Practical Technology

for practical people.

May 13, 2008
by sjvn01
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Sex and the Apple TV

It’s official. HBO and Apple have signed a deal that will bring six of HBO’s most popular shows to the iTunes store, which means they’re also available on your Apple TV..

The series are: Sex in the City: $1.99 per episode; The Wire: $1.99; Deadwood: $2.99; Flight of the Conchords: $1.99; Rome: $2.99; and The Sopranos: $2.99. This is both the first time HBO has made individual episodes available for buyers and it’s also the first time that Apple is set different prices for television episodes of the same length.

While I’ll miss the simplicity of Apple’s $1.99 per episode pricing, if this is what it takes to make Deadwood, Rome, and The Sopranos available on my Apple TV, I’ll deal with it. You can also buy full seasons of the shows off iTunes.

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May 12, 2008
by sjvn01
1 Comment

Linux PCs still available at Wal-Mart: Just not the one down the road

Recently there were some rumors that Wal-Mart was once more selling Everex PCs with gOS Linux. Well, they got it about a third right.

Yes, Wal-Mart is selling gOS Linux-powered Everex laptops, but then again they never stopped selling them. What they did so was stop selling them at their retail stores. Today, if you want an Everex gOS PC you need to go to the Wal-Mart Web site.

However, Wal-Mart doesn’t make it easy to find their Linux-powered PCs. A simple search for “Linux” won’t do the trick. If you do some digging, or just follow the links below, you can find their Linux systems.

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May 12, 2008
by sjvn01
1 Comment

The best desktop OS is…

Dear me. Just because I recently talked about Windows XP SP3’s virtues and vices, some people seem to think I’ve turned away from my beloved Linux systems. Nope, I’m still a rock-solid Linux desktop user.

In fact, I’m writing this tale on my #2 desktop, which runs openSUSE 10.3. But, just because I use Linux all the time-my current office’s desktop offerings include the aforementioned openSUSE, Mint 4.0, Ubuntu 8.04, MEPIS 7.0, Freespire 2.03-doesn’t mean that I don’t run other desktop operating systems. I do. XP SP3 has the lead with three systems running it-two on virtual machines under Linux and one natively; two Macs running Tiger and Leopard; a copy of the newest OpenSolaris that I’m still tuning, and one system that I tolerate having Vista SP1 on.

Some people collect baseball cards, I collect operating systems. It keeps me off the streets.

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May 10, 2008
by sjvn01
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Fixing the XP SP3 reboot blues

What can I say? For me, XP SP3 was the cat’s meow, the best Windows client operating system ever. But, for other people ‘upgrading’ to XP SP 3 is like being fed to a roaring lion.

They’re seeing endless, and I mean endless-reboots. Many can’t even escape to the relative safety of Windows’ Safe mode much less get back to the safe harbor of a previously saved System Restore point. Most of the people experiencing this PC nightmare seem to be running computers with AMD chips.

The core problem though isn’t that XP SP3 has a problem with AMD processors. It’s that some vendors, and HP is the one that usually gets mentioned, used the same XP image on both their Intel and AMD systems. Usually that’s not a problem. It’s sloppy workmanship at the factory, but not a show-stopper. Well, until now anyway.

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May 9, 2008
by sjvn01
1 Comment

The State of Oracle Linux

Oracle’s Unbreakable Linux is something of an odd-duck in Linux distribution circles. While Oracle, the database giant, produces it, under the Oracle paint job it’s all RHEL (Red Hat Enterprise Linux). In addition, while Oracle stands behind its distribution with support, Oracle doesn’t think of itself as being in the Linux distribution business.

What does it all mean and why does Oracle have one foot in the Linux business? For the answers to these and other questions, Edward Screven, Oracle’s Chief Corporate Architect, recently spoke with Jim Zemlin, head of the Linux Foundation.

Before launching into this discussion, first you should keep in mind that Red Hat‘s RHEL is the foundation of several other business Linux distributions. These include Centos, Pie Box Linux, and White Box, which appears to be inactive. Where Oracle’s Unbreakable Linux differs from these distributions is that their creators make no bones about it: they’re Linux distributors building on Red Hat’s work.

Historically, Oracle is coming from an entirely different place. While Oracle was one of the first major software development companies to support Linux, they only started shipping their own Linux in October 2006 This move came after months of rumors that Oracle might either make their own Linux distribution or buy an existing one, Ubuntu was mentioned, lock, stock and barrel. No one expected Oracle simply to take RHEL and repackage it.

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May 9, 2008
by sjvn01
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Deep, down and dirty PC repair

Sometimes, no matter how much you try to protect your computer, you need to get down and dirty with the hardware. Sometimes it’s the obvious. I never cease to be amazed at how many PC problems turn out to be loose cables or-the shame of it all!-an unplugged electrical cord. But, others times, it will be you vs. your PC’s internal workings in a battle for system superiority.

It’s for times like those that you need the kind of repair tools that Lincoln Spector talks about in his article 6 downloadable boot discs that could save your PC. My one concern with his tale is that he doesn’t mention what I consider to be the best of all the system repair boot disks: SystemRescueCd 1.02.

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