General IT

PrimeTime Linux

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I've been thinking of setting up a company to set people up with Open Source workplaces, and every year that goes past makes me think that the time is almost here.

There are a number of factors which are conspiring to make Linux a viable alternative:

  • The fact that Linux, via distributions such as Ubuntu, Mandriva, Suse et al, are now easy enough to install and intuitive enough for the Everyday User. I set my girlfriend up with an account on a spare laptop and just let her play. Soon enough she was asking for it on her laptop as well.
  • OpenOffice. Enough said. Hardly anyone uses the full feature set of Word, so why do we slavishly upgrade every time a new version comes out? Well actually we don't …

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PCLinuxOS to Mandriva Spring 2008.1

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I posted an entry here a month or so ago about my switch from Linux Mint to PCLinuxOS. There was good, bad, and definitely very ugly, which, to be fair, was probably due to the non-standard hardware of my Thinkpad r51e. In the many comments on that article, someone suggested that I should try Mandriva, which uses KDE and on which PCLinuxOS is based. So I did. Another new distro, another day …

I can't remember what prompted the switch. I think I was having some minor problem with printing, which if you mess with your system as much as I do, is only to be expected. Anyway, I had a CD of Mandriva 2008, so instead of fixing the printing problem, I decided to change operating system. In the topsy-turvy world of Linux, these can both take around the same time.

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Ubuntu 7.10 to PCLinuxOS 2008

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I started a new project at a client's office a month or so ago. On the first day I turned up, and managed to work for about an hour, before my laptop died. Somewhat embarassing. I tried for about an hour to resuscitate it, but couldn't get it to boot at all: it just died and froze before the KDE login screen. It seemed to be some sort of graphical mishap, and no amount of fiddling with xorg.conf from rescue mode would fix it.

I excused myself, went back home and after some more fiddling, decided to backup and re-install. Having made this decision I was looking through my pile of install CDs, and I came across PCLinuxOS 2008, which I'd downloaded a few weeks previously, and I'd been meaning to try out. "So why not try it out on this laptop?" said the evil part of my brain — the same part which forces me to spend time on Facebook instead of working.

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Thunderbird Calendar Rearrangement

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There are some tasks which are just right for Friday afternoon. I've got a to-do list with a number of urgent items on it, but none of them seem very appealing on a Friday afternoon. Especially when there's a holiday Monday coming up. So of course I not only chose a non-essential item to spend my energies on this afternoon; I chose one which wasn't even on my to-do list.

My calendar in Thunderbird has been bothering me lately. I like to keep all my appointments in it from when I first started using an electronic diary, which is now quite a few years' worth. This makes Thunderbird very unhappy, as it struggles to index and display all the events every time you use the Add-in Calendar (Lightning). Chug chug chug.

And there's another problem. I have an online synchronising service, the excellent Scheduleworld (http://www.scheduleworld.com/) with which I synchronise regularly. While it normally only syncs the events which have changed, Thunderbird will occasionally decide that it really must sync Everything, which it subsequently does. This takes it about 15 minutes, during which time I can't do much with my computer.

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Big Switch 7: Shake your Booty

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OK, in the last post, I had moved my partitions around substantially, so we were obviously in for a few problems booting. To recap, the new layout looks like this:

  • /dev/hda1 – 20Gb – Linux main system (moved and enlarged)
  • /dev/hda2 – 100Mb – /boot partition (moved)
  • /dev/hda4 – 1 Gb – swap partition (moved)
  • /dev/hda3 – Extended partition containing
    • /dev/hda5 – 17 Gb Data partition (enlarged)
    • /dev/hda6 – 17Gb /home partition (newly created to house all the VMs)

The first problem was getting the thing to boot up. The MBR was still on the boot sector of the drive, but it was telling the computer to boot from the wrong sector. I pulled out the Mint / Ubuntu install CD and booted from that.

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