• Linux useful(less)ness

  EvilDave

  I certainly agee with your reply if the only criteria is cost and cost alone. There certainly are a large number of programs out there that are close to being an equivilant of Windows programs. Note that I say “close”. The problem that I have run into with many of the open software programs is that they are being written and maintained on a voluntary basis by their creators or people who just want to make them better–more power to them. However this improvement is a slow process and many of these programs have quirks in them that make them comeup second best to the commercial programs in Windows. For exampe, I use gedit for writing simple long winded text message on various blog post that I do. I found it odd that you could not set in “Preferences” the “Autocheck spelling” evertime that you opened a new document, even though all the previous tabs had autocheck running. I thought that ought to be simple fix really. I wrote to the author and a week or two later got a reply that said thanks, we’ll look into that. Well that was 6 months ago, no fix yet. Is it a devestating problem, well no, but it is annoying.

  Another example: I use DigiKam and found that when I use the “Find Duplicates” on pictures in a folder, it does not show a thumbnail of the image if the size of the picture is over about 1.1 Mb. Wrote the author and he did reply a bit quicker and said they were aware of the problem but that was several months ago and still no fix. Devestating–No! But damn annoying. I also found that DigiKam “Find Duplicates” sometimes claims two pictures that are clearly very, very differnt are called a duplicate. No so good. Now combine that with a box that presents two pictures as duplicates and one has a thumbnail and the other does not, what to do? See the problem?

  The problem here is that most program creators and maintainers have real day jobs that have the first priority and these open source programs have only a second priority status at best. I understand that. If you are playing around trying to create a useful program you are more than likely doing it in your spare time. For some, once the create the program, even as a proof of concept, they are intellectually finished. Their work is done, now let the community maintain it. Well OK, considering that it is free I guess we have to be thankful for what we get. But it is the small little annoying bugs (or features if that is the way you wish to sping it) that tend to drive people away from many of these open source programs.

• Upgraded to 8.10
  Thanks! I have heard that since 8.10 has come out, the updates to it also have been coming fast and furious also. Sounds like some of the early issues have been cleared up. I am going to put it on my home built AMD64 machine that is currently running XP but I will probably wait a few more months since that machine is serving as my “shared printer” resource and I have three computers using it constantly. Want to reduce any problems.
• Trouble accessing installed software on Ubuntu Linux
  I added it to the launcher panel. Right-click, pick ‘Add to launcher panel’, and the icon’ll be there on the bar. You can make a desktop shortcut, too.

  Right-click on the top-level menu (the part with the icon) and pick ‘Edit Menus’ to drag/drop things around in there.

• OpenSuSE is the default OS. Can I switch it to Windows?
  number6 wrote:
  Please disregard my last post. I should have edited the /boot/grub/menu.lst instead of /etc/grum.conf. I corrected the line in menu.lst, rebooted, and now Windows is the default OS. Thank you very much. You’ve been very helpful!

  I’m glad you were able to get it figured out! I was kind of stabbing in the dark there.

لینوکس شریف سیستم عاملی ایرانی

Enable WPA Wireless in Ubuntu

Update the source list run the following command
$ sudo apt-get
$ sudo apt-get install wpasupplicant
$ sudo apt-get install network-manager-gnome network-manager

Comment out everything other than “lo” entries in that file and save the file
$ sudo vi /etc/network/interfaces

Create a file called /etc/default/wpasupplicant, add entry ENABLED=0 and save the file
$ sudo touch /etc/default/wpasupplicant

Reboot your system or use the following command
$ sudo /etc/init.d/dbus restart