Justin Hartman

Posts Tagged ‘Ubuntu’


Posted on March 1, 2007 - by

Technology Thursday kicks off

Today sees the launch of my new weekly contribution I’ll be doing for SA Rocks. Technology Thursday, will focus on South African technology and the impact it has on the world today. As South Africans we have created a vast array of technological innovations and will continue to do so and I’m privileged to pay homage to these achievements.

In the spirit of humanity I’ve decided to kick off the column with a focus on the ever-popular desktop operating system, Ubuntu in my Linux for human beings article.

In only two short years and millions of users worldwide Ubuntu is a major player in the Linux world and Canonical, the commercial sponsor of Ubuntu, has been named one of the ‘Top 20 Companies to Watch in 2007′ by Linux Magazine. It was selected as one of the companies best positioned in the coming year to spur Linux and Open Source adoption, while delivering on the immediate needs of the market.

 

Posted on January 18, 2007 - by

Debian Wiki Launched

I’m please to announce that I’ve officially launched my own Debian Wiki. Over the last two weeks I have been setting up a new server for Grabble and due to my growing attraction to Debian I decided this new server will be powered entirely off of the ever popular GNU/Linux distribution.

The Debian Wiki was created solely because I needed something to help me keep track of what I was doing when setting the server up and as such it has developed into a whole series of tutorials if you will. There is a lot of documentation out there for Debian however it is difficult to make that documentation work for the new (soon-to-be) stable release of Debian 4 a.k.a. Etch and the Debian Wiki aims to fix this problem.

Every single HOWTO on the Debian Wiki has had to be tailored to work with Etch and as such I hope that others can find value when needing to setup a similar item on their Debian based server. The Server Category items on the Wiki are confusing to the layman however as time goes on I want to have a whole bunch of Desktop related items so that people who’ve never used Linux before can actually see that it’s not that difficult to operate!

So head on over to http://linux.justinhartman.com and give me your thoughts!

 

Posted on December 20, 2006 - by

How to swap Control and Command keys on PowerPC

As a previous Apple OS X user I find that having to use the control key on my keyboard versus the Apple command key a real pain in the backside. Most Windows users don’t have a problem with this as the transition from Windows to Linux is easy with regards to using the control key. I’ve searched and asked and low and behold nearly a month later I now know how to swap the two around.

In Ubuntu and Debian it’s not as simple as configuring a shortcut or keymap and it requires a little bug-fix to get it working just as I’m used to it coming from OS X. Here’s a little step-by-step HOW-TO on how to achieve this on both an iBook G4 keyboard as well as the standard Apple USB keyboard.
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Posted on December 7, 2006 - by

Mark Shuttleworth puts me in my place

So this Ubuntu PowerPC issue has been bugging me a lot, so much so that I left the following comment on Mark Shuttleworth’s blog site this morning.

Mark the problem I am having at the moment is the whole ethics behind Ubuntu and what it actually does support. The concept or idea you came up with initially for Ubuntu was to provide a free desktop for all users in the world and make computing and technology more accessible to the people.

A recent decision however by the dev team at Canonical to drop PPC as a supported distribution concerns me. It concerns me in that it would appear there is no long term revenue in supporting PPC as a technology and it has seriously made me wonder just how true the idealism of Ubuntu really is.

I myself run Ubuntu Edgy on two PCs and my iBook G4 but to know that Ubuntu for PPC will ultimately be turned over to the community to support is a growing concern for me. My initial reaction was to move over to Debian but in chatting on the forum I have decided to, where possible, get involved in the PPC community because clearly there is a market and one that needs supporting.

While I realise that PPC doesn’t provide much commercial value for Ubuntu does this then not go against everything that Ubuntu is supposed to be in providing greater accessibility to the world? I’m curious to know your thoughts because I am certainly damaged in my perception by this recent decision.

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Posted on December 5, 2006 - by

PowerPC canned by Ubuntu

So go figure. 15 days after installing Ubuntu on my Apple iBook G4 a decision was made today to drop future support for PowerPC. For those who don’t know PowerPC is the chip inside the “now old” Apple computers much like the Intel chips that are made for PCs and now also Apple.

I first became aware that Ubuntu were thinking about dropping PowerPC support about a week ago by reading this forum thread. There was also a petition to save PowerPC support which I signed but despite the lengthy forum pleas and signatures to save PowerPC the decision was made by the developers of Ubuntu.
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Posted on November 20, 2006 - by

iBook G4 now sporting Ubuntu Edgy Eft

It had to happen and today it did. I have just completed a brand new Ubuntu 6.10 (codename Edgy Eft) Linux installation on my Apple iBook G4 laptop. I have to admit that I have always been very curious about Ubuntu on the whole and in particular the noise that they have made but for some reason I have avoided it up until lately.

I’m no stranger to Linux and have tried a few installations on my personal machines, some of which include Mandrake 10.0, Suse 9 and of course Ubuntu 5.04 (which only lasted about a week on my machine).

I also have experience working on CentOS, Fedora and Red Hat but these are all on a server level as they currently power my various web servers running my sites.
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