Posted by geetarista June 16, 2006
For anyone looking to change the Firefox and Thunderbird logos in Ubuntu to the way they should be, there is a great tutorial on how to change it.
Try it out, it works perfectly!
Update (6/22/07): This is only necessary for versions earlier than Feisty.
Posted by geetarista June 15, 2006
For a while I’ve had to go the long way to be able to acces my Windows hard drive in Ubuntu because I didn’t know how to mount it with the right permissions. I used to go into sudo at the command line, start Konqueror or Nautilus, and then browse the drive. Ubuntu already sets it up to be able to mount, but you can’t access because of permissions. So I finally found an easy way to change that. At the command line, type this:
sudo gedit /etc/fstab
After it opens, you should see a line somewhere that looks like this:
/dev/hda1 ntfs defaults 0 0
It may not be exactly the same, but look for the line(s) that have “ntfs” in them. Now, replace the “defaults” text and replace it with this:
/dev/hda1 ntfs user,fmask=0000,dmask=0000 0 0
Now you should be able to read the information off your hard drive or partition. Just remember not to try to write to it!
Posted by geetarista June 14, 2006
I’ve been hearing about Picasa Web Albums from Google for a while, and I just saw that they opened it up yesterday. They probably did this to promote their Picasa prgram as well as take some of the thunder away from Flickr. Right now it’s in test mode and only available as a first come, first serve basis. Luckily, I was able to get in right away since I stumbled across it when they just released it.
The format it similar to the regular Picasa in that the colors, layout, etc. are close. It does work pretty fast when moving around but updloading photos took a little while when compared to Flickr. It’s very simple and very easy to use. The only major drawback that I found was that it only accepts JPEG files. I don’t know if that’s because it’s just starting, but I know that will be a big issue for a lot of people who want to use BMP, PNG, GIF, etc. Other than that, it comes with most of the basic features that one would want: RSS, sharing, zooming, rotating, organizing, slideshow, etc.
The albums come with 250MB of free storage to use which is pretty good. If it’s not good enough, you can pay $25 a year and get 6GB of storage. On Flickr, it’s $25 a year but you get 2GB of storage per month!
Overall, I still think Flickr is better, but since it’s still in test mode we’ll have to see how it turns out in the future.
Posted by geetarista June 13, 2006
When it comes to tutorials and books that are basic and simple to use, I think I’ve found the best so far. It’s called Point & Click Linux! written by Robin “Roblimo” Miller. What’s great about this book is that it comes with a copy of the SimplyMEPIS distribution to try out Linux as well as a DVD with video tutorials to make it even simpler to learn. You can even find updates and more videos on the Point & Click Linux homepage. The books main purpose is to help people not too familiar with computers on their move over to Linux, especially if coming from Windows. The style used in the book and movies makes for a great way to start learning the basics of Linux.
Posted by geetarista June 12, 2006
Last night I finally upgraded to the latest version of Ubuntu called Dapper Drake. It’ been out for a little while, but I wanted to have time to sit down and go through everything. I did have a few problems with the upgrade, but none of it was Ubuntu’s fault. I first tried to download the ISO and burn it to DVD so I could have it, but it never worked because the download was bad, probably because of my stupid connection. Then I tried a couple of times to do the upgrade straight from Ubuntu, but because of my connection again, it wasn’t working out. Then last night, I decided to try it again, and everything worked perfectly! I was so excited! The only real problem I ran in to was that my wireless connection wasn’t working when I rebooted. After looking around, I found that when I upgraded, it installed a default driver that was overriding mine. All I had to do, though, was blacklist the driver and everything worked perfectly.
When everything was set up, I was actually really impressed. Before I upgraded, I was thinking that it wasn’t really going to make a difference, but it did. The best part was the startup and shutdown process which seemed to take half the time. There are a few other little improvements that I’ve noticed, but I really haven’t had a whole lot of time to find out what else has changed. But so far, everything works and I’m happy!
Posted by geetarista June 08, 2006
One of the greatest resources that really anyone can use is the public library. I have always been a fan of going to the library, but I’ve only recently found how great it really is. First of all, it’s free–and we all love free stuff. Of course it’s not 100% toatally free, you technically have to pay taxes that fund the library, but that’s only if you check out a book. If you wanted to, you could go in to any library and read any book you like without having to pay a thing. It’s great! Of course, it’s more convenient to take the material home and read at your own leisure.
Everything that I’ve learned about Linux, except for what I’ve found on the internet, has been from books that I’ve read in the library. They aren’t always the newest books, but there are so many that it’s hard to complain. I have found several books that were brand new, however.
The other really great thing about the library is audio books. Now that mp3 players are so popular, it’s so convenient to be able to listen to a book while your driving, exercising, waiting, etc. At first look, I thought that there weren’t that many audio books that I could check outt. However, I went online and realized that most of them were just checked out. I also found that one of my libraries here has over 5,000 audio books!
There are also many resources, references, and other materials that are great to use. One thing I love to go through is the magazine section. A while ago, I realized how much I spent for my subscriptions and that it was too much. After going through all the ads, I would usually find one or two articles that I was really interested in. So, I decided to just start looking at them at the library. Besides, they have just about every magazine there. Other than that, it’s all up to whoever goes to find out all that’s available!
Posted by geetarista June 07, 2006
Yawp! For the last couple of days, I have been dealing with a problem with Windows. Everything has been working perfectly fine for a while, and I got a random error after the computer hangs on the blue “Welcome” screen when trying to log in:
“winlogon.exe” - The instruction at 0×00000000 referenced memory at 0×00000000. The memory could not be written.
I had the option to press “OK” or “Cancel”, but both of them just rebooted the computer to do the same thing. Of course I couldn’t get into Windows to start trying to figure it all out, so I booted up Ubuntu (yeah!) and started scouring the internet. First, I thought it was the Netsky worm because it installs itself in the Windows directory and calls itself winlogon.exe. However, I didn’t find it, so I was sure that wasn’t the problem. I next thought that it was the video card because whenever I tried to load Windows in Safe Mode, it would always hang at agp440.sys. So I disabled that, which did nothing. I couldn’t just wipe out my hard drive and do a fresh install because it’s been so long since I’ve backed up some of my data.
So after spending the last couple of nights staying up and trying to figure this out, I decided to try a repair install. I thought that by doing that I would cause a lot of problems and that it wouldn’t even work, but after it finally finished, everything worked! I just had to install all the Windows updates and SP2, but everything is now back to normal.
Phew!
You know, it’s just times like these that making the switch to Linux just makes me so much happier!
Robby is a web developer that is always trying to stay on the edge.