Or skeptical for the Americans.
It seems that every day I’m reading or hearing about another assault on science – whether it’s creationists, homeopaths, climate change deniers or the anti vax nutjobs, it seems that all the advances and achievements science and scientists have brought us in the past decades are on very shaky ground as the never ending attacks on rationality send us ever closer to a new dark age.
Fortunately though, there’s plenty of things you can do to try and stop this. Obviously the most important thing is to get informed, and to get those who aren’t aware of the issues educated. I’d suggest buying one or more of the books on my top 10 sceptical list below for yourself or as a Christmas present.
Tagged: books, skepticism
Here are some of my tips on making the Ubuntu Netbook Remix 9.04 (Jaunty Jackalope) run smoothly and efficiently, and be as usable as possible on an Acer Aspire One netbook. Whilst this isn’t a definitive list, and there are no doubt 101 other things you could do, these are some things I’ve done that I’ve found to be exceptionally useful.
Whilst the wireless all worked perfectly on first boot after installation, the little light on the front of the machine didn’t show any activity. Not a big thing, admittedly, but it’s little things like this that annoy me.
Fortunately, it’s really easy to get it to work. Hit Alt-F2 to open the Run Application window, type gnome-terminal and hit enter to open a new terminal window.
In the terminal window, type:
sudo apt-get install linux-backports-modules-jaunty
and then reboot the machine.
Hey presto, we’re going to the laser show. The wireless on/off switch also works, although the only indication you’ll get that you’ve turned it off is instant disconnection from the wireless network.
I didn’t notice at first, but the Windows key on the Acer’s keyboard has metamorphosised into a Home key. Which doesn’t do anything. Wouldn’t it me nice if it actually took you home, to the Aspire’s launcher page?
Here’s how to make it do just that. From the main launcher, click “Preferences” then select “Keyboard Shortcuts”. Scroll down until you find the “Desktop” section. The last entry there is called “Hide all normal windows and set focus to the desktop background”. Click it, and then press the “Home” key. It’ll come up as “Super L”
That’s it – the Home key now takes you Home. Surprisingly enough.
Another wifi annoyance – the wifi doesn’t (well, didn’t on mine) wake up automatically after suspending, which wasn’t ideal. Fortunately, there was a good tip on help.ubuntu.com/community/AspireOne to get around this. This info is lifted straight from there. And it works fine.
From a terminal, do sudo nano /etc/pm/sleep.d/00wireless and put the following in the file:
[sourcecode language='plain']
#
# Restart WiFi interface after suspension
#
case “$1″ in
resume|thaw)
/sbin/ifconfig wifi0 down
/sbin/ifconfig wifi0 up
;;
*)
;;
esac
exit $?
[/sourcecode]
Much as I love the Aspire, I’m not a huge fan of its touchpad, so the more I can do to avoid using it and keeping my hands on the really nice wee keyboard, the better. Sounds like a job for the incredible, all-powerful Gnome-Do launcher.
If you haven’t used it before, hop over to the website and have a quick look at what it is and how it works. To quote:
GNOME Do allows you to quickly search for many items present on your desktop or the web, and perform useful actions on those items.
Ideal. Install it by opening a terminal window, and typing sudo aptitude install gnome-do. When that’s finished, hit the home key, choose “Accessories” and run Gnome-Do from there. Click the wee arrow on the top-right of its window and choose “Preferences”.
From the “General” tab, make sure there’s a tick in the “Start GNOME Do at login”. I also like to check the “Hide window on first launch” option, but that’s just me. I’m a tidy freak.
From the “Keyboard” tab, select “Summon” by double-clicking it, and then press “Alt-Space” to assign this shortcut to it (as the default Super-Space won’t work if you’ve assigned the Home key like I did)
I also install a number of plugins, mostly to make working with Google apps and twitter a bit quicker:
If you enable the Google Contacts plugin, it’s nice to set GMail to be the default Ubuntu mail client, rather than Evolution. See the GMail Contacts Plugin documentation for details of how to do this.
These are four quick things that you can do to make working with the machine a lot easier. I’ve a few more tips (tidying up Firefox for a small screen, synchronising stuff with a main desktop machine, etc) that I’ll post later. For now though, bonus points if you can identify the songs quoted in this post.
Tagged: aspire-one, netbook, tips, ubuntu
I’ve been running the release candidate of Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty Jackalope) on the netbook (the Netbook Remix, or UNR edition) for a couple of weeks and, with only a few minor niggles, it’s been going really well. It’s reasonably fast, stable and very usable.
Since the final version is released today, I figured I should install it from scratch. The issues that I had with the RC version (mostly related to sound recording in Skype) still seem to be there (https://wiki.ubuntu.com/HardwareSupport/Machines/Netbooks) but since I have an external USB plantronics headset to use, this isn’t such an issue for me.
So, for those of you who’re interested, here’s how I went about installing 9.04 from scratch on my Acer Aspire One netbook, armed only with a 4GB San Disk Cruzer USB flash drive (£7 from Tesco) and my main Windows Vista desktop PC.
When I first tried the installation, I had the devil’s own job to get the .img file burned successfully onto the USB drive. I tried *many* times to get a reliable procedure, and this is what I recommend.
Firstly, from windows, there are a few tools that I’d get hold of:
Install winMD5Sum from the downloaded file, making sure you enable its “Send to…” integration.
Right-click on the downloaded .img file and select Send To … winMD5Sum. As the file’s pretty big, this may take some time to complete.
Go to https://help.ubuntu.com/community/UbuntuHashes and copy and paste the md5 hash value for ubuntu-9.04-netbook-remix-i386.img from the table into the Compare field and click “Compare” – if the MD5 Check Sums are the same, you’re good to go, otherwise it’s back to the ubuntu site to download the .img file again, as something’s gone wrong.
Next to be sure, I reformatted my USB key as FAT32, then ran the win32 Disk Imager downloaded earlier.
In the device dropdown, select the drive letter assigned to the USB key (in my case E:) and browse to the downloaded .img file from the Image File file select box, then click write. Put the kettle on again, as this took *ages* on my machine …
When that’s done, safely remove the USB drive and move along …
Power-down the netbook, making sure you’ve backed up anything important as this will wipe *everything* that’s there.
Plug the USB key into the netbook, and start it up. Press F12 when the prompt appears onscreen, and select the USB FDD option from the Boot Option Menu. After selecting an installation language, the main ubuntu menu will appear. As I’m paranoid, I’d recommend selection the “Check disk for defects” option first, to make sure that the USB key has been written correctly. If any errors are found, go through the reformat and write img steps again.
From here on it, it’s a simple process of following the prompts to install the system. When you reach the partitioning screen, I’d recommend just using the whole disk. Beware that this will overwrite everything already on the disk, but you’ve got a backup already, haven’t you?
The installer will then run through its tasks in a pretty hands-off manner. It took about 20 minutes on my machine to finish, after which it prompts to remove the USB key and reboot.
First boot was quick (around 20 seconds) to the familiar UNR launcher screen.
Out of the box, the system is very usable. There’s a good range of default applications installed, hardware seemed to all be functioning correctly (with the expected exception of the right hand card reader, which only works if the card is inserted before booting – this is a known bug that I’m sure will be fixed soon), and for a lot of people, that’s probably as far as they’ll need to go.
As we all know though, I’m not most people …
Tagged: aspire-one, netbook, ubuntu
Well, I say my, but I should really say our, as itss purchase was prompted by the death of Hilary’s old laptop, but quite how interested she’ll be in using a 9″ underpowered linux machine when she’s got used to using my (sorry, our) other “proper” laptop, is another thing.
I’ve also fancied doing a bit of experimenting with one for a while too, specifically trying different OSes and using it for basic web development tasks, and again, I doubt Hilary would be that interested in those.
So, once the thing’s unboxed and charged up, and I’ve had a chance to familiarise myself with the basics of it, I intend to:
Which all sounds pretty good fun. I’ll keep you posted.
Tagged: aspire-one, netbook
