Linux Hardware Compatibility

Published
by
Albert
on December 1, 2008
in Uncategorized
. 0 Comments

Planet Debian had a post about hardware compatibility with linux, and how every once in awhile, there are regressive errors in new releases that cause things to stop working. Yes, this is a pain, but it comes as no surprise to me. Software is one of those things where each fix may cause another break. That’s why testing is so incredibly important.

Currently there is a kernel oops reporting system, and I believe one for Gnome as well. It would be very nice if in addition to a reporting system for bugs, there was a reporting system for hardware profiles. This would be similar to “popularity-contest”, which sends back data to the debian project about which packages are used. It is an optional program, and I submit this data for all my computers.

While profiles are not complete data, but it might help with the bug reports, and instead of just dumping all the text from hardware profiles, it might be helpful to instead have statistics about who is trying to support what hardware.

Any thoughts to share?

BIG SURPRISE - Adobe Flash for linux x86_64

Published
by
Albert
on November 18, 2008
in Uncategorized
. 0 Comments

This is incredible! Stop the press! Finally the giant hurdle which has caused so many open source 64 bitters grief could finally be over - there IS a light at the end of the tunnel.

Want me to be more specific? Sure, no problem. First, a little history.

Linux on the desktop is still in its infancy, but its been possible for quite some time - say 5 or 10 years for the adventurous. Within the past couple of years, its become attractive, user friendly, and even easy to install. When it comes to the oil and water stuff - like the proprietary binary blobs which cause dedicated kernel hackers to get the willies - Ubuntu has crossed the “picket line” and attempted to make installing unsupported software easier, which makes a practical difference for those who want fast 3D performance (this is changing too though - thanks to some open source drivers in the pipeline).

But anyway, back to Flash. For awhile (even with Macromedia I think) it was possible to use the proprietary Flash installer on linux, but only the 32bit version, not the 64 bit. For reasons unknown to me, the conversion of the plugin from 32 to 64 bit was a serious issue. It was possible to use nspluginwrapper, or Gnash, but I tried both of those with mixed results.

Today, one day after its release, I installed the Adobe Flash Player 10 for 64-bit linux. How’s it work? For me so far its worked fine. Hulu, YouTube, and even the tricky Google Analytics and Google finance charts work! I don’t think that the plugin is open source, but at this point, I don’t mind. I still have to say it: Bravo Adobe, bravo!

Flash Player 10 Prerelease

Related to Flash on Linux

Gnash, Adsense Firefox3 iframes, Analytics

Strip Punctuation with Javascript




Published
by
Albert
on November 13, 2008
in Uncategorized
. 0 Comments

This one had me bugged for awhile… and to be more specific, I also wanted to change spaces to underscores and convert the text to lowercase. Why? For pretty urls of course!

<script type="text/javascript">
function copyValue(field1,field2)
{
  document.getElementById(field2).value=document.getElementById(field1).value.replace(/[ ]+/g,'_').replace(/[\W]+/g,'').toLowerCase();
}
</script>

zip a Window’s file

Published
by
rae
on November 7, 2008
in Uncategorized
. 0 Comments

I’m a mac user for the most part, so when I work on a windows machine some tasks that are routine for me vary ever so slightly, and I’m stumped for a moment on how to do them. Today’s silly stumper was how to zip a file on my boyfriend’s xp machine. It was really easy, but I had to find the right option.

  1. Right click the file you want to compress
  2. Mouse over to the “Send To” option (it’s another drop down menu)
  3. Select the first choice “Compressed (zipped) Folder”

And you’re done it’s that easy, provided you know where to look. The send to drop down was what confused me. I didn’t look there at first because I didn’t think it suited the action I was trying to complete. Just goes to show you check every menu if you don’t see what you’re looking for.

« Older Entries