Practical Technology

for practical people.

October 21, 2008
by sjvn01
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Flash 10 on Linux: Better, not great, better

Let’s get this out of the way first. Adobe Flash is still a proprietary program and I, and a lot of other open-source people, wish that it wasn’t. That said, the latest Flash Player 10 on Linux is a lot faster than the last version and it opens up the doors to a lot of Web-based video content.

s is also, lest we forget, the first version of Flash to appear for Linux that showed up at the same time as the Windows and Mac OS versions appeared. It’s always nice to see Linux being treated as a first class citizen by a major software vendor.

So, to welcome it, I installed it on two different Linux systems. The first was my openSUSE 11 running on my faithful old HP Pavilion a6040n PC. This system is powered by a 1.86GHz Intel Core 2 Duo E6320 dual-core processor and has 2GBs of memory and uses an Intel Graphics Media Accelerator 950 with 32MB of dedicated graphics memory for the display. On my second test-box, my Gateway 503GR, I was running Kubuntu 8.04. This system has a 3GHz Pentium IV CPU, 2GB of RAM, an ATI Radeon 250 graphics card, and a 300GB SATA hard drive. Neither PC is what you would call speedy.

Despite that, using the GUIMark, a Web-based benchmark test suite designed to compare 2D graphics rendering systems, I saw 17.5fps (Frames per second) on the openSUSE system and 14.9 on the Kubuntu box. These results are somewhat misleading though if you take them at face value. GUIMark is designed to “heavily saturate the rendering pipeline.” Flash video over the Web tends to be designed to deliver the best possible video for the least amount of bandwidth and system requirements.

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October 19, 2008
by sjvn01
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Why good people make bad OS choices

I was looking for a mini-notebook the other day for my mom-in-law at a Best Buy when I happened to hear a senior sales guy telling a newbie the 411 on selling PCs. “You sell them either Vista, or, if you have to, point them to the Macs because those computers work. That XP stuff is old junk and Linux doesn’t work.”

Oh did I have words with him! And, as I talked with him, once more I was reminded about the difference between a used car salesman and a computer salesman: the used car salesman knows when he’s lying.

As our conversation continued I discovered that while he knew many people were unhappy with their Vista PC purchases — he told me most of them complained about older software and hardware incompatibilities — Vista was still the newest operating system so, it was, somehow, the best.

And, this mind you, was from someone who’ve I seen selling PCs at this particular store for more than five years. If this is what experienced sales help is like, God help poor customers who come in and just want a good computer for their money.

It wasn’t that this guy was shilling for Microsoft. It was that he really didn’t know any better. With help like this is it any wonder why good people make bad operating system choices?

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October 17, 2008
by sjvn01
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No Linspire Love Lost

When Michael Robertson sold Linspire to Xandros, I doubt many people saw a lawsuit coming his way from former Linspire CEO Kevin Carmony.

Carmony had not seen eye-to-eye with Robertson about Linspire’s future since the summer of 2007 when he resigned as CEO. Other Linspire executives followed and many people thought that Linspire, and its self-named distributions and its community distribution, Freespire would soon follow. Carmony’s feelings about his old distributions may be judged from the fact that, in October 2007, he switched to Ubuntu..

But, the split between the two Linspire executives wasn’t over yet. When, in April 2008, Robertson sold Linspire’s assets, including the key CNR (Click’N’Run) Web-based installation system, to Xandros, Carmony was ticked off.

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October 17, 2008
by sjvn01
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Ballmer says skip Vista

Boy, I wish I’d been at Gartner’s Symposium ITxpo in Orlando, Fla. this year. That way I could heard with my own ears, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer tell an audience of high-level business people that if they want to wait for Windows 7 to switch from XP, instead of going to Vista, “They certainly can.”

Mind you, this was at the same show, where earlier, Gartner analyst Yvonne Genovese had tore into Ballmer like a hurricane saying she had installed Vista for her daughter — and two days later went right back to using XP . “It’s safe, it works, all the hardware is fine, and everything is great,” Genovese said

She went on to say that “What we’re seeing and what we’re hearing from users is a very similar thing. It’s difficult to implement.” Amen sister. Vista is junk. And, yes, I speak from experience. I finally got Vista to work properly with all my hardware and software on one PC after 16-months of trying. But, hey, at least I got everything to work. A lot of people haven’t been so lucky.

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October 16, 2008
by sjvn01
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The five best things in Linux 2.6.27

Does anyone really know what will be better in Windows 7? I don’t and I follow Windows almost as closely as I do Linux. With Linux, on the other hand, we know exactly what we’re getting well in advance of its arrival. In this latest Linux kernel, I see several outstanding new features that have been coming down the road for some time.

After a brief hardware hiccup with Intel’s e1000e gigabyte Ethernet firmware, Linux 2.6.27 was released on October 9th. It’s a good, but not ground-breaking, kernel. Still, it has at least five significant improvements.

The first of these, in my opinion, is a new way of handling device firmware. In the best of all possible worlds, firmware should be compiled with each driver. Linux users know all too well that, despite the opening of some proprietary driver firmware by vendors like Atheros, the Wi-Fi chip OEM, too many devices still require proprietary firmware. In Linux 2.6.27, the firmware blobs (binary large object) now have a permanent home: the new directory, ‘/lib/firmware.’

This works for Linux in two ways. The first is that it will make it easier for all Linux distributors to handle proprietary drivers in a single common way. For users this translates into making it easier to use this kind of devices. For those users who don’t want a thing to do with proprietary drivers, it also makes it easy for them to make sure that their PCs don’t inadvertently use the closed software.

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October 15, 2008
by sjvn01
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Web browser dragster races: Firefox 3.1 beta vs. Chrome beta

I like Chrome, Google’s beta Web browser, a lot. It boasted the fastest Web-rendering engine I’d ever seen, until now. Starting last night, there’s a new Web speed-demon, Firefox 3.1 beta 1.

I know, I know. Some people aren’t seeing this speed boost. My colleague, John Brandon, found that “Compared to Chrome, in testing my most frequently visited sites, Firefox 3.1 now lags well behind Chrome.” Brandon’s right. For daily Web browser visits, Chrome is still faster.

The blame for that goes, from what I can see, to the fact that Firefox 3.1 beta has a lot more beta error-checking code in it than does Chrome. Before either one goes gold that code will be stripped out.

While I was looking under the new Firefox beta hood though at Firefox’s new JavaScript rendering engine, TraceMonkey, I saw killer performance that leaves Chrome’s V8 JavaScript engine eating its dust.

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