Friday, September 29, 2006

Edgy Beta 1 thaughts

Yesterday, right when Ubuntu 6.10 edgy eft beta 1 was release (at aproximatly 5 PM) and i downloaded it with high hopes that bug 53910 was fixed because this bug made edgy not boot into the live cd (from knot 3 back). I was happy to see that the bug was fixed and that edgy boot quite quickly into the live cd. The live cd was also very snappy. I first installed it to my portable hd...when i rebooted it worked fine and booted from grub right to edgy beta 1...i was apsolutly amazed because my laptop does not support booting from usb devices...then i decided i would install it on a partition on my laptop. So i dual booted Ubuntu 6.06 dapper and edgy beta 1...edgy looks very pretty but i did not try to install fglrx, xgl and beryl...i will when i have more time to fiddle around with it...one of the first things i did after i installed edgy on my laptop was try to get wireless working...as i have mentioned before i have a problematic wireless card (the broadcom 4318). I have to use ndiswrapper because bcm43xx-fwcutter does not work with my specific card. ndiswrapper is broken in edgy so i was having trouble getting my wireless card working...it is definitly poassable to get working but is problematic. Edgy is not going to be as stable as Dapper but it will be a nice OS over all...it needs some time and some much needed bug fixes....i really want to see DRI out of the box for all GPU's and xgl and beryl right out of the box...maybe edgy+1 or edgy+2. Only time will tell.

Tuesday, September 26, 2006

"Un-invention" : imagine

For english i had to write a small essay on what i would "un-invent" if i had a chance and why. And because i picked a topic that is tech related and that some might find interesting i decided i would share it with you...btw i am sorry i am not blogging more regularily but i have been very busy. I will soon let you readers know what i am doing that is interesting in school. Anyways here is my little essay (note this is not tottaly polished; comments are apreciated).

Un-invention

If i were to un-invent somethings i would un-invent proprietary software vendors like Microsoft and Macintosh because they prevent innovation, spread of computer usage throughout the world, and many other things that Open Source can provide. Proprietary indicates that a party, or proprietor, exercises private ownership, control or use over an item of property, usually to the exclusion of other parties (Proprietary). In the case of software that means the source code. Source code is the computer code that makes up an application. The following statement, “Knowledge belongs to the world” (Anti Trust) raises a point about proprietary software versus open source software. Knowledge should not be kept from the world but distributed freely, proprietary software prevents this. Open Source has many positive effects. One is a very fast development cycle. Ubuntu an open source linux distro that is based on Debian linux has a development cycle of 6 months where as Windows has a development cycle that changes from 2 to 6 years!! The reason open source development is much quicker is because other developers can contribute patches and extra code. Because more than one team of developers are working on the code and that outside sources are contributing you get a more innovative product. Also because open source software is free it allows more people to have computer because they can afford a OS (Operating System) therefore spreading computer usage world wide. Over all if there was no such thing as proprietary software then our world would be a cheaper, faster, nicer computer world.

Tuesday, September 12, 2006

Wow...i haven't blogged for a while!!

Sorry i have not blogged for a while...i started school and have been focusing on getting top-grade marks. I will update this post a little later with info about my Computer Engineering classes and the project i am working on which is a FireFighter Bot.