Posted by: Paul Nanouk
on February 15 2010
Having been around the UNIX world since the late 70's (UCB BSD ancillary member), seeing it grow, fracture, lay dormant for several years, get beat in the market place by Windows and Macintosh (pre-OSX), and then finally seeing it take its rightful place in an ever increasing complex world of computing, I am reminded of the once simple concept of the USB BSD development philosophy:
"Simplicity is better than complexity if the latter prevents completion."
Posted by: Nicolas Juneau
on February 10 2010
How old is your computer? One year old? 2 years old? Or more? Mine must be about 4 now... Time to throw it up?
Posted by: Brett Marshall
on January 13 2010
Tagged in: Untagged
Install a minimal ubuntu system with the mini.iso.
You can get the image from https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Installation/MinimalCD.
Choose the release you want and the architecture appropriate for your machine.
If in doubt, get the 8.04 hardy for i386 (this is the LTS release for standard x86 machines).
At the boot prompt, type cli and hit enter.
This will install a minimal, command line only system.
No graphical packages will be installed and we avoid the gnome dependencies.
One caveat I encountered is that the installer succeeded in autoconfiguring my Intel Pro Wireless card,
but only offered WEP encryption support. Since my router is WPA encrypted, I had to temporarily disable wireless security (or use WEP).
(Once the system is installed and wpa_supplicant added, I reactivated WPA encryption.)
When the system install is completed and the initial boot is done you should be presented with a login in the terminal.
Login with your username and password, update apt repositories and upgrade packages with:
$ sudo aptitude update
$ sudo aptitude safe-upgrade
$ sudo aptitude full-upgrade
then install a minimal graphical environment with:
Posted by: oddchild
on December 17 2009
Tagged in: Untagged
I have been helping out at a computer lab in Neba, which is a small suburb of Beirut. The majority of the people that live there are foreigners from Syria, Egypt, and other Middle Eastern countries.
Posted by: Slash
on December 11 2009
Tagged in: Untagged
Even though gnome-shell is really only a preview of what is to come for gnome 3.0 and it's still buggy and sometimes not completely stable perhaps, I really like it.
When I first saw the screenshots I was less then impressed, I thought it didn't at all look like anything new or innovative, but rather messy and confusing. But me being ever interested in new things and all I just had to give it a try (the gnome-panel look was starting to bore me).
Installing was easy
sudo apt-get install gnome-shell
and starting it afterwards was easy too
gnome-shell -r
Though first I had to disable compiz, which I don't really use anyway.
I was also using avant-window-navigator, which disappeared on me but still kept part of my notification area to itself. So the time after that I first closed AWN and all was as it should be.
I didn't feel like having to manually start gnome-shell every time I logged in so I started looking into a way to replace metacity and gnome-panel with gnome-shell and found that this could be done by editing you gconf (with, for example, gconf-editor) and setting the /desktop/gnome/session/required_components/windowmanager key from metacity to gnome-shell.
Of course, since it is a composited window manager you need a video card and driver that can handle screen compositing.
Posted by: Ross Larson
on September 04 2009
Tagged in: Untagged
Some Linux distributions put a lot of time into making sure that their default desktop looks pretty. Others do not. Either way, you don't have to settle for the included artwork in a distribution! Plenty of options exist on the Internet to find more icons and backgrounds for your computer. Here, I will focus on finding Linux specific content, as well as how to participate in the online community of artwork content creation.
Linux Community 
