Rescuing data from a drive

Thanks to goodies from Eric's gadget box, I was able to rescue some files off a 500GB drive with a broken connector. (The drive was otherwise in good condition, as was the data on it.)

Ubuntu on new laptop

Installed Ubuntu 9.04 on my new laptop. Vista promptly stopped working. Repair didn't work. Advanced repair did. Back in business, dual boot. Downloading updates to Ubuntu.

My new laptop computer just arrived! It's a mid-range Dell Studio XPS 13 with great specs.

Oh, cool! My spare mouse has red lights that match the red case of the new laptop.

I must say Vista looks very nice, with its swoopy blue/green background. Had a quick look at Word 2007; didn't take too long to find where most of the bits I use (on the rare occasions that I use Word) are hidden.

New laptop on order

Gave in to the urge to buy a new laptop. Dell XPS 13 in Merlot Red case is on order. (Purple is not available for that model in Australia, alas.)

Computer problems

Computer systems (not mine) have been misbehaving today, starting with the checkout computer at Woolie's (sloooooow); followed by hotel booking website not accepting my credit card and when I phoned, the reservation person said her system wasn't working properly and had to do a manual entry; then the Virgin Blue website declined both my cards (indicating a malfunction on their end).

Windows XP dies on my main computer

A complete switch to Linux may be coming on my main machine: the Windows XP partition won't load, even in Safe Mode. Spent a bit of time trying to get Windows going again, without success. I don't know enough to really be able to solve this problem, and to be honest I'm not createdly motivated to find out. Ubuntu works fine, and I do have a WinXP partition on the Eee PC for the rare occasions when I actually need to use it.

Free the web: boycott IE6

free the web says:

Internet Explorer 6 is holding back the future. IE6 is the bane of every web developer's life. Released in 2001, IE6 fails to even properly support the CSS 1.0 standard from 1996. Supporting IE6 prevents us from using cool new features, standard with up to date browsers. This erodes user-experience for everyone. Additionally, the hacks and workarounds that web designers are forced to use degrades their code, and this limits progress in other areas. Above all it's simply a waste of millions of hours of human potential.

IE7 is better, but still a problem. Encourage people to get a better browser, of which there are several: Firefox, Opera, Safari, and Google Chrome, for example. Or better still, encourage them to switch from Windows to Ubuntu. :-)

Installing Mac OSX on an Eee PC

I haven't done this, nor am I seriously considering doing it (at least not any time soon), but I really like the idea. Installing OSX on an EEE PC 901 or 1000 with an original Apple Install Disk v1.09

Adventures with my Eee - Part 4

Yesterday I bought another Asus Eee, a black 1000H model with Windows XP on it. The store had only one left (on sale). It has 160GB HD, 1GB RAM, wifi 802.11b/g/n, ethernet, 1.3M camera, Bluetooth, 3 USB ports, an SD card slot, microphone and earphone jacks, and an external monitor port (VGA). Full specs on the Asus website for those of you who want all the technical details. It weighs around 1.45 kg and its power adapter is surprisingly lightweight. I promptly downloaded and installed a specialised version of Ubuntu known as eeebuntu. It comes in three versions: Standard (all the usual software that comes with Ubuntu installs with the operating system), NBR (netbook remix) and Basic (minimal software). I chose Standard. The Eee's hard drive came partitioned into two 80GB drives, so I've now got the Eee set up for dual-booting, with 40GB for each operating system and its software, and 80GB for data files accessible by both o/s. I'm still installing application software. The screen is very crisp and clear; the keyboard is reasonably usable for a touch-typist (much more so than the smaller keyboard on the Eee701); the wifi and Bluetooth work with both Windows and Ubuntu; so I’m happy. This will be my main travel machine, and will also act as my Windows computer at home, replacing the older laptop (a Dell Inspiron 510m) that I’ve been using for that purpose; it, in turn, is going to a friend to replace the friend's elderly computer.

Adventures with my Eee - Part 3

Wanting to get the Eee working with my mobile phone as a modem, I bought a USB-to-Bluetooth dongle. (More recent versions of the Eee come with Bluetooth built in.) Lots of internet research and mucking around later, I got it working. Hooray! (I'll come back here later and insert some links to web pages that helped me figure it out.) Unfortunately, after turning off the Eee overnight, upon rebooting this morning I found that Ubuntu doesn't "see" the dongle. So apparently what worked to get it going wasn't persistent. More research needed, but no time right now. Here are two photos of the device I bought. It's one of the smallest ones available. I got mine from the local Tandy store, but they are readily available on eBay and other online shops.

Adventures with my Eee - Part 2

In March I bought an Asus Eee, one of the models with a 7-inch screen. In October I replaced its operating system with a special Eee version of Ubuntu. Here is what its interface looks like. This week I got around to trying to use the 24-inch Dell monitor as a display for the Eee. This turned out to be somewhat more complicated that I had expected. It had worked easily with the Xandros that came with the machine, so I had not been expecting problems. However, if I plugged in the monitor before starting Ubuntu, the display (on the Eee as well as the monitor) went completely berserk. The Eee's display was apparently attempting to fit the monitor's resolution (so most of the display didn't fit into the available area), and the external monitor was completely unreadable, with horizontal lines of colour jumping around. After much mucking around, I found a sequence that works for me:

1. With the video cable (to the external monitor) disconnected, turn on Eee, boot Ubuntu.
2. Connect the video cable to the external monitor.
3. On the Eee, go to Preferences -> Screen Resolution.
4. Click Detect Displays. Set Resolution to 800x600.
5. Click Apply. Answer "yes" to "Keep settings?" External monitor will come on.
6. Close Settings window.

So far I haven't found a way around having to do this each time I try to use the Eee with the external monitor. However, I don't often want to do this, so it's not a big drama and I'm not going to spend a lot of time on finding a better way. The next upgrade of the operating system may change it all anyway... or perhaps I'll try out one of the other flavours of Ubuntu for the Eee. Here's a photo of the Eee running the big monitor.

Ubuntu on the Asus Eee PC

In March I mentioned buying an Asus Eee PC running Xandros Linux. Today I replaced the Xandros with a special Eee version of Ubuntu, the Linux flavour that I run on my main laptop. A member of the Ubuntu Australia group kindly sent me a CD with the operating system on it (so I didn't have to download it), along with instructions for putting the program on a USB stick so I could install it (the Eee doesn't have a CD drive). This involved downloading some small programs and running them, to make the USB stick bootable and unpack the Ubuntu program files. Unfortunately, I couldn't install from my USB stick (it kept giving error messages), and I didn't have a spare one to try, so I used the same instructions to put the files on an SD card and it then installed with no problems. I'm much happier with the Eee now that it has a more familiar (to me) operating system on it, and the screen seems more readable to me, so I'm playing around with it quite a bit more than I did before. I've got an 8GB SD card in it to supplement the 4GB that comes with it. While at a science-fiction convention in Canberra over the weekend, I spotted two people with 7-inch Eee's (the model I have). One was running the supplied Linux, but the other had an alpha of Ubuntu 8.10 on it.

Jean buys an Asus Eee PC

The local computer store is having a sale. We went there today to buy a scanner and came home with a multifunction scanner/copier/colour-inkjet-printer to share, a terabyte USB hard drive for Eric, and an Asus Eee PC for me. It's cute, weighs less than 1kg, runs on Xandros (Linux) and has most of the programs I use every day, like Firefox, Thunderbird, and OOo all set up and ready to go. It's also set up to access Google Docs, Wikipedia, Gmail, and a bunch of other things with one or two clicks. The keyboard is a bit too small for me to comfortable type more than short things like the occasional email, and the screen is very small (but clear and readable). Could be a useful travel machine. In the photos below, picture 3 shows the Asus Eee on the lower left, my Dell XPS M1210 (12.1-inch screen) on the right, and my 24-inch monitor displaying what's running on the Dell. Picture 4 shows the Eee's display mirrored on the big monitor—great for showing something to a group, or for someone with poor eyesight who needs things enlarged a lot. (I am a bit in that category myself; on any high-resolution device, including large-screen computers, I usually need to enlarge the fonts a lot.)

Eric buys a MacBook Air

After resisting temptation for over two months, last week Eric bought a MacBook Air. It arrived today. I must say it's the most elegant computer I've ever seen... as well as being ultra-thin and lightweight. The top photo below is us testing one of the marketing gimmicks from the MacBook Air announcement, where Steve Jobs slides it out of an envelope to show how thin it is. We had to find an American-sized envelope for this to work, as Australian ones (designed for paper of narrower width) didn't quite fit.

Mobile phone as modem

One goal I had for my new mobile phone was to be able to use it as a modem to connect the computer to the internet using Bluetooth under Ubuntu. It was easy to get the phone and the computer to recognise each other's existence, but I was stumped on the next step. So I asked for help on the Australian Ubuntu users' list and several people answered, each giving me a different piece of the puzzle: one helped me get the Bluetooth connection working, one gave me a set of scripts to do the dialing, and one had some other hints and tips to make my life easier. I don't know what age group(s) these guys are in, but I asked them to explain how to do things "like you would explain it to your grandmother" and they did a fine job, even the one who started out talking in incomprehensible (to me) geek-speak. I followed their instructions carefully and on my first test -- IT WORKED! I won't actually use the mobile phone as a modem except as a last resort, because of the costs involved and its slower speed compared to our home broadband connection, though the phone company does have a monthly data plan I can sign up for at times when I expect to be using it a lot (like next year's planned outback expedition).

Ubuntu upgrade to Gutsy (7.10)

I upgraded to Ubuntu 7.10 ("Gutsy Gibbon") last night. OpenOffice.org and Thunderbird both stopped working. Probably not coincidentally, those are the two programs where I had been using versions that I self-installed (because I wanted a more recent one than was in the repository). Spent some time solving those problems. I installed Thunderbird from the repository and it works, so that's good. OpenOffice.org was more of a problem. Previously both my self-installed OOo and the one that came with Ubuntu worked; after the Ubuntu upgrade both versions of OOo crashed continuously and in the same way. A bit of research revealed that many people are having the same problem, but the cures vary a bit. I finally uninstalled both versions of OOo and reinstalled the one from the repository, after which that one worked fine. It's not ideal for my work writing documentation, because the icon set is different from the standard OOo set, but that's of minor importance because someone else is now redoing all the screen captures in a consistent style for the OOoAuthors books. Other than those problems (now solved), everything seems to work okay. I checked things like the DVD player to make sure it hadn't also broken, but it was fine.

More laptop progress

Today I got the DVD player working, using VLC. This involved a bit of mucking around, since some of the necessary software isn't hosted (for legal reasons) on the Ubuntu website. Once I found the (very good) instructions, which included where to find the s/w (on a site called Medibuntu.sos-sts.com, for "Media, Entertainment, and Distractions in Ubuntu"), the rest was easy. Not that I watch DVDs very often, but it's nice to know I can. I had not managed to get the DVD player working under the earlier version of Ubuntu, but that might just be that I didn't put enough effort into finding what I needed (I never found Medibunt before today).

New laptop

I wasn't going to buy a new laptop, really I wasn't. But -- as has happened before -- Dell had a sale of just what I wanted, so I gave in and purchased both a laptop (much smaller than my others) and a new monitor (much larger than my other one). The laptop is an XPS M1210, relatively lightweight but with all sorts of goodies on it, some of which may be more challenging to get working under Linux than others. The monitor is a 24" one with lots of USB and other ports. Later I'll look up the specs or post a link for those of you who want to know all the technical details. I repartitioned the hard drive for dual-boot and a shared partition with Windows, installed Ubuntu 7.04, installed the Nvidia driver for Ubuntu, installed the printer, and got the big monitor working with it (as the main monitor, not a second monitor; it came right up when I installed the Nvidia driver). Most of my data files have been copied over, though there are a few things still to set up (shared Thunderbird files, for example). I'm delighted to report that Ubuntu's installation from the desktop CD has improved with each release, and several things that I previously had to do manually are now handled by the installer -- like enabling the wireless networking (it was detected like the ethernet and just worked, no drama), switching between wireless and ethernet (automatic), mounting the shared drive (no more manual editing of fstab!), and some other things that I forget. It was a good distro for newbies before, but now it's even better -- I feel much more confident now that I can hand a CD to someone (except the totally clueless) and they would be able to install it successfully without assistance.

Another geek point for Jean

Usually when I run into something I don't understand about Linux or computers or other gadgets, I yelp for help, but today I had the time and energy to try to solve a problem on my own—and succeeded! It was, of course, easy to solve, once I figured out a few of the non-obvious (to me) steps along the way. Warning to Windows users: unfamiliar terminology ahead. Eric gave me an old 30GB USB hard drive to use for storing my digital photos. The problem: the drive was formatted for some Mac drive format. Ubuntu could see the drive, and the directory names, but it couldn't do anything with it (even read the contents). Eric said "you'll have to reformat it". "Ummm", said I, "how? I can't see any commands for formatting disks." "Use fdisk", said Eric, who then ducked and ran for cover. Well, I am totally enthusiastic about command-line stuff, so I did some searching on the Ubuntu forums to see if there was another way. Found it: Gparted (Gnome partition editor). Cool! So I installed Gparted, which let me see the partitions on the USB drive but not do anything with it ("Format" was greyed out). Then I looked up Gparted's website and found a note that I had to unmount the partition first. Okay, that makes sense (it never occurred to me, because I haven't done enough mount-unmount type stuff to remember it). I found the menu command for that, after which reformatting was straightforward and easy. Unplugged the drive, plugged it in again; it remounted automatically, and away we go. I copied my whole shared partition onto it, and checked on the other laptop that it could be read (yes).

Farewell to the floppy disk

I recently spent several days doing a boring but necessary chore: copying files off all my old floppy disks before the last computer in the house with a floppy drive finally gives up the ghost (or is given away to charity). Getting the old files onto a CD got a wee bit complicated because the computer with the floppy drive does not have a CD burner, so I have to get the files onto the computer with a CD burner. Turns out the two computers have no means of communication in common, but I have a third computer that can read a CompactFlash (CF) card (which the old computer can write to) and then write to a USB drive, which the new computer (the one that burns CDs) can read. So... copy from floppy to hard drive 1, copy from hard drive 1 to CF card, copy from CF card to hard drive 2, copy from there to USB drive, copy from there to new computer, burn CD. Whew! I thought for awhile I would have to email all the files to myself, just to get them from one computer to another. Mind you, many of these old files probably can't be opened by any programs I now own, so this may be wasted effort in the long run, but OTOH a lot of people have this problem so there probably are programs on the web that will convert from old file formats to modern ones. The photo shows a few of the floppies; I must have thrown out twice that many before I thought of taking a picture of them.