Happy Birthday Google!

A great big and happy birthday wish to Google, which turns 10 years old this month. I've been using Google itself for many years now, and started to use their awesome services a little less than a year. I've talked about Google's Services many times, and my original conference presentation can still be found on the blog. In Fact, Here is the post- FOSSVT April 4^th.

I downloaded Chrome and Picasa 3 right when I got news of them being available. My Firefox start page is set to my iGoogle. My word processing is usually done on line on Google Docs. I now use Gmail, and Love it. I love using Google Calendar to organize my tasks. This Blog, which will be celebrating it's own Birthday in a couple months, is hosted on Blogger, another Google service. My School started using Google Apps a small while ago. I can't wait until Chrome comes for Linux. Google is all around us.

So Google, on your 10^th birthday, have some fun, and enjoy it. Who knows what you will be doing in another 10 years!

Happy Birthday Google!

Online Video Version 1

Getting Back To School with New Gadgets, Services, and Software

School is back, and summer is over. While we wait for some awesome new Linux Distributions, coming in the following months, there are new gadgets and services to check out. Lets do just that, here it comes.

ASUS EeePC/ Netbooks

At least for part of the year, I have this to experiment with. The light, small laptop is great for light tasks, such as Word Processing and Web Browsing. Luckily, Firefox and OpenOffice.org are included for these tasks, and even though a little slow at times on Launch, it is plenty fast. One great thing is that KDE can easily be enabled for a more advanced user interface. It is great for what I need, and works pretty well. The battery only lasts about 3 hours, but the Power Supply is very small and portable.

Services- Google Services

As always, Google is helpful to me. I use several of their services, and they are a great help in organizing my work. I dislike carrying a thumb drive with me everywhere I go, and I like access to my docs or notebooks wherever I go. I also find storing my docs online does help. Google Gears makes it possible for me to get them offline too. I think it works great for what I need it for.

All In All, from Google I use,

• Docs
• Gmail
• Notebooks
• Blogger
• Bookmarks
• Talk
• Analytics
• Calendar
• Picasa

Software- Google Chrome
Google Chrome, Google's browser, is now In beta and available to the public. It seems to be a fast and speedy download, and after the tool is installed, it operates quickly, and has a nice interface, obviously Google Themed. Each individual tab runs it's own process, so simply going in to task manager and killing a single process will close a tab. The beta seems to be somewhat stable, but Java content does not work as of yet. The browser is Open Source, and it is based on WebKit, also Open Source. Chrome's new tab page is a little useful, and shows recent bookmarks, most visited pages (With a thumbnail of the page). It is very speedy, and I think it is almost faster than Firefox and Internet Explorer. It only works on Windows as of right now though.


Software- iTALC
I just learned about this one. It is like Synchroneyes. You can easily teach classes with it and if you use the master application you can take snapshots of others screens, power up a whole lab of computers (Wake on LAN must be enabled in the BIOS), log in remotely, shut down computers, demo your screen onto computers, and allow students to present things from their computers.


Hardware- Energy Efficient Systems
Energy Efficient systems are becoming more and more wanted. Non- Gamers don't really enjoy having a power hungry computer that uses 300 Watts of power(3.33 Hours = 1 Kilowatt Hour.) People also like laptops that have a long battery life. Intel's Atom processor, Possibly AMD's Athlon 2000, and VIA's C7/Nano, are making this possible. With an Energy Efficient power supply, the Intel and AMD systems have measured about 40 Watts. That is a small amount of power, and In Standby mode, Intel's C6 mode has seen about 5-10 Watts! Although not exactly the best thing for school (Maybe the Netbooks are) the Net-Top can be an interesting thing to experiment with. It would make an excellent always-on system, and could make an awesome Linux box. (The Realtek chip doesn't work great with Linux though.)

That wasn't so bad was it? I think the new coming software and hardware will be able to hold me off until some new big Linux distributions come out? Will it hold you over, there isn't that long to wait!

Linux Review 10- OpenSUSE 11.0

Ok, last time I looked at OpenSUSE, I completely confused myself when trying to configure things. This time, even with little knowledge of the settings manager, or the package manager (Both tasks are handled with YAST2) I was able to figure things out. I actually set mount points for Windows partitions correctly this time! (This is done before installation starts). So even when I wasn't sure what setting in YAST did what when I began, I quickly discovered that YAST for settings is absolutely Awesome. The YAST package manager is a little slow, and seems to take up a bit of System resources. So let's get started, shall we?

OpenSUSE 11.0
You know, you want a system to be able to do something with. You don't want it to just sit there not allowing any work to be done, because (Insert Bloated Anti-Virus Software Here) is using too much memory, and the system is slow. You do want a secure system, so you think that using this anti virus and anti spyware/adware/malware and a huge firewall will protect the system. Even then, some of this malware can get in. Tracking Cookies are spyware, and they aren't automatically detected when the browser picks them up. You have to scan with your Spyware tool to find them. OpenSUSE is very secure, and when you want to change a setting, it's easy. For example, a webserver will bring you through the process, and even ask to open up a firewall port. That's great, most distro's have you doing that yourself.

Installing
Installing Open SUSE was a shorter process this time. It only took about 45 minutes and required a single reboot. I was running OpenSUSE right off, but found that I could not hit the power off in the start menu, I just powercycled the machine, but I still wonder why that was. On the next reboot, (Start Ups are a little slow) It worked just fine. Installing was painless, I knew what I was doing this time, and I was up and running OpenSUSE 11 right off the bat.

User Interface

The user interface is friendly, and the apperance is good looking. Starting Compiz fusion was also easy. Packaging with YAST is also prettty good. I was able to install the Phun Physics Simulator really fast, and It seemed to understand that that package needed 2D acceleration drivers, and downloaded those for me too. Wow, thats just awesome. It seems easy enough to the end user, that is a little tech savvy. It is pretty easy, but I would be weary about people wiping out their C:\ Drive because they don't know what a partition is. OpenSUSE does use some technical language, so be weary. The partition tool was pretty good too, speaking of partitions.

Conclusions
After figuring out OpenSUSE 10.3 slowly, I came into 11 quite easily, I have a picture of the installer, and will upload that once I can. So let's outline the main points.

The Good

• Installer was easy to use
• Interface was nice
• Configuring things is quick with YAST
• User Friendly
• Pretty Fast when using
• YAST
  

The Bad

• Technical Language (Not bad for me, but maybe another user)
• Boot Is slow
• YAST for package managing is just a little slow

The Inbetween

• YAST
• Technical Language

 As for a rating, I can't resist giving OpenSUSE a high score, I had a great experience with it this time. It's nice! I have to give it a 5/5, I almost found it perfect for my needs. For another user though, I'm not so sure. 

Switching To Open Source Completely- One Step at a time.

The Introduction

There may be an interesting story behind my switch to Open Source, I didn't switch completely at one time. I started using Open Source with Windows, with programs like Open Office and The GIMP. I liked The GIMP because it didn't cost money and I felt that Open Office had much better features compared to Microsoft Word.  I liked the ease of use of Open Office. Because the original copy of office I had preloaded on the PC didn't have a presentation tool, OO Presentation was perfect.


A little Farther...

After the Introduction to those utilities, I started looking for more and more free tools. I found them quickly, but not all of them were great. I still used Open Office and GIMP more than the closed source applications of the same kind. I found things like Audacity and Mozilla Thunderbird for Email. I had been using Firefox before I started to use OO. SourceForge was a great place to find these, so I went there from time to time if I was looking for something.

After that?

After finding these Open Source applications, I felt pretty good with the software. At the time I didn't really know about GNU/Linux, but I was lucky enough to be able to get an introduction. The first distribution I actually used was K12LTSP (Article Anyone?) to set up a server for several older clients to be used again. Even though we ran into countless problems with things such as PCs with no PXE capabilities and garbled graphics, we continued with it for a while, and quit because the older machines to be used were being retired soon anyway. The next "Adventure" was with Xubuntu on these same old machines! This was a funny story (Another Article Possibly?) and there were problems with this too. Being so very persistent with these tasks, I would have probably stayed all night working on these things. For the real detailed story on that, you would have to ask my Tech Teacher.

Around these times, I became intrested in the Hardware pieces too. I was fascinated by the fact that these computer parts were so powerful and fast enough to run the awesome software that I liked to use. It was still a little while before I built my own system, and right after that I started to use Linux for real by myself. I found that the hardware I had used in building this computer was very well supported.

Is there more?

Of course there is more. I began to use Linux and found some applications that seemed hard to use. I hadn't done Video Editing with Linux, but I am now beginning to do that too. I like using free formats like .OGG for Music and Theora for Video. I also found that these formats were good with high quality and a decent file size. I thought these formats were great, but many Media Players, like Windows Media Player wouldn't play them. Most people don't usually install more Media Players on their systems, unless they needed Quicktime or Real.


We also use Linux in the form of Edubuntu at our writing labs, and the school uses the software that I have already mentioned. By using free software we can save money so that we can replace our old hardware. Our Oldest hardware was just replaced this year, in the writing labs we had machines with 64MB of memory and Celeron processors at 566Mhz, by donated machines with 256MB-512MB of memory and Pentium 3's at 1Ghz, and P4s with 1.8Ghz. Not the best, but it helps us to get through the years.