Peter's Blog

Could this be the best of both worlds?

Best of Both Worlds

On the left we have kubuntu running under vmware player on Windows Vista. To the right we have Outlook and some Vista widgets running on the Vista host.

Vmware player is incredibly solid and linux installs nicely unlike Microsoft Virtual PC which runs into various problems (which Microsoft aren't rushing to fix). Vmware player is free and I prefer it to Vmware server as I don't need the 'server' element. It's missing features like pause/rewind/snapshot so it is less useful for testing setup programs (cannot roll back to a clean o/s install) but is ok if all you want is a simple desktop os. It supports USB, unlike the free versions of VirtualBox.

I found a site called Easy VMX that allows me to make new virtual machines for vmware player so I can build whatever vm's I like.

Somehow (not sure how) the seamless mouse thing works and I can switch between kubuntu and windows just be moving the mouse. Unfortunately cut and paste between them does not seem to be working.

So why use Vista as the host? Because I'd need another license to run it in a vm on a linux host

I'm giving kubuntu/KDE a try. Compared to gnome it is either more suited to the power user or more bloated, depending on your viewpoint. I think I'm leaning to krusader as a file manager, I could probably run it under gnome but it costs nothing to try KDE.

TBH there's something about the gnome philosophy of cloning windows that irritates me. KDE may have once used 'non free' software but I don't really care.

Good to see the blog works in Konquerer and the text editor has a spell checker! Ironically Konquerer is flagged in red.

I still want to set up a system what will automatically record tv programs for playback on my pocketpc. For various reasons this is becoming more important: in a nutshell, I can only take so much ITV.

Been trying to setup mythtv on a new pc I have acquired. I have tried various windows PVR packages in the past but none of them were attractive, being flaky and annoying (including meedio which of now available for free as yahoo go). Mythtv was attractive because of it's flexibility.

I installed a clean kubuntu install in the box which went quite smoothly and after some exploration I established that the kernel already supported my hauppauge nova-t usb. I found an application called kaffeine that was already installed which was able to display tv and this essentially Just Worked out-of-the-box, albeit with lip-sync issues (probably because it needs the proprietary nvidia drivers).

Still desiring mythtv, I found an ubuntu repository that has mythtv packages for version 0.18 and installed that. I looked in the ubuntu package readme which says something to the effect that whoever set it up had no experience with mythtv and didn't know what he was doing. Thanks for the warning. I set it up using the mythtv-setup application, started the mythtv backend and tried to start mythweb. I am mainly interested in this as a way of remotely scheduling recordings, I care not about using the myth frontend. Mythweb wouldn't work, it complained about being a different version to the back end. The php code appears to display this error if there are any problems communicating with the back end but I decided I wouldn't mess around getting an old version to work, I would build the latest 0.19. After a few hours of installing dependant packages it built but when I tried running it I got a segmentation error. At this point I gave up with mythtv, I just don't have the time to nurse it into life. mythtv seems bloated and fragile. there is the option of knoppmyth, a dedicated mythtv distribution, but I'm not sure how cutting edge this is, whether it is any good as a general purpose linux distribution or whether the kernel will support my tv card without having to fiddle with compiling it.

I had a brief look at freevo but sourceforge was down (what an advert for oss) but found that freevo used command line tools to do the recording so I am currently investigating that approach: knocking up simple python scripts to do just what I want. I would rather debug these than mythtv (hell is other peoples source code).

Incidentally, I was browsing through some ruby source yesterday and for a few files there I was wondering whether ruby had a comment character.

Got new laptop: Dell Latitude D410.

Specs:

• Pentium Centrino Mobile 1.86GHz
• 1G memory
• 40G hard disk
• 12" screen
• weights < 4lbs

I wanted something light, not a portable desktop but a true laptop.

I bought it from Europc as 'refurbished' which seems to mean factory return or < 6 months old. It was close to £400 off the Dell price. After I ordered it I started wondering what could be wrong with it as other similar systems from the same place were north of £850. The next day they rang me and asked me if I realised that it had no operating system. No Redmond tax: that explains it. I thought about it for about 2 seconds and said I don't care, I'll take it.

They weren't strictly accurate, it did come with a copy of Freedos...

I installed ubuntu on it, taking the plunge of going totally linux on my main personal computer. Can I live without Windows on it? If I can't I can always get a copy but let's see how it goes.

Various Notes:

• Looks like new, transparent film like new pc's have, not dusty or faded.
• Installed ubuntu with no problems, mostly it Just Worked.
• Had to downgrade wireless network to WEP as it does not support WSA out-of-the-box. I had to fiddle for some time to get the keys in agreement. Seems to work very well, maybe better than the 500m. I always thought that the di624 was the weak spot UPDATE: it is, see comment.
• Battery life is over three hours, more than twice the Dell Inspiron 500m and enough to last an evening. UPDATE: should mention (as I wondered this before I bought it but couldn't find mention in any reviews) that this was with Wifi running all the time. I set the screen to minimum brightness.
• Suspend to disk doesn't work. Had to install linux source code to figure out how it was supposed to be used and it didn't work anyway. I could go through kernel patching to get suspend2 running or I can live with a long initial boot and lots of suspending-to-ram (which seems to work fine).
• It has both a trackpad and a nipple thing: I hate the nipple things, I'm used to the trackpad from my 500m. Unfortunately the default drivers lack the support for scrolling, tap-to-click, tap and drag and various other neat shortcurs. I think I could get it working, either by patching the kernel or by installing a different version of X windows. I'm not in a big hurry to do either. UPDATE: trackpad working.
• Some reviews say the keyboard is cramped but to me typing on it now it is gorgeous: apart from the page-down key which is hyper-sensitive: I'm hoping the previous owner rejected it because of this and nothing else is wrong with it.
• Living with kubuntu: installed ubuntu and upgraded to it as the kubuntu servers were unresponsive. I got warty warthog which was released only days before I got the laptop.
• The 12" screen is a bit tighter than I had hoped. It is 1024x768 but seems like less. I've made the fonts small and I can get into the habit of running firefox full screen by banging F11. The display quality is good, crisp and good contrast.
• It's fast: nothing seems to take very long. Gimp boots in about five seconds, compared to maybe 15 on the 500m (under windows). UPDATE: not sure I've ever seen the top command show a process using more than 2% cpu time. Must find something intensive for it to do.
• It came with a media dock that holds the DVD-rom (no DVD-RW ). This can also act as a charging station and has sockets for VGA, wired network etc. It supports Wake-on-lan so I am tempted to set it up so I can wake it remotely from my hosting pc and do cool things like program the sky+ box from the irda port. I email the hosting pc from my mobile and coolness ensues.
• Better build quality than the inspiron. Lattitudes are the business models and are targeted higher. It doesn't creak much when squeezed. Not a 10/10, maybe 8 for creakiness, where 500m was a 5.

Right now I love it. The small screen may get annoying and I'll miss suspend-to-disk (unless I go kernel building, which I cannot be bothered with).