Ubuntu on Dell

I were worried that the Dell computers with Ubuntu would get close to the same price as those with Microsoft Windows. Therefore, I'm glad to read that there are a notable price difference between a computer with Ubuntu and one with Vista.

Talk by RMS

Yesterday evening my wife and I visited a talk by Richard M Stallman at the university here in Linköping. He is currently doing a tour in Sweden. He had a talk with over 1000 visitors in Gothenburg on Wednesday and in Linköping were it close to 300 people. They had to close the doors fifteen minutes before the talk started. He will today talk at the Swedish green party's congress in Norrköping. The picture is when I am buying a pin from RMS.

It was the first time I listened to a talk by Stallman live. He is a classic politic agitator, no slides. He just stands and talks absorbed about his subject copyright and free information. The title of the talk was "Copyright vs Community in the Age of Computer Networks". He started with the history of copyright. Then he entered into discuss the problems with currently done changes in copyright laws and introduction of DMCA.

The talk was interesting, but he is some times to much fundamentalist and mark words. Like, if you say Digital Rights Management about DRM, he points out that it should be Digital Restriction Management and of course Linux is GNU+Linux.

I like the vision of his ideas but I think we have to accept the compromise of Open Source a a pragmatic solution.

It was just a question of time...

and now has it happened. I am of course talking about the big discussion subject in the FOSS-world today, the CNN-article about Microsofts attack on Free and Open Source Software.

I am not worried at all. I hope instead that this will kill software patents and proprietary
software. Unfortunately, a lot of managers will be afraid of open source. Personally, I would be more afraid doing business with a company that base its existence on layers and lock in methods.

The last two weeks, I have been working with a commercial content management system. Don't ask me why, I wondering this my self. It has not been a pleasant drive. Not at all, not a single minute. It is complex to configure. There are tons of errors in the documentation. They say you should use maven, but they don't do it in their example site. They jump around with different versions of jBoss, tomcat and other J2EE-environments. (Tomcat is not a J2EE-environment, but anyway are some examples based on it.)

I am glad I have my nice and warm Ubuntu Linux systems here at home.

A kind help message

I am playing with TinyCA on Ubuntu. Selected help and got this message.

Three become one

Today I took three different computers. Decomposed them into parts and built one computer fitting my need for a new server. I have installed Ubuntu 7.04 (Fesity Fawn). The /boot-directory is stored on a 128MB compact flash disk. The main disk, configured using LVM, is a 200GB-disk. I will later move a 320GB-disk from the current server to this new on. So I will get ½TB of disk, if I do not buy a new disk before that. Thanks to this solution, I can change to bigger disk without reinstall the system.
First, of course, I install the new disk in the computer. Then I tell LVM to include that disk in the Volume Group. After this, I ask LVM to migrate all data from the old disk to the new one. This can be done seamless. Finally, I tell LVM to remove the old disk from the volume group.

Zepto 6014w with Ubuntu 7.04

I have now installed Ubuntu 7.04 (Feisty Fawn) on my wifes laptop from Zepto. It's a 6014W. I do my installation, as usual, through network boot (PXE). I noticed that Zepto has the same bug as my MSI S271 in BIOS for PXE-boot. It will only bot through PXE some times, with no clear pattern when.

Unfortunately, I do not like the LVM-configuration in the text based installation. The installation worked smoothly, except the LVM-part. The cause was that I wanted to change what partitions to create.

The resolution for the screen got right in the xorg.con-file, but not in the reality. The xorg.conf said 1280x800 but the display showed 1024x768. The solution, which is not obvious, is to install the package 915resolution. I would like to see this installed by default. No extra configuration needed.

The default volume control must be remapped to work to another controller in the mixer. The sound worked out of the box.

Other things we have tested are:

• The wireless and network manager works great.
• The flashy graphics with Berryl are working.
• We can turn on and of the touchpad
• CPU clocking does not work. It is a Pentium mobile CPU.

Still to test are the card reader and bluetooth.

The impression so far is that it is a nice laptop, which you can by without Microsoft tax, and it works well with Ubuntu.

Dell + Ubuntu = True

It is official that Dell will ship Ubuntu on some of their desktops and laptops. I can imagine that CEO:s at Novell and Red Hat are dragging their hair until they get bald as Steve Ballmer. They will wounder why they have not been able to write such an agreement with any of the major suppliers of client-machines. The answer is pretty simple; Ubuntu is a great desktop system that can be used by most people. It is cheap, or to be correct free. There are a community that are willing to answer questions from anyone in a lot of different languages.
Who is up for the next deal? HP, Lenovo ... and with whom? Ubuntu again or will any of Red Hat and Novell take it?

Congratulation Mark, Cannonical, and of course all in the Community. This is a big day for Ubuntu and for Linux.

SCO

Our "favorite" company SCO is trade at $0.80. This is the lowest value per share since 2002. As we had read on several news sites is now facing the risk of delisting from Nasdaq. I hope the court affairs around Linux soon will end and SCO goes bankruptcy. They have not provided any proof at all that they are right in their accuses against IBM etc.

My wife are waiting for her new laptop that she has ordered from Zepto a week ago. They are kind to provide their computers without any Microsoft tax. I'll install Ubuntu 7.04 on it as soon as it arrives.