Saturday, December 14, 2013

Chagned Laptop OS to Sabayon

I've been thinking for a while to change distributions, Ubuntu has served me well for years, but I wanted something new.  I thought of OpenSuSe, but that's also a yearly, or by-yearly release.  This time I wanted to move to a rolling release, bleeding edge ASAP.  Kinda liked the idea.  So, now the question, which distribution, Archlinux comes to mind.  But I wanted something in between, bleeding edge, and a bit more user friendly, I'm lazy what can I say.  Ended up choosing Sabayon, sounded good, and the install went smoothly.  First boot, setup wireless, and then run the updates, now there I did something wrong, and puff the system wasn't booting to KDE anymore.  Had to connect to my router directly via network cable, bummer I know.  Then logged in to terminal and was able to run the update commands.  And now I am using the system again.  Still have a few apps that I need, like virtualbox, mount my NAS, and so on, but those are small details.  The system is stable and running, and I am enjoying it so far.  As a matter of fact, browsing is faster, I can't figure out why so far, or maybe it just feels faster???

Saturday, December 7, 2013

Ubuntu 12.04 LTS on an Asus E1-522

This weekend I had the fun of installing Ubuntu on this machine, well it wasn't easy. UEFI wasn't fun, had to switch to legacy. And save yourself a headache do the install with network connection, enabling the option of upgrade while installing. The ATI radeon 8830 can be tricky, the version that comes with LTS is a beta version, which will be upgraded after the first boot. The system still runs into errors here and there but it works. Shutdown doesn't work properly, some KVM errors can be fixed that show up on boot, every fix can be found on Google. The machine is OK specially for it's price.

Tuesday, November 26, 2013

Prestigio multipad 7

I've had the tablet for almost a month.  So far I like it. Fits my needs and doesn't break the bank.  No fancy Samsung, Nexus, or Apple tablet, but doesn't look cheap either. I managed to make it freez a couple of times but for this price  I didn't expect more.  If you are thinking of getting a cheaper tablet, think about your needs and uses, do you really need 3G, GPS, and more than 16GB of storage built in.

Sunday, November 3, 2013

New tablet

I've owned a tablet for the last two years.  Back then I was stuck between choosing an iPad or an Android one.  Financial reasons led me to chose Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 instead an iPad, and I did not regret it.  Though time passed by and now I've learned from past experience what I really use a tab for and what not.  Now this is my personal experience, may be different from yours. 
What I use the tab for:
- Reading
Articles
News
Emails
Blogs
What I didn't use it for:
Mobile internet, basically at home or work I had WiFi' if I really need to I could share the Internet via my phone.
Navigation or GPS
Games
This makes me think, why buy equipment that you won't use? I mean the 3G modem can be useful but GPS, navigate in the car with an 10.1 inch tablet?
I finally decided to get another tablet, this time a non brand.  Basically a Chinese brand called Prestigio, no extra stuff like sensors, GPS, or huge storage. My plan is to use it more often than my, now considered heavy Galaxy TAB, true the new tab is 7 inch, it's perfect for reading, and I hope blogging as well.  I wrote this entire post on the small tablet.  And I plan to keep this up.

Saturday, June 1, 2013

Switched from Gnome, to KDE

Been using Gnome for the past 4 years at least, but I decided to switch to KDE after trying it again.  I seem to recall that KDE wasn't stable enough.  I must have tried it when v3 was having stability problems, and then v4 was in between as well.  Lately, I switched to the latest that comes with Ubuntu 13.04 and I like it more.  It get more tweaking, and it's pretty stable.
Gnome has become too minimalistic to my taste, although I like the approach, but too much tweaking was needed to customize it to my taste.
I also like digiKam application, it's way better than shotwell.  It's got a two pane comparison window when editing images, that is an excellent feature.  I do feel that shotwell is faster a bit, but I can live with the slowness for those options.

Tuesday, April 2, 2013

Flash nightmare Kubuntu 12.10

I tried to install Kubuntu for an elder couple, mainly they use it for surfing, youtube, email. I've installed linux on so many older systems, and never had a problem getting flash player to work until now. I started with the LTS version 12.04. Removed, installed and re-installed flash with no luck. Then I decide to go to the latest version 12.10, re-installing flash, and gnash etc... no luck.  Still fighting against the machine.  Funny thing is I've been using Ubuntu for over 10 years now, I've had headaches, with flash and a few inconveniences but this time it is annoying.