Recently I read an interesting article by Vint Cerf, mostly known as the man behind the TCP/IP protocol that underpins modern Internet communication, where he brought up a very scary problem with everything going digital. I’ll quote from the article (Cerf sees a problem: Today’s digital data could be gone tomorrow – posted June 4, 2013) to explain:
One of the computer scientists who turned on the Internet in 1983, Vinton Cerf, is concerned that much of the data created since then, and for years still to come, will be lost to time.
Ever wanted your computer to be on when you need it but automatically put itself to sleep (suspended) when you don’t? Or maybe you just wanted to create a really elaborate alarm clock?
I stumbled across this very useful command a while back but only recently created a script that I now run to control when my computer is suspended and when it is awake.
#!/bin/sh t=`date –date “17:00” +%s` sudo /bin/true sudo rtcwake -u -t $t -m on & sleep 2 sudo pm-suspend This creates a variable, t above, with an assigned time and then runs the command rtcwake to tell the computer to automatically wake itself up at that time.
I recently re-built an older PC from a laundry list of Frankenstein parts. However before installing anything to the hard drive I found I wanted to check it for physical errors and problems as I couldn’t remember why I wasn’t using this particular drive in any of my other systems.
From an Ubuntu 12.04 live CD I used GParted to to delete the old partition on the drive. This let me start from a clean slate.
There has been quite a bit of activity on The Linux Experiment over the past little while. Check out the site here or quickly jump to the post that I wrote below.
Big distributions, little RAM 3 How do the ‘big time’ distributions handle on constrained hardware? Take a look.
How to install sun-java6-jdk and Netbeans in Ubuntu 11.10 A simple process to install the official SunOracle Java JDK and Netbeans IDE in the latest Ubuntu.
In case you somehow found your way here and haven’t already seen them over at The Linux Experiment, I have put up two new posts that deal with fixes for your linux desktop.
Two monitors. Different resolutions. One desktop. If you’ve ever wondered how to use two monitors with different resolutions as a single, unified, extended desktop I highly suggest you do a quick read of this post. I’ve covered how to avoid, and fix, the ‘dead space’ issue where application windows can get lost because of the difference is vertical resolutions.
As sort of follow-up-in-spirit to my older post I decided to share a really straight forward way to use Objective-C to build GTK+ applications.
Objective-what?
Objective-C is an improvement to the iconic C programming language that remains backwards compatible while adding many new and interesting features. Chief among these additions is syntax for real objects (and thus object-oriented programming). Popularized by NeXT and eventually Apple, Objective-C is most commonly seen in development for Apple OSX and iOS based platforms.
These posts were originally featured on The Linux Experiment
One week, three distributions (Day 0) With the recent releases of Linux Mint Debian Edition, Ubuntu and Kubuntu 10.10 I am once again starting to feel that need to hop around and try something new out. …I’ve set myself up a little experiment of sorts: try each distribution for two days each and on the 7th day choose the best from among the three.
Windows?? *GASP!*
Sometimes you just have to compile Windows programs from the comfort of your Linux install. This is a relatively simple process that basically requires you to only install the following (Ubuntu) packages:
To compile 32-bit programs
mingw32 (swap out for gcc-mingw32 if you need 64-bit support) mingw32-binutils mingw32-runtime Additionally for 64-bit programs (*PLEASE SEE NOTE)
mingw-w64 gcc-mingw32 Once you have those packages you just need to swap out “gcc” in your normal compile commands with either “i586-mingw32msvc-gcc” (for 32-bit) or “amd64-mingw32msvc-gcc” (for 64-bit).
After a little bit of pressure from the people responding to my previous post (My search for the best KDE Linux distribution), I have finally given in and tried out Chakra. The Chakra Project starts with Arch Linux as a base but, instead of forcing you to build your own distro piece of piece, Chakra comes more or less pre-packaged.
Installation
The installation was one of the best I’ve ever seen.
As some of you already know, I am a big fan of the KDE desktop environment (or KDE Workspaces or whatever they’re calling it these days). In my search to reach Linux KDE perfection I have tested out a number of different distributions. First there was Fedora, which I happily ran throughout the length of the experiment. Once that was finished I attempted to install and try both Kubuntu and openSUSE.
