Hello Again!

I’ve been waaaay away from this blog for almost a year now. Sorry about that. I’ve been busy with real life and other projects. Anyway, I was wondering if anyone wants this blog to spark up again. Ever since I left this aside there have been major improvements in Ubuntu and as of Karmic Koala (9.10) it works flawlessly right out-of-the-box with the Toshiba A135-S4527 and Lenovo Ideapad S10e.

So, if you’re interested in reading and learning more about Ubuntu please post a comment here. I’m always open to suggestions. And I really don’t feel like writing a lot here and not being visited by anyone.

Come on, don’t be shy! See you around!

Success!!!

Sorry for being away for so long guys, but after my bloody and violent showdown with openSUSE, I decided to experiment with other distros that use KDE. Why? Because I love KDE!

After much checking and testing I ended up installing Kubuntu…and I just have one word: TOTALLYAWESOME!!! heh!

I got it working 100% on my Toshiba Satellite A135 S4527…I won’t go into deep details because it was a long and frustrating process, but I managed to get everything working (even the pesky Multimedia Keys and the wi-fi card) and now I’m the proud owner of a laptop dual-booting Ubuntu and Kubuntu 8.10 Intrepid Ibex.
Kubuntu is an awesome distribution and it’s very comprehensive software-wise. It has almost everything preinstalled, except for copyrighted software, such as MP3 Playback and DVD codecs, which are easily installed by the way.

So if anyone wants to know the complete step-by-step process let me know and I’ll post it! It’s worth the try, believe me! At least for a Linux-junkie like me!

Anyway, now that I’m happy with my KDE configuration, I’ll post here more often!

So see you guys around and remember to post your comments here!

No openSUSE for now . . .

Well, I really wanted to test this thing out but it looks like my wireless card will never be supported…

I have an Atheros AR242x and Madwifi doesn’t work on openSUSE 11.1, ndiswrapper is a mess and compat-wireless drivers killed my card’s firmware…

Many people claim this card works…but not for me…(the card is recognized by the default drivers but the wireless network is not…so that means the card is not really working). So until this issue is fully fixed without using weird drivers, like in Ubuntu, it’s bye-bye openSUSE for me…or at least when I can have a wired-LAN computer. My laptop seemed to work fine with wired-LAN but I’m 20 feet away from the router on another room, so a long cable is not by best choice…

Anyways, I encourage you to try it out and test if it works for you. At least for me it didn’t…

New Banners!

Hey guys! I thought I’d add some banners/buttons to the site, linking to my 6 favorite Linux Distributions webpages! (On the sidebar to the right).

Just click on them and you’ll be taken to their corresponding webpages from wher eyou can download them!

Those are all good distributions so you won’t be disappointed!

A tiny twist . . .

Yep, today’s post has a twist…why? Because I’m not going to talk about Ubuntu on this one. Instead I’m gonna talk about openSUSE.
What’s so special about it? Well for one it’s got nice eye candy by default thanks to the KDE environment (openSUSE also comes with GNOME though). Also it’s hardware compatibility is higher than Ubuntu’s with some computers (for example my Toshiba Satellite). Not to mention that it has a cool lizard/chameleon as a mascot! (lol!)

Tomorrow openSUSE 11.1 will come alive, and let me tell you…IT’LL ROCK ! ! !

As with all other Linux distributions there are some quirks and downsides to openSUSE but luckily most of that is fixed in the new version. One of the most annoying annoyances was with wireless drivers. It was a pain to just connect to the internet with a wi-fi card. But if things turn out as the openSUSE wiki says, all of that will be a thing of the past.

So, for those of you wondering what else openSUSE has to offer go visit their site .

Tomorrow will be a great day for me! I’ll have my new openSUSE liveCD to test and I also have Debian and Gentoo LiveCDs laying around to play around with all of them!

If you want to have fun too, go download openSUSE! You won’t be disappointed…A fair warning though…Read the installation instructions carefully! I wasn’t careful the first time I installed it and managed to destroy all my data in the process…overconfidence is veeery bad in Linux.

So, have FUN!

Ubuntu Dawn’s new home!

Yeah, you read right! I moved from Blogger (which is cool by the way) and I intend to keep the blog here leaving the Blogger version as an archive for older posts.

So, I was wondering…What do you guys think?

I want the readers of this blog to let me know what I should add, remove, change, etc!

So if anyone has any requests whatsoever post them on a comment here and I’ll do my best to make this blog as comfortable as possible for everyone!

Happy reading!!!

The new Xorg . . .

Well, as the post title implies, there’sa new Xorg in Ubuntu Intrepid, and basically it sucks! Heh! Let me explain.

This new Xorg apparently uses Xrandr 1.2 and now it’s a lot easier to use dual-monitors on an extended desktop scenario, but sadly they removed the “Input” section of the Xorg.conf file and even if it still exists on your Xorg.conf it’ll be ignored. Now the Input devices are controlled by another file, which looks like a letter soup, so I won’t bother to post the location here so you can see it.

As far as I’ve experimented Wiimotes, Synaptics touchpads and other input devices are harder to configure, or not configurable at all. I made a post about how to use your Wiimote in Ubuntu as a Multimedia Controller and/or a mouse…well, now that’;s gone until we find a way to make the new Xorg play nice with uinput, which is a very important part of the wiimote-in-ubuntu stuff.

Synaptics touchpads, found in a wide variety of laptops like Apple MacBooks, Toshiba Satellites, and so on, are now harder to configure. Back in Hardy you could just pop an “options–” statement below the “Input Device” section and you could even make your scrolling circular instead of vertical/horizontal. Pretty cool options, the circular scroll was just like the iPod clickwheel, very fun to use.

Anyways, I’ll post back when I find something new about this new Xorg and how to make it work with input devices like it used to.

Intrepid Is HERE!!!!!

Last Thursday Intrepid Ibex 8.10 officially came live! And I must say I’m impressed by all the improvements it has over Hardy Heron! I won’t go into much detail since I’ve already covered all of this before, but if you guys have any questions about it’s improvements and features don’t hesitate to post it below! Happy INTREPID!!!

Fix SpellCheck in Firefox and OpenOffice.org!

I’ll make this quick. Remember back in Windows how everything you wrote incorrectly in Office Word got underlined in red? Well in OpenOffice.org and Firefox that doesn’t happen automatically. You’ll need some packages first.

Simply go to Synaptic and search for:

myspell

Now check among the results for the ones that end on “en’ or “es”(for spanish).

Check all that apply, reading carefully their descriptions and making sure that they’re the languages you’ll need. Then hit “Apply”, install all the needed dependencies that Synaptic is gonna ask for by hitting “OK” on the pop-up window, and wait for it to install. Once done fire up your Firefox and/or OpenOffice.org! You know get the red lines below the wrong words and you’ll also get the spelling suggestions!

Hope this helps someone!

Oh, and tomorrow is the great day!!!! Tomorrow October 30, 2008 Ubuntu Intrepid Ibex 8.10 goes officially live!!! I’ll be making a special post for tomorrow (hopefully)!

Solutions For Mediaphiles!

“Yeah, how do you even rip CDs and encode videos with Ubuntu?! This can’t be! I’m going back to Window$!!” Hold it right there partner! Ubuntu has some cool programs you’ll love for doing common things we normally did back in Window$.

Once of these things is ripping audio CDs to the computer’s HDD. Back in Windows there are tons of thousands of programs that do this, and most of them are worth $40.00+ and people end up downloading them from somewhere, illegally of course. Well, here in Ubuntu we don’t have the need to pirate programs.

If you want a good CD ripper just go to Synaptic and search for:

sound-juicer

This little program (found in Applications>Sound & Video>Audio CD Extractor) rips your music and converts it to WAV, MP3, OGG and others. After ripping the music just sync it with your mp3 player (gtkpod-aac for iPods and as of other mp3 players you’re on your own. I don’t have any other mp3 player which I can test. I do know that iPod Classic 160GB, iPod Nano 1st gen 4GB and iPod Shuffle 2nd gen 1GB work perfectly in gtkpod, if you have a Zune…well…you’re pretty much alone in the dark since no one can make a Zune work with Linux this far…go figure.)

And what if you want to convert videos for your iPod?…SIMPLE! just follow my instructions on how to install ffmpeg and winff found here.

I won’t go into much detail here because these programs are pretty easy to figure out. But if you encounter any problems or you have questions, just post them on the comments section! I’ll be happy to help!