PCLinuxOSPosted by Mike Wed, April 14, 2010 18:34:52If the Twitter link on the PCLinuxOS website is to be relied upon then a new release (Beta or RC?) of my favorite OS is about to be released, from what I am able to workout it would appear to be a RC , hope so, then it will be time to buy the new PC mentioned previously!
PCLinuxOSPosted by Mike Wed, March 17, 2010 18:21:17Now things are really moving forward! I don't know how many beta's there will be before a final RC but at this rate it should be soon, I will probably download this Live CD (see if I have time before Beta3 or RC!) with a bit of luck I should get this working on a secondary disk, as mentioned previously it is fairly certain that I will be buying a new PC in the not to distant future, but I would very much like to see what kind of performance I get on the present PC.
PCLinuxOSPosted by Mike Wed, March 17, 2010 18:07:03Well I decided that enough testing of the 2010 Beta live CD had been carried out and that I would try to install the OS to a secondary hard disk.
All seemed to be going well, no error messages or the like, but when it was time to reboot the problems began, I was unable to access a working version of 2010 and what was even worse was that I could not boot 2009 either!
The installation for some reason had messed up the boot manager (Grub), still don't know if it was something I did or a bug somewhere, anyway I first tried to "repair" the 2010 installation, which I finally got to boot but only as far as the log in page! the messages I was getting lead me to believe that the Live CD or at least the installation of it was corrupt in some way, in the end I had to reinstall Grub to the main (hda1) hard drive to get things working again, so now I am back to square one!
PCLinuxOSPosted by Mike Wed, March 10, 2010 20:50:47The information concerning this major update turned up on the PCLinuxOS website on the 8th March, downloaded the live CD on the 9th, tested it the same evening, he's done it again! worked directly (if a little slow but usable) all hardware discovered correctly, all hardware working correctly.
I dare say that with perhaps a little more memory in the present PC it would be quite usable if installed to the hard drive but I think I will keep this machine at it's present level with KDE3.5 and install the OS on a new PC, seems that there are one or two (reported) serious bugs, the one affecting my decision to not move yet is DigiKam, I will probably wait until the release moves out of beta, which I am certain will be fairly soon.
I really like what I have seen so far, I will be making a more exhaustive test of the live CD in preparation for the hard drive install on a new PC, so keep tuned to this channel.
PCLinuxOSPosted by Mike Thu, March 04, 2010 19:12:15Well things are very quiet at present, the calm before the storm I suppose, no movement at all on the PCLinuxOS site, the 2010 release is imminent, the repositories for the old version are locked, KDE4 will be the standard desktop, from my own personal point of view I will install the new version on my present hardware to see if it is up to the challenge, there seems to be two schools of thought concerning if KDE4 hogs/requires more memory than KDE3.5 I will just have to wait and see, even if it works OK it will probably be a new PC this year, nothing top of the line but it would be nice to test the 2010 OS and KDE4 on a machine that is not a few years old, the present system works really well but it would be nice to see if there is any major speed increase with a new OS/hardware combination.
PCLinuxOSPosted by Mike Fri, February 19, 2010 00:04:11LXDE on an old laptop.
This post is a short description of my experience so far of an installation of LXDE on an old laptop (Compaq Evo N610c).
The original OS on this machine was Windows XP Professional, but with only 256MB of RAM it was not particularly fast or responsive and was only used for one or two DOS applications that I needed to run occasionally, and that I could not run under Linux, the situation changed in that another even older laptop (HP Omnibook 6100) became available for these applications so I decided that I would try to use it for the installation of a lightweight version of my favorite OS (PCLinuxOS), so I downloaded both Xfce and LXDE, first up for installation was Xfce, which installed without a problem, now to be honest I can’t remember exactly why but this installation just wasn’t for me, look and feel just wasn’t in my taste.
Thus it was up to LXDE to show it’s colours, again installation went well, no hiccups and as usual with a PCLinuxOS based distribution no problems with hardware detection, even a new cheap Chinese Sweex model LW053 USB wireless network adapter was detected (as a Ralink), and after configuration worked perfectly.
After the installation was finished it was time to do a bit of configuration of the GUI from the LXDE control center, there is plenty of scope for changing themes, icons, etc so that you can personalize to your own taste, I personally wanted to keep it fairly plain and simple so the GUI looks a bit like a mixture of Windows 98 and XP (if you can imagine that).
Being a lightweight desktop it has lightweight applications! Abiword instead of Open Office Write, I think that this word processor is a bit under-rated, I have started to use it on a regular basis now, all posts on this blog have been written using it, and with the plug-ins available it is a very capable lightweight alternative, it also starts very quickly (less than 3 seconds!).
Gnumeric is the spreadsheet, again very fast start time, browsing the web is catered for in the form of two browsers, Epiphany and Midori, both are fast starters and seem to be OK for general browsing but I had a small problem with the presentation of my Internet banks start page, nothing serious and strangely enough I can’t repeat this but I decided to install Opera instead of Firefox, this works well as my standard browser, slower to start (between 6-8 seconds) than the two default browsers but quicker than Firefox.
Wine has also been installed to allow me to use this PC for Sanscript programming
(see previous post) and also to be able to listen to legally streamed music via Spotify (
http://www.spotify.com) which has no native Linux support at present.
Previously I have installed the standard PCLinuxOS using KDE 3.5 as the desktop environment on older laptops and this has also worked very well indeed, not quite as fast as LXDE but acceptable, now with the discontinuation of KDE 3.5 and the move to KDE 4 it will be up to LXDE and the like to take over, it certainly gives older equipment a new lease of life, and to be honest most people do not require more than a word-processor spreadsheet and web browser for normal everyday use, which shows in the popularity of netbooks nowadays, so to conclude, if you are looking for a lightweight alternative give LXDE a try, you will be pleasantly surprised!
Codeless ProgrammingPosted by Mike Sat, February 13, 2010 19:40:37Now I am fairly certain that not many readers are aware of this programming method, I came across it a few years back when I was still a Windows user (as you will see from the other post on this blog I am now a Linux convert).
Sanscript is a free and rather unique way of programming that is in principal completely codeless, apart from the input of variables and constants everything is done by dragging and dropping functions from so called cabinets onto a work surface, different functions are connected by dragging connecting lines with the mouse to produce the final program, each function icon has normally a number of inputs and outputs that do not allow syntax errors, so although you can produce junk code that does not do anything your code will be syntactically correct!
For me personally it was a bit of a revelation, as stated previously I used to administer a fairly large network and was therefore use to DOS, batch files and the like, I was therefore surprised that Microsoft did not include something like Sanscript when Windows XP came along, as you could almost call it a kind of codeless visual batch files.
But it has more power than normal batch files in that it allows one to use dialogs and to some degree forms as well, although it can of course produce programs with no GUI.
I have been able to make some fairly capable utilities using this “language” one that worked very well for me was a program I called Jotter, it was used for quickly jotting down notes and giving them a time stamp, it used a dialog where the text could be written, once the OK button was clicked it would automatically open a pre-named file, insert the text including a time/date stamp and then automatically save and close the file, this was done in the background so that the file was normally not visible, the next time the program was used it would open the file insert a new empty line and then the new text and time stamp as above so at the end of the day the document would have a nice neat set of notes with each entry timestamped, it certainly saved time and was used on a regular basis at work for keeping tabs on projects.
Another program made using Sanscript was a small program that I called Chord, which was used for simplifying the use of the formula for working out the radius of a circle from it’s chord, this was made to assist machine operators to extract this information from templates sent in by customers where the radius was normally unknown, this information could then be fed into automatic cutting equipment for glass, the program used a form with two input fields, one for the width and the other for the height of the chord taken, on clicking OK the calculation would be done automatically, the result would be rounded off (downwards) and shown in a third field,
now this could have of course been done with a programmable calculator but because the PC was on hand I thought it better to use this method, also no skill was necessary from the operators apart from being able to take accurate measurement on the template.
I think these two examples give you an idea of what can be done with Sanscript, as I mentioned previously I now run Linux only but I have had Wine installed for some time now and therefore I decided to see if I could install Sanscript on a Linux PC, using Wine File Manager I installed the program with absolutely no problems at all! next was to try to run a previous saved Swedish language version of the Chord program mentioned above, which also worked without any problems, (see screen-shot), I then tried using the language for interaction with Linux programs, starting applications, opening files, writing to files etc which all worked fine.
All the functions I have tested so far have worked although I am fairly certain that a small number of functions will not interact correctly with Linux, but it is still a very usable program development environment, pity it was never ported to native Linux, now as mentioned above this programming tool is available free from a company called Northwoods Software, at
http://www.sanscript.net/, the software is no longer being developed and there is no support apart from the forum, you will have to register on their site to be able to access the software, don’t worry, you will not receive spam or the like from this company, just download and install the .exe file as mentioned above (if you are taking the Linux path or follow Northwoods instructions if installing to Windows), give it a try, I think you will be pleasantly surprised, cool software!
TravelPosted by Mike Sat, February 13, 2010 19:30:31Now if you want to “chill out” in Spain I can recommend a really cool place, a small village called Castillejar in Andalusia, situated in the village is the Casa-Britannia, self-catering holiday accommodation owned by a cousin of mine, my wife and I have visited 5 times during the last 4 years and have always had good weather, good food and a good time!
We normally “chill out” by the pool or in the shade with a good book, but for those who like an active holiday there are loads of possibilities, horse riding, mountain biking, trekking etc, the area has some really interesting surroundings, with Europe’s only official desert area on the other side of the main road that runs past the village!
Check out the owners website at:
http://www.casa-britannia.com/casa-britannia.com/Home.html there you will find all the relevant information concerning the area, things to do, places to visit and booking details, there are a lot of photographs from the region, you will probably even notice the “Tree” shown at the top of this blog amongst the images, my picture was taken from another view point and tweaked a little using the Gimp (Linux image manipulation program).
We will probably be visiting again this year if we can sort out cheap flights to Granada (the nearest airport), herein lies the conundrum, from Sweden/Denmark there are no direct flights, but if you want to visit somewhere that is of the beaten track that is a price that has to be paid, you certainly see the real Spain, so get ready for tapas and siesta!
