Monthly Archives: May 2007

Xfce desktop environment

Posted by on 26 May 2007 23:12 Comments Off

screenshot2.pngI started using the Xfce desktop environment under Ubuntu the other day and have loved it so far. GNOME is a bit too heavyweight for me, so I’ve been using Fluxbox for a few months. It’s lightning fast and really slick, but there’s no eye candy whatsoever.

So the other day I decided to download Xfce and try it out. It looks quite similar to GNOME but runs a lot faster. It’s much easier to customize than fluxbox and it supports my keyboard metakeys much better. Plus the eye candy is great without taking too much toll on the speed. I really like the themes, too. (There are even some windows-esque ones.) And everything runs just as well or better under Xfce as it did under fluxbox.

Another cool feature is the ability to create multiple “sessions” or startup profiles. You can set Xfce to prompt you for which session you want when you log in. So I can create one for play, one for work, and one with nothing special.

So there you have some ramblings about the wonders of Xfce.

Ubuntu Studio

Posted by on 26 May 2007 20:47 Comments Off

screenshot-1.pngI helped my friend install Ubuntu Studio on his laptop yesterday and today. It’s pretty cool, I must say. Being a huge linux fan, I’m really excited for him. Ubuntu Studio has a ton of open-source multimedia authoring and editing software. And a really sweet theme (pictured at right).

We ran into some issues while installing but were able to resolve them fairly easily. Here’s a summary and some tips for anyone that may be having the same problems:

  • He first installed 6.06 because that was the only CD version he had. Since it was a fresh install, he didn’t have any trouble upgrading to 6.10 and then to 7.04 (besides a slow connection).
  • Once the full 7.04 system was installed, we followed the instructions on The Ubustu Feed to install the Ubuntu Studio packages on top. We had to make sure the “universe” repository was selected, as we were getting “<package name> is not installable” messages.
  • His screen resolution was less than optimal (1024×768 on a widescreen laptop made for 1280×800). But he has an Intel graphics card, so we resolved it using the 915resolution package and these instructions.

rm -rf

Posted by on 17 May 2007 20:55 2 comments

Just a note to you UNIX users out there. rm -rf is a dangerous command. I’ve been warned from so many sources I don’t remember them all, but I still manage to use it somehow. Today I deleted a whole directory of image files on a project at work. (Luckily I had a backup from yesterday, so it was just fine.) But the point remains: Be careful using rm -rf!

I’ve made an alias in my .bashrc file that says rm='rm -i', just so it will make me confirm things in case I actually wasn’t paying attention. (Obviously using -f overrides that, which is convenient when deleting directories but very dangerous at the same time.)

Be careful with sudo, too…

Ubuntu

Posted by on 12 May 2007 0:42 Comments Off

I’ve been using Ubuntu Linux for nine months now and have enjoyed it immensely. I’m a computer geek anyway, so linux is the perfect toy for me. I love the customizability and control linux gives me. I can open up a bash shell and do most of my work from there. In fact, for the last several months I’ve been using the Fluxbox window manager. It provides very few graphical utilities, so I do most of my work from the command line.

Aside from the terminal, my favorite thing about linux in general and Ubuntu specifically is all the open source software that is available for it. Everything running on the box right now is free/open source software. It is awesome to watch how the open source community has made such great products.

Simply because of the way linux and other unixes (like Mac OS X) are built, viruses and spyware are generally not a concern. Security is much easier to maintain. I don’t even have any antivirus software on this box and have never had a problem.

One perpetual issue with linux is hardware support. The built-in wireless card on my Compaq Presario laptop has never worked reliably, despite my earnest efforts. But by and large, the default installation of Ubuntu 6.06 (the first version I used) found most of my hardware and made it work sufficiently well. I’m using 7.04 now, and it all still runs great.

So as I was surfing today I found a few interesting items:

  • Ubuntu Studio is an Ubuntu derivative targeted toward the multimedia guru. Their first official release has just come out, based on Ubuntu 7.04. I have a friend who is really into video and audio editing, but most of the software he uses is written only for Windows (except for The GIMP, of course!). This is a step in the right direction for linux to enter this market. These blogs discuss Ubuntu Studio and may be of interest:

    EDIT: I also found the following two sites:

  • Dell is offering Ubuntu pre-installed on new systems This is another exciting step for linux entering the general consumer market. Linux has long been the domain of the computer geek, but Ubuntu especially has made great progress in making linux accessible to the average human being.

Google madness

Posted by on 3 May 2007 11:28 Comments Off

Google is pretty much amazing. (Some will disagree with me, but that’s okay.) Aside from all the good products they turn out, they really have become an enormous think-tank that is driving software and web development. At Microsoft, which is rather on the other side of the spectrum, it can take years to turn out new software products or features. But Google is always on its toes, releasing its innovations as it goes. Microsoft is trying to get on the bandwagon that Google and Yahoo! have created, but they’re quite a bit behind.

The two products from Google that I most enjoy at the moment (besides Gmail and Blogger) are iGoogle (formerly the Personalized Home Page), and Google Reader (a slick feed reader).

It always amazes me how well Google is able to integrate its products and services with each other. One Google Account gets you access to the four I mentioned earlier, as well as a myriad of other useful things.

In A Beginning

Posted by on 2 May 2007 22:07 Comments Off

NOTE: This is the original first post on Instance Variable. I thought I’d leave it here, for old time’s sake.

One of these times I will remember what I had wanted to write on this blog to share with the world. But for now, I’ll just make introductions.

I’m a Latter-day Saint attending Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah. That whole experience has given me much food for thought, and perhaps I will write some of that here.

The title of this blog [my other blog] comes from a programming contest I was in a few years ago with the BYU ACM (Association for Computing Machinery). I was the only programmer on the team of two, so we didn’t do very well. But that was the name I chose for the team. It’s a programming term that nobody would actually use. (It has to do with object-oriented programming.)

And the title of this post comes from the lesson in my Old Testament class this afternoon. Bro. Wilson mentioned that the correct translation for the first verse of Genesis 1 is “in a beginning,” not “in the beginning.” Eternity has no beginning and end, but this earth had a beginning.