The total myth of Windows ease of use

Over the years I have heard from many people how easy it is to use Windows and how complex Linux can be , and that you always have to spend most of your life at the command line.

Well just look at this post on how to install Windows 7 onto a USB pen drive.

Windows 7 onto a USB drive

It is laughable the stages and processes you have to go through to achieve this goal on Windows, using the command line like it is going out of fashion. Admittedly to to anyone who is technically savvy this is not rocket science, but I think it would blow most Joe six packs into the weeds.

In Ubuntu , you click on a very simple and extremely useful Utility , and install as many Linux distro's as your heart desires.

Ubuntu USB drive creator

If you would like to go further and have multi-boot USB pen drives then you can just download and use another great Linux USB creation tool - unetbootin

No, anyone who says that Linux is more complex than Windows either has not used a modern Linux, and is therefore talking from lack of real update experience, or they are so blinkered that no matter how complex the task is on Windows, they just can't be objective. I use Windows, and it does some things well, but modern Linux is just more useful, in more situations, more often.

Just download Ubuntu 9.04 and see for yourself - Ubuntu 9.04

10 Free Linux Ebooks

The guys over at LinuxHaxor have put together a great list of free ebooks for Linux. Now I have not read all of them, but at least three of these books I have read, and they are of good quality and offer something to all levels of Linux user, so I can recommend them.

Just go to this link and see for yourself.

10 free Linux Ebooks

Ubuntu 9.04 on a flash disk on my Asus 1000

I have to do a lot of testing on my Asus for the latest releases of Eeebuntu, and at the moment I needed to test the latest netbook specific kernel from array.org, which has been reworked for the netbook format.

One of the nice features of Ubuntu 9.04 is the way you can easily install it onto a flash drive in your netbook, and the ease with which you can create a live USB drive.

Well as normal this was very straight forward, and this post is coming from that installation with the new kernel installed. It offers many advantages, but one of the key ones is improvements in the touchpad.

I have also installed the latest build of the Chromium browser as I feel that once this has been fully developed it will work very well on the netbook format , as it has a real performance advantage.

So if you would like to try ubuntu 9.04 on your netbook, there has never been a better time to try it out, just follow these easy steps:
1) Download the Ubuntu 9.04 iso and burn it onto a USB drive
2) Boot from the the USB Drive
3) Install Ubuntu onto your test flash drive
4) Install Adams kernel Jaunty kernel install

Then once the netbook restarts, just make sure you boot from your flash drive installation.

Finding Picasso in the Sierra Norte

Toreador before the fight

Well, this was a bit of a surprise find I have to admit. We were travelling back from southern Spain, just north of Madrid, heading for the Spanish/French border, and we needed somewhere to stay over night.

I spotted a beautiful walled town just off the Autopista and decided it would be a great place to stop, its name, Buitrago del Lozoya. We found a lovely small hotel in the middle of the walled town, and we then noticed that their was a Picasso museum underneath the town hall. I have to come clean and explain that I am a large Picasso fan, and have visited the "Salt Merchants House" in Paris and his museum in Barcelona to just enjoy the magnificence that was his genius. So it was a complete, and very pleasant surprise to find that in this tiny town there was also a tiny museum of his work.

The reason for this collection is an odd one, his life long friend, fellow exile and Barbour had lived in the town, and had been given many works by Picasso as presents, and on his death he gave them to the town to use as they saw fit. Thus the museum under the town hall.

The collection is obviously not enormous, and the pieces on display are certainly not on the scale of Guernica , which is a must see on everyone's bucket list ;-) They are however very interesting, and give a real glimpse into the private life of Picasso and his friends.

One of the pieces that was particularly unique was the Barbour's work box, which Picasso had scribbled over for many years, including the phrase "To my good friend Arias", which was the name of the Barbour. There were also many ceramics, with pictures of bull fighters and bull fighting, that had also captured Picasso's imagination during this period.

If you are in the region, then this little museum, which is beautifully kept and maintained is well worth a visit, as is the town which offers an oasis of calm on a long journey from the middle of Spain to the west coast of France. I have attached a few of the items I took pictures of below to whet your appetite.


Picasso Ceramics

Chromium now building again on Ubuntu

As I have previously mentioned before, the native Chromium build for Ubuntu Linux has been having issues over the last few weeks, but is now building again, and as I suspected has seen some intense development.

The new version is now working again with Google reader, and this post is being created with the latest build. I have also noticed while testing that a number of the options on the selection menus are now working , including the about option, see the picture.

The speed is as impressive as it has been during all of the current builds, and this particular build feels more stable than some of the earlier ones.

You are now able to easily use the tabs, and moving around the browser is as straight forward as using Firefox.

Playing with Firefox 3.5 beta 5 , which wasn't meant to be

I have been installing the latest alpha and beta builds of firefox 3.1/3.5 since they became available , mainly for testing for eeebuntu, but also to see what is coming down the pipe and looking for speed improvements for on the Linux platform. Well , it has been faster since the early nightly builds, and has been showing improvements from each new installation, even with the version of Ubuntu being upgraded underneath it.

Well I was under the impression from all the development feeds that there was not going to a beta 5 , and it would be an RC after beta 4, but this post is coming from a nightly build of 3.5 beta 5.

Firefox 3.5 beta5 pre

The developers must have found a few more major bugs, although as yet after much testing I have yet to find any show stoppers, the only thing I find is that it does not shut down properly, and you have to force the quit. This is certainly not a big issue for me, as I very rarely shut down the browser, and always suspenf my lappy these days.

I have also been following the latest alpha builds of Chromium, but have noticed that it has not been building for the last few days, so it is obviously under going a considerably amount of development at the moment. I can't wait until it goes alpha, so I can start testing it properly.

Centos 5 is an excellent Xen virtualization enterprise distribution

I had need to set up a Xen virtual server recently , and wanted to use the Redhat Enterprise 5 series to do some testing. Unfortunately these days, you only get 30 days update trial support so I decide to use a binary compatible distro instead and I picked on Centos. There are a few, but I have always had the best success with Centos, so why change a winning combination.

This has been around for a while now, and has been working hard to stay with the Redhat releases, and are only a month or two behind them when released. This is really a none issue for business users, as being at the cutting edge is exactly where they don't want to be.

I installed it on an AMD dual core X2 powered server, with 6GB of RAM and 5TB of disk space, which acts as my virtual testing server. As a virtual server it is not that large these days, but it allows me to run several virtual machines with ease.

The anaconda install process detected everything, and the for those people who are used to Fedora or Redhat , the process is identical (not surprising), with just a change of art work. It is a real credit here to Redhat for being a real community player and putting their source code out there for other projects to do this, and the Centos team for taking the time and effort to implement it. Just make sure you select the virtualize section when picking which applications to install on the server.
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The new tools for managing both para-virtualized and full virtualized machines with Centos, using libvirt, worked without a single hitch, and I had an Ubuntu test virtual server up and running in literally minutes. The new GUI virtualization management tool works well. It is most definitely not a VMware virtual center or the Citrix Xen Enterprise management tools, but then it is free and for a simple virtual setup works well.

The performance was very good on this test server, and the Xen implementation - 3.0.3 - in the 5.2 release worked flawlessly.

If you are looking to build a virtual server for home or the office, then this distribution should be on your short list as it offers full functionality without the costs. You of course don't get the great technical support that Redhat offers, but the Centos community forums I looked at were full of quality answers, and anyone with a good background in IT infrastructure should not have any issues, unless you are a paper MCSE of course ;-)