From Ubuntu 9.04 to Fedora 12?

Posted on November 13, 2009 by Bart Westgeest

Logo_fedoralogo

I thought that updating Linux Ubuntu would be quick and easy, but in the end it took me more than a week. After the switch from Ubuntu 9.04 to 9.10 I was stuck with a system that could start and sometimes did let me log in, but only to display the dashboard for a few seconds before showing a ‘loading Ubuntu’ grafic again. Apparently Ubuntu tried to start or restart but it never came out of this loop.
I must admit that I had not anticipated a problem like this so I had to reconsider what to do next. After trying for a day or two in the recovery mode to try to solve the problem I felt that I had to give up in order to move forward. Reluctantly I had to log in to Windows again after not using it for almost a year. So the ever-so-slow Windows had to update a lot as well as the anti-virus system, firefox etc. But after that I was able to browse and download a program that made it possible to access the linux partition to save my data. The windows partition wasn’t big enough unfortunately so I had to create some space once in a while before being able to transfer all files.
I reinstalled 9.04 from the live cd but for some reason I couldn’t install the Adobe flash player.

As I didn’t like having to return to 9.04 without knowing if I could upgrade to 9.10 in the future, and since I had to make a clean install anyway, I decided to try another Linux distribution that perhaps could give me a similar version as Ubuntu 9.10. OpenSuse seemed to be an option or Fedora. Both were about to be upgraded to a newer version within a week or two, but I didn’t want to wait for that and have to rebuild my Ubuntu system for those two weeks. Somewhere I read that Fedora might work better with some hardware so I tried to find out how to install Fedora as there seemed to be 5 cd’s needed for an install. I had however Fedora 9 on a live cd so I installed that, updated all and from within the system upgraded to Fedora 10. That didn’t work however as the computer never managed to go through the entire upgrade cycle of Fedora 10. So I burned a Fedora 11 live cd and installed that and to my joy that worked well, Flash could be activated and it runs perfectly.
Actually, for some reason Fedora is the most quiet Operating System I tried so far. There is an enormous difference in noise coming from the computer when running Windows or Fedora, the first being practically constantly irritating noisy  and the latter being almost completely silent.
Fedora also offers and installs the latest software, including beta versions where as Ubuntu can be many versions behind.
Fedora 12, the latest version, will be released in a week or so. I will wait a few weeks before updating I suppose and then hope for the best.

And I am not sure if I dare to update my Notebook from Ubuntu 9.04 to 9.10.

Update 29-11-2009: It was unfortunately also not possible to install Fedora 12. As far as I can find out it has to do with the boot-memory being to small. This might be the problem for both Ubuntu and Fedora. Anyway, I gave up.  For now I’ll run Fedora 11 until the next versions of Fedora or Ubuntu will be released, because  who knows….

But the good news is that my Notebook did update without a problem to Ubuntu 9.10!

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Vim – The keyboard text editor.

Posted on October 25, 2009 by Bart Westgeest

Vim is a well elaborated editor for many platforms including Windows, Linux and Mac, with a speciality: You can do all the work in the editor without letting your fingers leave the keyboard.  So you don’t need a mouse for example in order to find, select or replace text or do many other tasks, including complicated ones. This should speed up your text editing considerably.

It does require however that the user gets used to the various commands and knows how to use them quickly and without thinking.  Some practising is therefore needed. All commands can be looked up in the extensive help sections that can be reached by for example typing “:help” or one can spend some time at the extensive Vim Tips wiki pages.

“What Is Vim?

Vim is a highly configurable text editor built to enable efficient text editing. It is an improved version of the vi editor distributed with most UNIX systems.

Vim is often called a “programmer’s editor,” and so useful for programming that many consider it an entire IDE. It’s not just for programmers, though. Vim is perfect for all kinds of text editing, from composing email to editing configuration files.

(…) Vim can be configured to work in a very simple (Notepad-like) way, called evim or Easy Vim.

What Vim Is Not?

Vim isn’t an editor designed to hold its users’ hands. It is a tool, the use of which must be learned.

Vim isn’t a word processor. Although it can display text with various forms of highlighting and formatting, it isn’t there to provide WYSIWYG editing of typeset documents. (It is great for editing TeX, though.)”

www.vim.org

Vim uses different modes that are used to perform different groups of actions. For example the “Insert mode” is for typing text and the default “Normal mode“ is for all the numerous commands you can use to read, edit and search a text. One can switch to the different modes by pressing a key. Commands are given by typing a letter or a number or combinations of letters and numbers. Besides the usual commands like for example save or close (triggered by typing :w and :q) there are also more complicated commands like “select 5 words from cursor position”, “Replace this line” , “move cursor up” or “find and replace”.

In this way Vim makes it possible to quickly perform all actions directly from your keyboard, and as no space is needed on a menubar these actions can be many.

Besides the normal undo/redo possibilities Vim can also show a document as it was at a certain time interval, both backwards and forward (using the “:earlier” and “:later” commands).

Vim’s features can be furthermore extended with plugins.

GVim Is a graphical Vim version (see screenshot). Vim also runs in Linux in the terminal by typing “vim” <enter>.

Here is a link to a 6kb small text file explaining what Vim is. (It is also available in many other languages)

“Vim’s License

Vim is charityware. Its license is GPL-compatible, so it’s distributed freely, but we ask that if you find it useful you make a donation to help children in Uganda through the ICCF. The full license text can be found in the documentation. More information about charityware on Charity-ware.org. ”

www.vim.org
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Three Web Operating Systems (WebOS) to create your online office

Posted on October 21, 2009 by Bart Westgeest

Besides working with online word processors such as Zoho Writer or Google Docs one can also work on a complete desktop environment online. These are the so called Web Operating Systems. One can argue about the usefulness of environments like that as you already have an excellent operating system on your computer, but there are benefits like having “the whole computer” online and thus always with you, easy collaborating and a concentrated, distraction free, workspace.I found three that seem very interesting, but unfortunately only one works well on my computer.

EyeOS

eyeos is the Open Source Cloud Computing’s Web Desktop. However, eyeos can be useful to you in different ways depending on your needs.

EyeOS can run on your local computer, a local server or you can create an account and run it on their free server eyeos.info. It can therefore be used by schools or companies as an intranet or you can use it privately or with friends.

Out of the three webOS this one works best for me at the moment.  Here you have everything you need to create your own office on the web, there is a pop3/imap email application, plenty of space for  word documents on its servers, a feedreader, calender, spreadsheets, internal messaging, an ftp client etc.

It furthermore has a text editor and a good word processor based upon OpenOffice.org Writer (version 2.4 at the moment). A new word processor with extensive collaborating tools is on the way.

The new EyeOS 2.0 will be released on the 1st. of January 2010, many screenshots of the new applications are already available on the EyeOS blog.

Its Word Application looks promising, with an emphasis on collaborating. You can read all about it in this EyeOS Blog post and here is a screenshot:

Cloudo Beta

With Cloudo, every computer, in school, at work, at your friends’ or even in the library becomes your own, free of charge computer. And with Cloudo Mobile your online computer is accessible from your mobile phone as well.

Use Cloudo as your default computer, or use it side by side with your work or home computer.

When logging in there is a clear warning: ” Please Note - Cloudo is still far from being ready for prime time”. Users are invited to try out the beta version for a limited time

It already looks beautiful however, but it is indeed not very functional yet. There is an application called Word that probably one day will be the word processor, but at the moment it actually is a text editor. There is for example no option to change the colour of the selected text or to insert a picture.

There is a application called Textpad, which must be the text editor, as the default courier-font also seems to hint. Here I can change the colour of the text, but only of all text. No support for pictures either.

It does have a functioning email application with your own address username@cloudo.com and for example a feedreader, calender and contact manager.. Cloudo is an open platform made to make it possible to add or even develop your own applications.

And by the way… I think that clock is just perfect.

icloud

icloud doesn’t start in my Firefox browser but it is also clearly stated on the icloud homepage that Firefox is at the moment only supported in an early alpha state. So I have to be patient.

I opened it briefly on another computer in windows with Internet explorer (see screenshot), but I wait with a more thorough look at it until I can open it on mine. One of the benefits of a WebOS is that it can run on different Operation Systems, so I suppose they will soon update the Firefox handling.

It looks very promising though, see for example this page with its features explained.

There is an application called Write and I read that they provide an email account as well: username@icloud.com. It offers 3GB of webspace.

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AbiWord – First Impressions

Posted on October 18, 2009 by Bart Westgeest

AbiWord is a free word processing program similar to Microsoft® Word. It is suitable for a wide variety of word processing tasks.

Not being used to AbiWord I opened the word processor and started writing down what came to my mind. I was using version 2.6.6 as provided by Linux/Ubuntu, but followed the instructions on the Abiword.com pages to upgrade to the stable 2.6.8 version. There is however already a version 2.7.8.

First things I notice in AbiWord:

  • The nice clear big buttons, good friendly layout.
  • It loads quickly.
  • When I started using AbiWord the last letter typed appeared half finished. I first thought that it was a nice feature, but when all the letters disappeared half when I let the cursor run backwards over them I understood that it was not meant to be. Disabling Compiz on My Linux/Ubuntu fixed the “problem”. Pitty because I liked the half finished last letter.
  • The arrow in front of the sentence that makes it possible to select the whole sentence with one click.
  • Besides the well known red spell check there is also by default a green grammar checking. I am not sure how it exactly works and if I can use it, but I want it in my “perfect word processor” so I am interested.
  • In the menubar there is an option called collaborate. Sounds interesting, but the help section doesn’t exist unfortunately and only Jabber is available through the pop-up menu. This article from Linutop.com tells more about this feature.
  • It uses by default Konquerer or Epiphany as the browser on my computer to display the help files.
  • There doesn’t seem to be an easy way to edit a toolbar.
  • Mail merge is the term used to print copies of a file, each with a new entry in a data field. Used for example when printing invitations to a list of people where each copy is addressed to a different person.
  • “Revisions”  is very interesting, it is a good way to edit a document of somebody else. It is not so user freindly friendly to have to right click and point/click accept or reject for every single revision, but it works.
  • “Maintain full history” mode makes revision sets every time the document is saved, so one automatically can recreate a new document with a previous version of the current document.
  • ‘AbiWord cannot export Microsoft Word documents at the moment; you should use RTF for sending files to people who use Word.’
  • Plugins can be installed from within the word processor but only if you know the name. A list of plugins can be found on the Abiword homepage and in order to download them one is directed to the download page. There is a section for Linux (which I use) but unfortunately there is no possibility to download any plugins (if needed btw, as many are installed by default).
  • I played around to discover the table features, it worked well, but it doesn’t completely show up after copy/pasting it to this blog post:

Here is a link from magazine.redhat.com with a somewhat older but extensive interview with the developers of AbiWord.

I easily got used to AbiWord and I like the fact that it loads quick. It is a nice alternative in between a text editor and a more complete word processor as for example OpenOffice.org Writer.

See this article for a comparison between AbiWord and OpenOffice.org Writer.

Here is the link to the AbiWord information page.

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Yalm Magazine compared Abiword with OpenOffice.org Writer

Posted on October 13, 2009 by Bart Westgeest

There is a nice article in the German Linux-orientated Yalm Magazine about Abiword and OpenOffice.org Writer. Both Wordprocessors function flawlessly under Windows as well so the article might be interesting for many readers. It is in German however but since it is published under the admirable Creative Commons license I take the liberty to tell about it here in English.

The article can be found in Yalm Magazine 06/2009 - here is a link to the pdf.

First of all the writer (Ralf Hersel – rhersel@yalmagazine.org) urges to say that he by no means pretends to have written a conclusive and final verdict. It is his personal interpretation based upon a more or less random observation, of course.

He had a look at Abiword version 2.6.6 and OpenOffice.org writer version 3.0.1 on Ubuntu 9.04.

The article is written in a nice and easy way, giving a score for each task or feature that he had a look at. In order to test the abilities he used a letter that he recreated in each of the two word processors. That is a simple and good test that I will certainly reproduce in my reviews.

Remarkable enough he “lets” Abiword be the winner of his small comparison, even though he concludes that in his test they end up equally interesting and that he could have continued giving points for a long time.

Here are the points he gave:

Abiword OO.org Writer
Load time 1
First visual impression 2 1
Changing the default font 1
Help documentation 1
Creating a header in the test letter 1
Creating a table 1 1
Creation of a numbered list (layout) 1
Creation of a numbered list (numbering) 1
Alignment 1
Saving the Document 1 1
Selecting text for more than 1 page 1

Total  :

 8 7

Ralf concludes by writing that he realizes that the result of his comparison might be surprising to some, as OpenOffice.org Writer is the more complete product of the two. But on a day-to-day basis Abiword can stand a comparison as it is easy to use and loads fast.

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A list of text applications that can be found in Linux Ubuntu – Part 3

Posted on October 7, 2009 by Bart Westgeest

In part 1 of this series of 3 posts I wrote about what text editing applications I can install on my computer using the options available under Linux Ubuntu 9.04.

I listed the text editing software available that can be found when clicking on

“Applications” -> “Add/remove” -> “Office”

Click here if you want to visit post 1 of these three about Ubuntu software.

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In part 2 I looked at the software found under “Applications” -> “Add/remove” -> “Accessories”.

Concentrating on the text-editing software I found 1 journal or diary and 11 different text editors and some other versions of them.

Click here if you want to visit part 2

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In this part 3 of the 3 posts about Ubuntu software I will look at programs that can be found under “Applications” -> “Add/remove” -> “Internet”.

I found 5 editors made for creating a post to a blog and 1 program that makes it able to work collaboratively on documents.

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At first sight I wasn’t too impressed with the post-to-blog editors, the reason being that it is difficult to access all possibilities of a blogging platform.

I personally use Scribefire occasionally, a browser plugin.

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I again copy/pasted the text that is given for each program and took a screenshot of the programs as they appeared on my screen.

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Blog Editors:

Blog Entry Poster

gnome-blog is a panel object (aka applet) that can post to weblogs using bloggerAPI, advogato API, MetaWeblog API or LiveJournal API

It notably works with Blogger.com / Blogspot.com, Advogato.org, Movable Type, WordPress, LiveJournal.com and Pybloxsom.

Homepage: http://www.gnome.org/~seth/gnome-blog/

A simple blog posting editor that makes it possible to post text and pictures (if supported) to a blog. It worked well for me on a blogger blog.

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BloGTK Weblog Client

BloGTK is a weblogging client that allows users to post to their blogs without the need for a web browser. It features the following:

* Connects with blogging systems like Blogger, Movable Type, as well

as any system that uses the MetaWeblog API.

* Supports advanced editing of posts including custom HTML tags and

offline post saving and editing.

* Supports basic HTTP proxies.

Homepage: http://blogtk.sourceforge.net/

It didn’t start properly on my computer. It looks good on the homepage though.

Drivel Journal Editor

Drivel is a GNOME client for working with online journals, also known as weblogs or blogs. It retains an elegant design while supporting LiveJournal, Blogger, MovableType, Advogato, and Atom journals, as well as derivatives such as WordPress and Drupal.

It allows you to perform most functions that are supported by the server (posting, friends editing, friend page checking, post editing etc). It is designed to utilize the new features of GNOME 2.0 including GConf and GTK 2.0.

It posted to the same old blogger blog. It doesn’t have too many features either, so I suppose one should use also this one for simple blog posts.

Link to the homepage: http://dropline.net/past-projects/drivel-blog-editor/

Kblogger

KBlogger is a simple to use blogging application for KDE 4. It provides for a fast and easy blogging experience with a user-friendly interface that attempts to provide all features supported on the server side for your convenience. Just configure your blog, load the editor, and start writing.

Blog to any blog supporting the Blogger 1.0, MetaWeblog API, MovableType API, as well as the GData API (WordPress, Drupal, LiveJournal, and Blogspot). It features a profile manager, media manager, KWallet integration, KDE proxy support, a rich-text editor, and it allows you to write your posts offline and upload them when you are ready.

Homepage: http://kblogger.pwsp.net/

At the first start it prompted me to install Kwallet. I chose “cancel” and came to the actual editor. In order to start using it however I need to create a profile installed in KWallet. This is probably a good security measurement. I choose therefore to install KWallet after all but unfortunately the program crashed after that. Note that this must be due to my setup.

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LogJam

LogJam is a GUI client for LiveJournal.com and sites based on LiveJournal. It lets you post, edit old entries, manage your friends, save your journal to a local offline copy, and whatever other useful LiveJournal-related features we can think of

Homepage: http://logjam.danga.com

A link to a screenshot-tour: http://logjam.danga.com/tour/

Collaborative Editor:

Gobby Collaborative Editor

Gobby is an editor which allows to edit text documents and source files collaboratively over a network. All users could work on the file simultaneously without the need to lock it. The parts the various users write are highlighted in different colours and it supports syntax highlighting of various programming and markup languages. A chat window is also included.

Gobby is portable to both Windows and Unix-like platforms and makes use of the Gtk+ toolkit. A dedicated server is available in the sobby package.

Homepage: http://gobby.0×539.de

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Click here if you want to visit post 1 of these three about Ubuntu software.

Click here if you want to visit part 2

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