The Open Source Advocate

In response to Aaron's post ... cannon : A large tubular firearm designed to fire a heavy projectile over a long distance. Canonical : An innovative company designed to "realize the potential of free software". The Canonical logo may look like a cannon, but any such resemblance is merely coincidental... or is it?

I have been searching for GUI interface to configure dual monitors for a long time. ( Fedora beats Ubuntu: Dual-monitor configuration ). Recently, I have heard about a new tool that is being developed that might be included with Ubuntu 7.10. This is great news, but it means that we have to wait another four months before it will be available. Fortunately, I have stumbled upon a resource that has been available for quite a while. It all started when I read this post about a neat tool called SysInfo . One of the features of this tool is the ability to launch an application called "nvidia-settings". (This assumes that you have an Nvidia video card, and that you are running the Nvidia non-free drivers.) You can either click on the "Nvidia Display Settings" button, or simply run the command "nvidia-settings" from a terminal session. This will open up a new GUI to configure your video card and monitors. On the left side of the window, click on the text ...

When the Dell/Ubuntu deal was first announced, many people speculated on the financial impact to Canonical. The behind-the-scenes details are still not available, but I was able to glean some information from the Dell website as I customized an Ubuntu machine. As you can see below, Dell is selling support contracts through Canonical. They are offering terms ranging from 30 days to 1 year of support. If you compare the Dell prices to the official Canonical support prices , you will find that one year of support costs $250 direct from Canonical, and $275 if you buy it bundled with your Dell machine. I wonder how much of that $275 goes to Dell, and how much goes to Canonical. At first glance, you might guess that the $25 increase could be Dell's cut for selling the support contract for Canonical. But Dell is also going to be providing hardware support, so I expect more than $25 is going to Dell. Even so, I expect the amount of revenue coming to Canonical via Dell will dwarf any ...

Should I use my real identity when communicating on the internet, or should I have a separate online identity? That is the question I have been thinking about as I watch my internet footprint grow with every blog entry, blog comment, forum post, mailing list reply, and IRC chat message. (FYI - IRC chat messages are often logged and posted online.) I do not have a reason to keep my privacy now, but who knows what the future holds? I may have new enemies in the future that I don't want to know personal details about me. Once data is on the internet, it stays on the internet. It is usually impossible to erase your writing from the public domain. I can only think of two options: 1. I can continue to use my real identity, but I must always keep in mind that what I write may be used against me in the future. This can be in the form of a job opportunity, an evil stalker, a political campaign, a business deal, or a lawsuit. 2. Create a new nickname that serves as my online identity. ...

Last December I wrote an article titled " Why can't we watch the news in Linux? " In that article I exposed the problems that Ubuntu 6.10 had with watching video feeds from popular news websites. These problems were not caused by a lack of multimedia support in Ubuntu, instead they were caused by the news companies who designed their sites for Windows-based media players only. Now that Ubuntu 7.04 is out, I wanted to evaluate the progress that has been made by testing these video feeds from the same news websites. ABC News Sound: NO Video: NO BBC News Sound: YES Video: YES (Improvement!) CBS News Sound: NO Video: NO CNBC Sound: NO Video: NO CNN Sound: YES Video: YES (Improvement!) FOX News Sound: YES Video: NO MSNBC Sound: YES Video: YES As you can see, two of the websites have improved their results. This increases the number of working video feeds to 3 out of the 7 websites that I selected for testing. I am not certain if this change can be attributed to improvements...

In my last post , several people accused me of being anti-Microsoft. This is not true at all! I believe that Microsoft makes good products. Do you think they could attain a 95% market share without making a good product? That is not the way a market economy works. What I am opposed to are arbitrary restrictions being placed on the software I use. Can you imagine a case where my Linux operating system locks me out for no good reason? Perhaps a message that says "We're sorry, but the Penguin Kingdom has decided that you have not given them enough herring. Access denied." This chain of events has got me thinking about Windows and Linux. Specifically, would you use Windows if it was licensed by the GPL ? Windows would just be another open source operating system to choose from. Would you choose it? It has great hardware and application support, and most of your users already know how to operate it. You could choose to run only open source applications on it, or yo...

I have been happily using Ubuntu for quite a while now, and I don't really use the Windows partition on my hard drive. The only thing I have ever needed was my Groupwise archive that contained some old emails. Recently, I heard about a new tool called VMware Converter . This free tool can be used to create a VMware image from a real installation of Windows. I thought it would be a good idea to convert my Windows partition into a virtual machine so that I could simply fire up Windows while I am running Ubuntu. I booted into Windows, downloaded the VMware Converter, and followed the wizard. After a few hours of processing, I had a VMware image of my Windows installation. Everything appeared to be working, so I booted into Ubuntu and fired up VMware Player and started the new virtual machine I had just created. Everything looked good as Windows started to boot inside the virtual machine. However, I quickly ran into a brick-wall. Licensing. Yuck! Windows told me that I didn...