Liberty Systems & Software

Just a quick post today - here's a great article from Cory Doctorow on his computing experiences with Ubuntu and Lenovo ThinkPad X series.

The Register has a review of the Ubuntu 11.04 beta release which suggests there are some rocky times for existing Ubuntu users ahead.  The part the article that stuck out to me reads:

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Today we have a guest blog post from my wife Angela.  She is an avid Ubuntu user (in fact, so are our kids) and a great web researcher in general.  She wanted to borrow digital editions of books from our local library; however, the books are only available in the form of digital handcuffs.  So she set herself the task of getting Adobe Digital Editions (DE) working on Ubuntu lucid.  Without further ado, here's her story:...

(I used to love Stan Kelly-Bootle's column in Unix World, so i thought i'd share an experience a little like the ones he used to write about.  Hope some old-timers out there can get into it...)

The task i was working on involved taking a file containing a very large directory listing (about 158 MB) and determining the total size of all the files listed in it.  The file's contents looked like this:

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This is here just so nisshh can check it out...  :-)

I use IRC a lot for asking questions (and hopefully answering some as well) about Free Software projects, particularly Ubuntu-AU.  Most of the time i use IRC from my laptop, which means that every time i shut the lid or disconnect from the wired network and reconnect via wireless, my IRC connection drops out.  This results in disconnect/reconnect messages which inconvenience my fellow users, and sometimes even causes multiple accounts to be logged in.  I've also had a few instances of flaky Internet access causing multiple disconnects/reconnects in qu...

Last week i had my first encounter with a person who was unable to read an email which used Usenet-style quoting.  For those not familiar with the whole debate, which probably started probably before i first encountered the Internet (way back in 1989), the following references offer some insight:

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I have to deal with a lot of different software in my various roles.  Lots of it is good, but there's always the odd software package that makes me want to run ahead of it with a loud, clanging bell, shouting "Unclean! Unclean!"  Here are a few such packages which i've encountered lately:...

I've had a few problems over recent weeks on both Ubuntu karmic (9.10) and lucid (10.04) whereby web pages built on Flash player (such as ABC iView) would display a large error screen proclaiming that Flash player had crashed. I first saw it on my son's ThinkPad X31 which i had upgraded to lucid very shortly after it was released, and assumed that it was just part and parcel of the new release, and that the bug would be fixed shortly....

IT Toolbox has a great little summary of the experiences of Mike Kavis, a guy who's been living Microsoft free in an all Microsoft shop - at work!...