Fortiter Et Recte
Thinking of buying a new laptop? Take a look at this report before you choose..
SquareTrade analyzed failure rates for over 30,000 new laptop computers covered by SquareTrade Laptop Warranty plans and found that one-third of all laptops will fail within 3 years. SquareTrade also found that netbooks are 20% more unreliable than other laptops, and that Asus and Toshiba are the most reliable laptop brands.
Thanks to Robert for pointing this out, but according to Raymond Wagner the new Dell Zino HD won’t cut it for a back end or front end MythTV box (if you’re doing high def).
That processor is marginal at best. You would likely not be able to
decode full bitrate ATSC, much less do so with any deinterlacing. The
$110 more expensive 6850e would be a bare minimum, and even then you can
hardly manage half-bitrate HDPVR recordings, and bluray/hddvd is out of
the question.You should be able to get the HD3200 working well enough with the fglrx
drivers, but it will not currently, and will likely never support
hardware accelerated decoding. You can upgrade to the HD4330 which now
has XvBA support indirectly through VAAPI, but will not be supported by
MythTV until at least 0.23.
Awww… I was always weary of the AMD video card anyway!
With Fedora 12, the .NET note taking program Tomboy has been replaced with C++ note taking clone, Gnote. This means that the default GNOME install is completely Mono free. Thanks for protecting our freedom, Fedora!
Looks like there’s a proposal for Ubuntu to get its very own online music store, in time for Lucid next year. It would be tied directly into the desktop with applications like Banshee and Rhythmbox providing a web front-end for users to purchase music.
That’s quite an interesting suggestion and I wonder if it will come off. No doubt the store will be closed source and proprietary, as we’ve come to expect from Canonical.
Still, if they offer Music in lossless formats, I’d buy them. I have never bought any music online because it’s all lossy MP3, which I detest. For me, CDs remain the best way to get high-quality music on my PC. That would definitely change if I could buy FLAC albums somewhere..
I think it’s high time that I try this “microblogging” thing. As such, I now have an Identi.ca account which also feeds to Twitter. Let’s see what all the fuss is about!
If you have any tips, please let me know. It’s all so foreign!
Ever played with Ardour? They have just released version 2.8.4 for Linux and OS X.
* Unlimited audio tracks and buses
* Non-destructive, non-linear editing with unlimited undo
* Anything-to-anywhere signal routing
* Unlimited pre- and post-fader plugins
* 32 bit floating point audio path
* Automatic track delay compensation
* Sample accurate automation
* Standard file formats (BWF, WAV, WAV64, AIFF, CAF & more …)
* Full AudioUnit plugin support on OS X
* More than 200 LADSPA & LV2 plugins freely available
* Support for Windows VST plugins available
* MIDI CC control with 1 click
* Level 2 MIDI Machine Control
* MIDI Timecode (MTC) Master or Slave
* Full integration with all JACK applications
* Video-synced playback, pull up/pull down
* No copy-protection
* Distributed, world-wide development
* Released under the GPL
* Source code for everyone
* Open XML session file format
* On OS X, works with any CoreAudio supported audio hardware
* On Linux, works with any ALSA/FFADO-supported audio hardware
* Network audio (full fidelity over local network or long haul with CELT) via NetJack
Sounds good to me! (Excuse the pun.)
I use rsync to move most of my data around the place (who doesn’t!?), but sometimes I have to copy files to a server where SSH is running on a port other than 22. How do I tell rsync to use a different port for SSH? Like this:
rsync -e "ssh -p [remote-ssh-port]" ~/local-files/ user@remote-server:remote-files/
Handy indeed. Thanks rsync!
I also like to pass “-P” to the command so that I get a nicer progress than verbose mode, so:
rsync -Pae "ssh -p [remote-ssh-port]" ~/local-files/ user@remote-server:remote-files/
I’m sure that most users will already know this, but it’s handy to put on my blog as a reference for my ageing brain!
I think the upcoming Inspiron Zino HD could make a great MythTV back/frontend.
Coming with Ubuntu, up to 8GB RAM and a 1TB internal drive, the units have AMD processors with AMD graphics. My problem would be the graphics driver – I’ve no idea if the free drivers will support it, but in my experience AMD’s proprietary driver on 64bit machines is absolute rubbish.
Nevertheless, it looks like a cool little box:
In every case, the Inspiron Zino HD includes wireless networking (802.11b/g or 802.11a/b/g/n), four USB 2.0 connectors (two front, two rear), audio I/O (microphone, line, and headphones), a four-in-one memory card reader, and gigabit Ethernet. The device’s rear panel (below) also includes a VGA output in addition to the HDMI port, plus two eSATA connectors for external hard disk drives, says Dell.
Of course, they’re not going to sell it with Linux in Australia, right? *Sigh*
The new release of openSUSE ships Mono with Windows.Forms by default. For users who don’t mind Mono but would rather not have Windows.Forms installed, there are other options.
You could forcefully remove mono-winforms with something like:
sudo rpm --erase --nodeps mono-winforms
Admittedly this might cause issues with other packages which depend on it, but should work. Installing new applications shouldn’t ask for mono-winforms because it’s generally pulled in by a parent package (like mono-web) which is still installed.
Another option is to remove Mono and all dependencies:
sudo zypper remove mono
Add a lock for mono-winforms:
sudo zypper al mono-winforms
And then re-install those Mono applications you want. When the resolver errors, tell Zypper to “break the program by ignoring some of its dependencies”. This way the program should be installed with all Mono related dependencies, but without Windows.Forms.
As far as I know, none of these applications actually require mono-winforms, it’s just a package which is pulled in by default as a part of Mono.
Of course, there are other reasons to not use Mono and I’d recommend removing it altogether 
I was pleased to see (although not too surprised) that the KDE desktop in openSUSE 11.2 does not ship Mono by default.
With GNOME, however it’s a different story. The main .NET applications included with 11.2 include Banshee, Beagle, F-Spot, GNOME Do, Tasque and Tomboy.
Not much of this has changed from the openSUSE 11.1 release, with the exception of GNOME Do which is new.
What is interesting, is that by default openSUSE ships the Mono implementation of Windows.Forms from .NET, which is outside the ECMA standard (and not covered under Microsoft’s horribly inadequate Community Promise).
Furthermore, all of the afore mentioned applications rely on Windows.Forms (package “mono-winforms“) and want to pull it in as a dependency.
At some point, Novell intends to split the Mono package between free and non-free components, but that doesn’t appear to have happened yet.
The fix
For users who don’t want Mono and .NET applications on their system, the solution is simple. Firstly, remove Mono and all that depend on it:
chris@wks1004925:~> sudo zypper remove mono
root's password:
Loading repository data...
Reading installed packages...
Resolving package dependencies...
The following packages are going to be REMOVED:
art-sharp2 avahi-mono banshee-1 banshee-1-backend-engine-gstreamer banshee-1-backend-platform-gnome
banshee-1-backend-platform-unix banshee-1-client-classic banshee-1-core banshee-1-extensions-default beagle
beagle-evolution beagle-gui beagle-index evolution-sharp flickrnet f-spot gconf-sharp2 glade-sharp2 glib-sharp2
gmime-sharp gnome-desktop-sharp2 gnome-do gnome-do-plugins gnome-keyring-sharp gnome-panel-sharp gnome-sharp2
gnome-vfs-sharp2 gsf-sharp gtk-sharp2 mono-addins mono-core mono-data mono-data-sqlite mono-nunit mono-web mono-winforms
mono-zeroconf mono-zeroconf-provider-avahi ndesk-dbus ndesk-dbus-glib notify-sharp rsvg2-sharp taglib-sharp tasque tomboy
wnck-sharp
46 packages to remove.
After the operation, 126.0 MiB will be freed.
Continue? [y/n/?] (y):
Next, lock Mono so that it can’t be brought back by any application you install in the future:
sudo zypper al *mono*
Finally, install replacement applications.
After a reboot, I had a weird issue where the GNOME Desktop Manager (GDM) didn’t load completely. There was no-where to put my username and the “Restart” and “Shut Down” buttons did nothing. It only happened once I had removed Mono, but it could just be Virtualbox playing up. I’ll investigate further..