The World of a Penguin

Today, I found the command-not-found feature in Ubuntu Feisty. The feature is useful when running commands in bash. If the command you tries to run is not installed you get a suggestion what to install. $ svn checkout https://forgesvn1.novell.com/svn/apparmor/ The program 'svn' is currently not installed. You can install it by typing: sudo apt-get install subversion bash: svn: command not found $ I like! The functionality is included as standard in Fesity.

I wrote about Dell and Linux a few days ago. ZDnet confirms the problem. They called all five top vendors in UK and asked about buy a naked PC. Some of the vendors said that they could, but when ZDnet tried to they failed. Just as I did with Dell. Up to proof all big suppliers. I want to buy a laptop for my wife. The one of you that let me choose any, not just one, of your models in Sweden without an operating system or with a free Linux pre-installed (preferably Ubuntu) will get the order. Of course it must be cheaper than with Microsoft windows, last time a got €130 in rebate. So you need to be close to that.

There have been a lot of discussion about Dell and Linux for a while. Both at Dell's Idea Storm , different news and blogs. It had not only been at Linux and Open source news sites, but also in major computer magazines. Dell seems and confess that they are confused about Linux and how to fit in their business model. Mark describes it pretty well in his blog . He also mentions that taking part in Microsofts marketing budget is important money. This is impossible for the suppliers to admit officially, but several suppliers have told me this of the record. When I bought my new laptop this Christmas, I looked for a specific configuration but also for the possibility to buy one without an OS or with Linux pre installed. Any Linux is better than Windows, even if I replace it with Ubuntu. At a fair here in Sweden early last fall a Dell representative told me that I could buy a laptop without Windows if I called them, but not on the site. When it was time for me to buy my laptop mailed Del...

I have played a bit with bzr a few days. I have earlier planned to setup a subversion server. The plan was to use subversion instead of cvs. But I thought it was complex to set up, a version control system should be easy to set up and use. I have also heard that there have been some problem when upgrading the repository database and I do not want to loose my repository since I also use it as a backup. Bzr is nice and easy to set up as well as use. It is easy extensible and have good documentation and tutorials . The tutorials makes it easy to start using it. Since it is a distributed system, the thinking when using it must be a bit different. You will get good help reading bzr for CVS users . bzr will be my version control system of choice. It is also used a lot in the Ubuntu community.

I gave up on my problems with Hauppauge PVR 500MCE. I think the card is broken. Instead I saw a shop selling a KISS PVR 558 for about €200. So I bought one. The box runs Linux and the GPL-parts of the software can be downloaded as source. I can FTP to the box and read and write videos, pictures and audio files. The box support free format such as OGG as well as propitary formats. Through their web service can I program it to record a show where ever I am. I have now uploaded the go-open TV-shows and can finally look at them from my sofa, without having the laptop in my knee. The campaign and shows was sponsored by Canonical and HP among others.

I did a network install yesterday of Ubuntu Feisty Fawn Herd 5 on my meant to be TV-computer. I have earlier struggled with getting a good picture with my Hauppauge PVR 500MCE. A few weeks ago I noted that Feisty will have full support for the TV-card, including firmware. Today it was time to try it out. It worked out of the box, I did noting extra. Brilliant!! But, a big BUT ... there is still a bad picture. If I amplify the signal, it get worse. If I reduce the signal then it, also, get worse. It looks like there are two problems; noise and not fully correct tuned signal. So on the picture quality view nothing had been better since last time. Does anyone have any ideas? I start to believe that I have a hardware problem, maybe it is time to buy another card. The new feature within Feisty that suggests what application or decoder you need to show a file works great. This feature will simplify for a lot of users. By the way, here is a dump of my dmesg output. Everything looks good, from...

Ubuntu Feisty Fawn Herd 5 is out. I have not seen any official announcement yet, but I am downloading it. I have also installed Feisty on my laboration computer today. It looks very nice and I have not noticed any major glitches.