Tag Archives: Linux

Software Freedom Day 2008. Not so much in the UK, though.

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Yes, it’s that time of the year again, when the great and geeky unwashed masses around the world again get under the shower, have a shave, put on a colourful t-shirt and show the rest of the world the benefits of free and open software. I did my bit in 2006 when I tried to persuade the inhabitants of a small town in New Zealand to convert (at least they’re now all using firefox) but since I am back in the UK these Kiwis will not have the benefit of me looking like an orange sausage again (they give you tight orange t-shirts to wear).

So this year I thought I help out one of the UK’s team. With me living in the south – east, London comes to mind, but there doesn’t seem to be much demand for FOSS in the capital.

The one entry in the London section states:

  • “Meet outside school or train station at around 1300.
  • Go into Kingston town centre, make some noise and hand out many Ubuntu cds, flyers, balloons etc
  • Unfortunately no speakers were able to speak, so no talks and straight into the social.
  • End and begin a social evening in nearby public house, restaurant etc. “

Now, call me a notorious moaner, but is that all London has to offer? No install fest, no radio interviews, newspaper articles, tables on highstreets full of glittering compies?

Sad. Very sad.

P.S. And for those of you wondering why I’m not doing anything this year, I have not even been able to contact my local LUG. Apparently it’s extinct.

Running Ubuntu on mediocre Hardware

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As my lifestyle is rather mobile at present, my main computing tasks are being performed by my Macbook, but recently I inherited an old beige Box from work together with a nifty flat screen LCD monitor that has a nice small footprint. so before throwing it away, I thought I give it a try. After cleaning it and having a rummage around it turns out to be a ca 6 year old KM2M Combo-L Motherboard from MSI, powered by a 1.4 ghz AMD Duron. I upgraded it to 1.2 GB ram and added an oldish Geforce FX 5700 that I still carried around with me, but still, for 2008 the whhole thing is a bit of a stinker.

Next my thoughts turned to the Operating System: it was supposed to have a dual role, on the one hand enabling me to finally finish Morrowind, so I bought the last legit copy of Windows XP my local mum and pop retailer had left (“funny that”, he said. “We have never sold so many copies of XP as in the last 6 months.”) and prepared the one half of the harddisk to be my gaming ‘rig’. Albeit a rather ancient one, but for Morrowind it works beautifully, and as its completely off the net with all connections disabled, it’s probably the safest XP machine in the neighbourhood. But it also should be hooked up to net, print and do some decent wordprocessing  so a more secure option was necessary.

“Use what you know”, so a Debian derivate it needed to be. I previously ran Ubuntu on my last ‘real’ gaming rig, but that was an enormous, up to date thing with quad core cpu and a bloody expensive new GPU, so I was hesitant to try it on this machine with specs from 2003. Nevertheless I am happy to say that Hardy Heron is performing well. Better than I thought, actually.

To check how the dear old Duron was coping with an OS from 2008 and the new breed of ajaxified websites with their rich content and online streaming I had three desktop windows open: Window one ran the resource hogging Open Office,  window 2 had Evolution in all its glory, while Window 3 was filled with Firefox running the BBC’s iplayer, showing me the installment of that weird archaeology show ‘Bonekickers’. The 5 year old beige box performed absolutely flawless. No hickup with the playback on the iplayer, even though the machine connected to the internet via a Asus usb plug-in wifi thingie (that was instantly picked up by Ubuntu and hooked up without any problems to my WPA-2 network). LastFM is playing nicely, printing works out of the box, and my non DRM’d songs on my itunes collection are picked up as well.

I would put the value of this machine at, what, 20? 30? pounds?

Don’t fall for the hype of always buying the latest multicore machines. The only reason I would ever buy a new, ‘pushing the envelope’, PC again is if I wanted to play the latest games on Vista. But as I have a Playstation3 and would rather eat my coffeecup before running Vista I’ll stay with my beige box for now.