German tech journalist Volker Weber has an N900 to play with and he already has some insightful observations:
“I like it. Not as a phone, but as an adventure. This will be a fun ride. [more..]
The N900 has zero navigation buttons. The iPhone has one. While the iPhone is easy to understand, the N900 is not. A beginner will have a steep learning curve. The first thing you have to learn is that the Maemo 5 UI has four distinct layers you need to be aware of: [more..]”
Four years ago, Ubuntu Linux replaced XP as my main desktop OS at the office and at home. Most things work fine, with some major annoyances left (see below).
Now that we want to upgrade our computers at home, these annoyances feel big enough that I now consider switching to a Mac. Are there other people here who went from Linux to Mac? I’d like to hear your comments if the following things are nicer in OS X.
Gnome Evolution is the default mail client of Ubuntu. Tried it with each new release, but after all these years, it’s still a big clunky mess. It stalls every now and then, is slow with IMAP and forgets calendar data. Evolution syncs with mobile devices, but not with mine. Thunderbird is a much nicer mail client, but it’s not integrated with Gnome as well and it doesn’t sync. KDE is still recovering from its 4.”zero” release and doesn’t feel usable yet, so I didn’t try its solutions for this problem.
I “just” want to read my messages, deal with appointments and remember people’s address and birthday data and sync all these to my computers at home and at work and to my mobile devices (an iPod Classic and a semi-old, dumb Nokia phone).
My wife and I love to take photographs. But we both want to work on these photos as a single collection. Right now, we use f-spot on a single computer. f-spot is somewhat okay, but slow and it crashes sometimes. It expects photos on the local hard drive, not on a network share.
Is there a solution to manage one private photo collection on two computers if it’s not on the local drive?
Our drm-free music collection (flac and mp3) lies on a network share. With gtkpod and a samba mount on the local 100mbit network, it took over 20 hours to fill my iPod (and no, it’s not really a big collection). Banshee and Rhythmbox were slow as hell, as well. Amarok didn’t even play sound from Gnome in Ubuntu Jaunty. All of these apps expect your music on your local drive, not on the network.
And after all this, gtkpod reported lots of dangling files after it tried to build the proprietary file hierarchy of the iPod (thanks, Apple, for trying to shut out iTunes alternatives, you inconsiderate prick).
What is an elegant way to handle an iPod with Linux when your music is not stored on the local drive?
The Mac is beginning to look a lot nicer, with its polished photo software and working calendar/contact management and sync. (Well, is it working? Apparently it does, haven’t heard people complaining so far.)
On the other hand, Ubuntu has served me well. It works with cheaper hardware and there’s no need to buy iLife or invest in regular OS X upgrades. (Even my mother is using Ubuntu, mostly because she wanted to surf the net and nothing else. And I can easily help her from 200km away with remote desktop sharing.)
So I’m conflicted. Stay with Linux? Move to OS X? Or does it suck just like any other OS?
The Smart Q5 MID – now this might be a device for Mer: ARM11 cpu, WiFi, Bluetooth, 1G storage, SD-slot, 800×480 screen, touchscreen and a sub-150$ price tag. (Now that price sounds way too good to be true!) Originally designed to run Ubuntu for ARM, but seems to have everything needed for Mer / Maemo.
By the way, where is the next Nokia tablet hardware?
11 Tage alt.
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Es wurde gelegentlich gefragt, wo die Quelltext-Pakete der e-tobi vdr Binaries für Ubuntu bleiben. Tja: Es sind die Quelltexte von Tobi, die unverändert von mir compiliert und dann im Repository angeboten werden.
Falls Änderungen notwendig sind, patcht Tobi seine Quellen, damit sie später unter Debian und Ubuntu compilierbar bleiben. Deshalb gibt es von mir keine Quellpakete, denn die gibt’s bei Tobi. Er bietet drei Varianten von vdr an: “standard”, “multipatch” und “extensions” – diese unterscheiden sich durch verschiedene Erweiterungen und die dadurch nutzbaren Plugins. Die Quellpakete sind aber für alle drei identisch, die Shellvariable “PATCHVARIANT” sorgt beim Compilieren automatisch für die nötigen Änderungen der Quellen. Um die e-tobi Quellen der Variante “standard” unter Ubuntu zu verwenden, legt man zunächst eine Datei an: |
Some folks have asked why there are no source packages of the e-tobi vdr binaries for Ubuntu in my repository. Well: I’m using the original sources maintained by Tobi.
If changes are necessary or I run into problems, Tobi patches his sources to make them work with both Debian and Ubuntu. That’s why I do not offer source packages – you can find them at e-tobi. He offers three flavours of vdr: “standard”, “multipatch” and “extensions” – they use different extensions and patches and allow using a different set of plugins. The source packages are the same for all flavours, the “PATCHVARIANT” shell variable will make sure that the sources are patched accordingly when you compile them. To use his sources for the “standard” flavour, you need to create a file first: |
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| Um z.B. die aktuelle Version 0.2.0-4 des “live”-Plugins für die “standard”-Variante von e-tobi zu backen, geht es wie folgt weiter: | If you wish to compile a plugin, e.g the current version 0.2.0-4 of the “live” plugin for e-tobi “standard” flavour, here’s how: | |
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Die e-tobi vdr Binaries für Ubuntu Intrepid Ibex sind nun verfügbar. Wie bisher stehen sie für i386 und amd64 zur Verfügung.
Im folgenden Beispiel – ähnlich wie bei e-tobi beschrieben – bitte #SECTION# ersetzen durch standard, multipatch oder extensions. Weitere Informationen zu e-tobi vdr unter Ubuntu findet Ihr in den früheren Blog-Artikeln zu diesem Thema. |
The e-tobi vdr binaries for Ubuntu Intrepid are now available. As usual, you can fetch them for i386 and amd64.
In the following sample setup, replace #SECTION# with standard, multipatch or extensions. You can find more information about e-tobi vdr for Ubuntu in my earlier blog entries. |
# /etc/apt/sources.list.d/vdr-etobi-hanno.list
# SECTION = standard | multipatch | extensions
deb http://www.hanno.de/vdr-experimental intrepid base backports addons vdr-#SECTION#
deb http://packages.medibuntu.org/ intrepid free non-free# /etc/apt/preferences
Package: *
Pin: origin www.hanno.de
Pin-Priority: 1000
Eversince installing Ubuntu about three years ago, XP rots on unused partitions of my computers. Ubuntu has been a pleasure to use and except for occasional gaming, XP has become obsolete – both at the office and at home.
While previous Ubuntu releases have been one solid update after the other, the most recent “stable” release “Intrepid Ibex” has been a bit of a letdown.
They were unlucky with their timing. OpenOffice 3 isn’t included because it was released after Ubuntu’s feature freeze, and some more recent drivers seem to be out-of-date for the same reason:
The WLAN drivers for my shiny new (linux-friendly) Acer Aspire One Netbook don’t work, its graphics driver brings up garbage on the screen when using 3d desktop effects and I was also bitten by the inability to use an external monitor at native resolution – this worked out-of-the-box on the same machine with the previous release.
Ubuntu’s default email client Evolution still sucks with multiple IMAP accounts – no improvement after three years – so still the first thing to do is replace it with Thunderbird. Gnome VFS seems to have become slower with SFTP and its bookmarks don’t appear in the file dialog anymore, which they used to do in the previous release.
This time, I tried Xubuntu und Kubuntu on my Netbook to see how they deal with limited screen estate, but KDE still looks very much like work in progress and XFCE wasn’t really that much better than Gnome as a user interface.
To sum it up: Not much of an improvement, this time. Hoping for the next release.
Tonight Only:
Heike und ich machen unsere eigene Wahlparty und gucken Wag the Dog. Hoffentlich ist der Film in der Videothek noch zu haben.
