I haven’t really written much about my studying with the Open University but someone recently commented on blogging their experiences throughout their courses and there might be some mileage in it.
The final push
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Monthly Archives: May 2009
Dell Inspiron 1545
If you’re on the lookout for an off the shelf laptop that runs Ubuntu, I picked up a Dell Inspiron 1545 laptop from Tescos yesterday – dual T3400, 2Gb RAM, Intel GMA graphics, Broadcom BCM4312 wireless, a nice matt black finish. Not bad for £349.00. Installed Jaunty without issue and all the hardware works out of the box (although the Broadcom uses proprietry drivers).
USB wireless mouse and Jaunty
If you’re struggling to work out why your USB wireless mouse is registering the scroll wheel and the clicks but not the movement – it appears that movement draws more current. I just spent ten minutes farting about with a cheap Sigma mouse that I have and realised after I gave the thing a quick charge.
You would think that being an avionics technician I would think of these things first…
What do you identify as?
I’ve been looking at my site stats and it seems odd that a site primarily focused on Linux would have almost twice as many page views from IE as from Firefox (22% to 12%). Platform wise, XP and Linux are neck and neck at 3200 but when you include all the Windows derivatives (a special hello to the three page views from Windows 3.1 – man you believe in getting your money’s worth) its 6350:3200.
So, I was wondering – is this browser identification strings being set to identify as IE? Well probably not because there would be a more proportionate OS identification. Are there twice as many Windows users looking to change to Linux as there are those who’ve done it? Is everyone just surfing my site at work?
I don’t know but I do know this, 6350 Windows visitors and 264 Vista visitors. They’re either very happy or very lonely.
What was your favourite comment in OpenWeek?
I’ve been trying to get to as much of OpenWeek as I could and have really enjoyed a lot of the sessions. Dustin Kirkland’s session on encrypted home folders and of course the Docs Day sessions were fantastic 
So I was wondering what everyone’s favourites so far were…
My favourite comment was from Mark Shuttleworth during his Q&A, I’ve seen similar questions asked so many times but I’ve never seen an answer as succint:
(12:24:03 PM) jcastro: <rabbit251> jcastro: QUESTION: Do you see Wine (and Windows-compatibilty in general) or native Linux ports as the more important ingredient in the success of Ubuntu, or do they each play an important role? (12:24:18 PM) sabdfl: they both play an important role (12:24:30 PM) sabdfl: but fundamentally, the free software ecosystem needs to thrive on its own rules (12:24:41 PM) sabdfl: it is *different* to the proprietary software universe (12:24:54 PM) sabdfl: we need to make a success of our own platform on our own terms (12:25:08 PM) sabdfl: if Linux is just another way to run Windows apps, we can't win (12:25:13 PM) sabdfl: OS/2 tried that
I’ve started using the last two lines as my email signature.