QuickTime, and Flash media files. In short, with Mint you’ll be able to watch and listen to pretty any media you’ll find on the Web.

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February 9, 2009
by sjvn01
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Installing Linux software 101 for Windows users

Lately, I’ve seen several articles by Windows users grumbling about how hard it is to install software on Linux. It is? You could have fooled me.

Still, people are having trouble, so here’s my 101 class on installing programs on Linux.

First, chances are good you won’t need to install any software on a Linux desktop. Almost all Linux distributions already come with an office suite, usually OpenOffice; a Web browser, Firefox; a universal IM client, Pidgin; and so on. Don’t like the main choices? Most Linux distributions also come with alternative picks. For example, there’s Gnome Office; the Epiphany Web browser and the Kopete IM client. You get the idea.

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