DISQUS

I like the threaded thing myself.

I can't remember where I first saw Zorbing, but when we decided to go to NZ, I knew I'd have to do it no matter what.

It was raining and cold (well, sort of cold - it's about as cold here today, and this is supposed to be *summer*, whereas it was winter in NZ!)... but I went anyway.

No way I'd fly 10,000 miles and not do it!!!

For anyone in North America, you can find a Zorb park in Tennessee.

That's *awesome* bro - I've never done it myself (had a chance a long time ago and missed it).

I did go Zorbing in New Zealand, which was something I always wanted to do, so I guess I'm doing okay :)

Love the video!

Oops, double checked it is a 965 (my old work laptop was a 950) and some Googling determined that the 965 has been blacklisted in Compiz while they work out some bugs.

If I feel adventurous I'll comment out the line in the config file otherwise I may just wait :)

It has been *very* nice so far. I only have two minor issues on the two machines I use full time (both are Xorg items - you can't run Compiz and a vnc server at the same time, not a big deal for my media box - and on my work laptop, I have an unresolved driver issue preventing Compiz from running at all - weird, it is just a GMA950 and worked in 8.10!)

Much nicer than 8.10 overall though, and I expect both of these issues will go away in a few weeks.

Wow, that is really cool! I haven't seen that before - it should come in handy.

I use this one sometimes:

http://www.lesswatts.org/projects/powertop/

Hey, how did you get the Org Chart for my company?

;)

Will do! I'll probably give it a go tonight and see how it turns out (I bet that it will look almost exactly the same too).

Hey, this is awesome help - thanks for sharing it!

So I had to cave and put Vista back on my wife's laptop (no more 7) - but I left a partition for Ubuntu :) so on the weekend I'll put it on with a Vista theme and Gnomenu - set it all up and see if she likes it!

LOL that's so true... I'm all self-taught, so the first couple of years were "interesting" with my wife getting mad at me every time I broke something on the one computer we had at the time.

Yeah, he's pretty smart :) I did help him a bit, putting Firefox on there and hiding IE, and a few other things.

Maybe a bit too smart / inquisitive... I didn't want to limit him so I gave him full rights to everything. And I guess he started peeking around in the file system and moving stuff until he moved the wrong thing and it started acting up!!!

UUID, that's right - I guess I needed a coffee when I wrote my last comment.

I thought it was kind of weird too. I will say this though, I'm getting used to things working really well with Linux when they don't work anywhere else!

For example - my oldest son's laptop (we gave him my wife's old machine last year) - he is 7, and during his learning he sort of killed Windows XP. No viruses, he just started moving files around and so on!

I decided to put Ubuntu on it a while back - but the CD-ROM had failed. I tried an external CD-ROM, no deal. I also tried putting the live image on a USB stick. Again, it didn't work.

So I took the HDD out and put it in a USB enclosure, then took the HDD out of one of our other laptops so that there wouldn't be any mistakes. I plugged the USB drive into the laptop, installed Ubuntu onto it, and had a look at fstab and menu.lst - I noticed something.

Ubuntu (and I'm not sure what other distros) seem to be very smart these days and are referring to the device by some kind of device ID rather than physical location.

I had a hunch it would work if I put it back into the laptop without editing the files, and I was right - it just booted.

Try that with any other OS!

I may also consider putting a Wubi install on there to see if she would like that. Something I ran across for installing Ubuntu via Wubi on 7 right now:

http://www.clububuntu.com/2009/01/how-to-solve-...

I haven't verified it yet but this claims you need to run Wubi via compatibility mode as Vista or Ubuntu won't show up in the boot loader. I'll let you know how it goes.

:)

At first she didn't notice it wasn't Vista and said she liked the wallpaper! Then when IE8 crashed a couple of times, she realized it was Windows 7 (from the writing at the bottom right of the screen I guess, or maybe she had to restart) - so I just said, "use Firefox!" which I had installed already - and so far, no more complaints.

I quite like it too (I run it in Fusion on my Mac - much quicker than Vista in the VM) and I agree, I think MS has done great things with it. It will be my default VM of choice and as you say, I'll also have it around on bare metal somewhere when it goes gold.

I used K3B back on Slackware and really liked it. I've been using Brasero on Ubuntu so far but will likely put K3B on there as well.

I hope my friend makes the jump - though he said he was successful in reinstalling XP so he may need some "help" moving to the dark side :)

It is probably easier to get young people on it because they won't have the preconceived notions that a lot of adults have. Most of the folks where I work (and perhaps where a lot of people work) just throw up their hands at the first blip, and call IT support...

Kids won't do that. They'll just try and figure it out. Linux gives them the power to do that.

I'll let you in on a little secret ;) I find myself using that Ubuntu laptop (it is an HP 6710b) more often than my Mac sometimes. The HP screen is higher resolution than the Mac, plus I've just been enjoying really learning with Linux again. I did quite a bit with Gentoo and Slackware a few years back, and then got busy (kids) - now with Ubuntu being so popular, what better way to learn than to immerse myself?

And as you say - it just works so much better than Windows. It feels like you can use the whole computer.

I know what you mean about the difference between the communities. Even on OS X, I'm more drawn to those who do the open source stuff exactly for that reason - they want people to join them.

The Ubuntu experiment may yet happen. I had to recently replace the HDD on my wife's laptop, and when I asked what OS she wanted, she just said "Windows". Vista or XP, I asked? "Windows."

So she actually got Windows 7 :) which means I'll have to replace it before August. I'll probably put Vista back on as that's what she is used to now - but maybe Ubuntu will have to go on there too, masquerading as Vista.

I'll keep you posted as to the results of that, and if I think of anything for tutorial ideas I'll let you know.

(A quick one - have you done any on burning software? A friend of mine may convert to Ubuntu this weekend and CD/DVD burning is something he's concerned about before he goes to it.)

It never hurts to be able to know how to do things in an advanced way, so I kept that post of yours for just such a day.

My first *nix file server (back in '03) ran FreeBSD, CLI only and headless - it was a great learning experience and not that hard at all (the FreeBSD manual is amazing). Eventually the hardware failed but the machine was solid 24/7 until then.

Sometimes I'll try out the GUI stuff too just to see if it works, so this time I thought "hey, why not?" and it worked.

Good old Caps Lock - I was going to buy one of those Happy Hacking Keyboards that put Ctrl where Caps Lock is some time ago, and never did - the remap is just as good!

(and that was pretty darned funny... !)

Incidentally... I switched one of the machines because it was running XP and the "Active Desktop" just started randomly crashing - no reason...

(Oh, and the Caps Lock key thing - I did that on Windows too, but it needed a third-party app that made a registry change, and a reboot - a bloody reboot! - to remap a key...)

I've had Firefox crash a couple of times but it doesn't seem to be too often, and with the session restore it doesn't bug me really.

I use Disk Manager for all disk management stuff and that seems to work pretty well for me (I had read your excellent post on mounting NTFS drives but I felt lazy that night and tried Disk Manager instead - no problems so far!)

I hate Caps Lock so I used the Keyboard Preferences to make it an additional Ctrl key :)

-Brett

Great post Randy - I've been using Linux a lot more lately (in the form of Ubuntu myself).

What do I like about Ubuntu? Well, it just works - that's something really neat about it. I first used it back at version 4.10 and it is amazing how far it has come in 4 years.

On the weekend, I decided to add my printer (a networked HP2600N) - it just worked. Today, my Logitech bluetooth mouse (that I use at work) - no problem.

To be honest, my work laptop is more useful running Ubuntu than it is running XP and I could do my job better with Ubuntu (if I were allowed to use it at work).

I admit I like Mac too (I have a Macbook Pro) but I'll be picking up a netbook soon - and it will be running Ubuntu for sure, probably the Netbook Remix.

Just a quick inventory - in my house, there are two servers and four laptops (if I count my work laptop) - the servers run Ubuntu, and two of the laptops run Ubuntu (at least part time in the case of my work laptop). There's my Mac (which has Ubuntu in VMware for testing), and then my wife is still a Windows girl... maybe I should put Ubuntu on there with a Vista theme and Gnomenu and see if she falls for it!

@Valerio,

An idiot who did very well for himself by doing rather than thinking ;)

@Robert,

That's a great tip for Mac users - thanks for sharing :)

(I do use a vision board, but I also "get on with it" more often than I look at it...)

This is the solid kick in the ass that everyone needs. Seriously.

Especially the Eastwood stuff (that guy still scares the crap out of me), I read that interview when it came out and thought, "amen".

I agree with you wholeheartedly, as I had said to you on Twitter.

These "people" (more like animals) could have chosen to use words, but they did not.

So as far as I'm concerned, they do not deserve to have a voice anymore.

They gave up that privilege when they chose to murder innocents.

Man, are you talking right to me today? Started blogging, wow this is fun, then months in, "okay, where is this getting me?"

So I'll keep doing it, for fun only. But my eyes are freshly refocused on the goals, the dreams.

I, too, choose freedom.

Thanks for the reminder - Brett

I, too, nominate Monika at http://www.thewritersmanifesto.com/blog/ - her writing has always struck me as being very, very "real", and always interesting. One of the very first posts of hers that I read continues to inspire me to chase my dreams to this day.