brunier.nl

After my quest for 13 years trying to find the ultimate Linux desktop, I have given up. There’s no Linux desktop environment for Patrick. So I reinstalled my notebook with Windows Vista, 3 months ago, and upgraded to Windows 7, 2 weeks ago. Huh? What? Your kidding? No I’m not. Ooooh. Why?
Just because Windows works best in this field of application.

• Performance: Can’t realy feel the differnce between the two. Ofcourse Windows is sluggish against plain Linux. But what about the eyecandy of KDE, or GNOME. Ofcourse you can choose the run the lightning fast XFCE or WMaker, but than we can have a little talk about functionality.
• Stability: There’s no doubt that a plain Linux is more stable than a plain Windows installation. But….What about that nice new bleeding edge app that you want to run. Your Linux distribution doesn’t support it yet. You might try to ignore the dependency on that new version of GTK and cross your fingers. Or just upgrade your GTK engine and twist your fingers. No matter what option you choose, your stability is at risk. Windows applications just run on Windows. No 100 parallel universes. In case of library conflicts Windows SxS performs better than the rather limited symlink tricks.
• Usability: I had a Nokia E50 and later a E51 for a long time. No descent Linux application that managed to sync my contacts with my computer. I have a Garmin GPS60CSX. Managed to get Garmin MapSource running under Wine. Too bad the baudrate was limited to 9600 baud. I can tell you it takes a while transfering 4 GB of maps to my GPS. Just a few of the many examples.
• Free software: I’m a big free software enthousiast. But I think functionality and usability needs to have the highest priority. Good working free software has the preference. Good working non free software is second. In practice this means I have to buy some pieces of closed source software now and then. Illegal software is a no go. Most useful Linux apps have been ported to Windows.
• Security: A weak point on the Windows side. Years and years people were dependant on crappy virusscanners like Symantec/Norton and McAfee. Microsoft recently released MS Security Essentials. I have to say I’m very positive on that one. But using Windows you still have to look over your shoulders now and then. Keep your system patched, don’t do crazy stuff with Internet Explorer (or better don’t do anything with it).
• Hardware damage: A few months ago, my notebook got a fryed GPU, after doing a kernel upgrade on Ubuntu 9.04. First thought it was just a hardware failure. After getting a replacement GPU, the new GPU started to overheat again. Going away from that specific kernel, fixed the overheating. The problem might reside in the kernel or the Nvidia kernelmodules. I just don’t care. Fact is that it happens on Linux and not in Windows. Bug reports were not picked up. More people frying their notebooks, no reaction from the kernel developers.

Still running Linux on my homeserver. No problems with that. Bought an Android Phone a few weeks ago. No problems with that either. Just not on the desktop.

After getting some MS security patches on my XP box at work a while ago (april 2009) , I encountered problems while starting Oracle JDeveloper. The message I got was: Unable to create an instance of the Java Virtual Machine
A workaround is limiting the maximum heap size of your application to e.g. 512M instead of 1024M. Eventually you’ll run in to trouble while developing larger applications. This also applies to other Java applications such as Tomcat.

After doing some research, I’ve managed to pinpoint the responsible security patch.
KB972260 – http://support.microsoft.com/kb/972260

There is no real fix for this issue. The only one is uninstalling this security fix, and hide it inside Windows Update to prevent that you are getting bothered over and over again. Both Microsoft and Sun have been informed by users, but have not taken any actions.

In addition to the above:
MS has recently released a new IE7 patch. Too bad this patch also breaks Java related stuff. Patch: KB974455

And another one:
KB976325

During my quest finding the perfect GNU/Linux distribution for my daily computing needs during the last 13 years, I have ran into Sabayon Linux. Sabayon 4.2 to be precise. You can get it in two flavours a KDE and a GNOME flavour.
I don’t care about either of those two. I want to use XFCE this time.
Because Sabayon doesn’t come in an XFCE flavour, you’ll have to choose GNOME or KDE to startup with.
I have chosen KDE….but GNOME is fine too.

During installation you’ll have the option to chose the kind of installation. Or KDE (or Gnome on the GNOME DVD), or XBMC, or FluxBox, or blablablabla.
Obviously no XFCE there either…..Because I wanted a clean starting point, I chose to go for the FluxBox installation.
That way I would have a minimal and more important clean installation perfect for installing XFCE later on.
The installation is pretty straight forward. Not very much additional choices that can be made.
After installation the idea of the clean installation went up in flames.
Despite the fact that I chose for the FluxBox installation a lot of KDE stuff was installed.
Ah well….we can uninstall the useless stuff later on, as I did.
Sabayon 4.2 does a good job handling all my notebook’s hardware. Everything is detected and it all works out of the box. No need to install the Nvidia drivers…they are already there and just work. No need to fiddle with my soundchip….it just works. Just install XFCE and you’re ready to go. Thumbs up to Sabayon!

A few things I had to alter to the configuration to get rid of some annoyances:

* System bell/beep
One of the most anoying things while working in the terminal on Linux is the system bell.
Especially if you like to use tab (auto-completion) and you don’t have an exact match.
On Sabayon (not sure if it is Sabayon or my M1330) the beep isn’t a real beep. It’s even more annoying.
It’s some sort of high pitched chicken. Had to get rid of that one….fast.
You can easily achieve that by editing the following items:
- Uncomment the “#set bell-style none” to make it look like “set bell-style none” or if you like “set bell-style visual” in the file /etc/inputrc.
This disables the beep in the consoles after reboot.
- Add “/usr/bin/xset -b b 0″ to some of the possible places for this. Like your X session manager of xinitrc.
- Add “blacklist pcspkr” to the /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist file.
This disables the pcspkr kernel module after a reboot.

* Trackpad
The M1330 has a fairly small trackpad. Sabayon by default has trackpad scrolling enabled on the edges of the pad. I don’t like that. If you want to disable this, open “/etc/hal/fdi/policy/11-x11-synaptics.fdi”. In this file you’ll see four lines that say something about scrolling. Depending on your needs set the ones you don’t like to “false”. I personally disabled all…..what a relief.

Sitting in my garden this morning, recovering from some sort of flu (probably not the swine type). It’s still a little chill outside, but with the sun on me it is very nice. Life is coming back in the garden after the winter. Seen a green frog, some dragonflies, two butterflies, a toad and a dog in the garden. The dog isn’t a rare species in the garden

I recently launched a Dutch RC forum.
It also has a map with airfields, RC clubs, and other fields to launch your airplane.
You can visit it at http://www.wildvliegforum.nl

A quickfix for one annoying Firefox 3 behavior. Since version 3 Firefox has the ability to detect if the networkmanager in Linux is connected to a network. If so, then Firefox will pop in to online mode, otherwise it will go into offline mode.
Very annoying if you’re sitting in the train using wvdial (or any other dialer outside networkmanager) to connect to a 3G network, and have to disable offlline mode over and over again.

This workaround will keep your Firefox in online mode:

1. Type about:config in the addressbar.
2. Search for the setting called toolkit.networkmanager.disable
3. Set its value to true

Your Firefox will not pop into offline mode by itself anymore.