Nothing much new but the OS

There hasn’t been much of anything going on in my life, but I have been busy getting ready for the semester, so I haven’t been blogging.  But today, I thought I would at least let anyone who might stop by know that I am still alive.

My project for today was installing Kororaa on my Dell mini12.  It went off without a hitch.  Even though I had to install the drivers to get my wireless (Broadcom 4312) to work, that was easier than it has ever been before.

Kororaa is based on Fedora, which I used until 15 came out.  15 just didn’t work on the Dell, so I took it off both of my laptops.  But nothing else worked as well as Fedora 14 had on my Dell.  I had tried a number of Fedora-based distributions, but there always seemed to be a problem.  This one, which I had never heard of until today, works like a charm.  If it continues to work on this very fussy machine, I will probably keep using it forever!

A new OS

That’s a new operating system for those of you who don’t know.  And if you don’t know that, you will probably want to skip this post.

After about 7 months of using Fedora on both my laptops, I have returned to Linux Mint on one of them.  It wasn’t something I planned to do or really wanted to do, but an upgrade to Fedora 15 did strange things to this machine, the better of the two I have.  I already knew I wouldn’t  be able to run it on my Dell Mini 12, but I expected it to work well on my Toshiba Portege 705.  But it didn’t.  So I installed Linux Mint 11.  Everything works great!

The problem was mostly with Gnome 3 and my video card, not with Fedora itself.  But Fedora made the decision to go with Gnome 3, so I can’t hold them entirely blameless.  And yes, I know I could tweak it and used an older Gnome or KDE, but I decided that when an upgrade doesn’t work on my machine, it is time to switch to a different OS.  So I did.

It had been probably 3 years, at least, since I last used Mint.  I have to say I really like it,  And everything worked absolutely perfectly from the very beginning!

More on TXLF

As I said, the Keynote at TXLF was made by Ken Starks.  It was interesting.  He talked about the work of the Helios Project of getting computers into the hands of children who need them.  He also talked about things the Linux community could do to make Linux more accessible to new users — things like giving program understandable names.  He talked about creating a cognitive pathway between the name of the program and what it does.  He made a lot of sense.

I attended some sessions that I really didn’t understand well — about an open source program that would play blue-ray quality movies and about setting up and hosting your own website.  I also attended one on learning in the Linux community.  It was just an overview of very basic research, but it was interesting.  They talked about the ways we contribute to the community and how much we feel – or do not feel – that we are part of a community as a result of that.  They also started to talk about opensource in education but seemed to kind of leave that topic.  That would have been of more interest to me, I think.  But I was able to undersdtand what they were talking about, so that was good!

This was my first Linux conference.  It was an interesting experience.  I am used to coming home from a conference with ideas for things I can do in my classroom the next week.  I didn’t get that kind of take-away from this conference.  But I did come home with something — a feeling that I am part of a community.  I have experiences the online Linux community for years, but this was different.  And it was nice!  I hope to go back next year.

TXLF

I am currently at Texas Linux Fest in Austin. The keynote address this morning was delivered by Ken Starks of the Helios Project. He gave a presentation from the point of view of the new Linux user.

Many (most) of the sessions are way too geeky for me, but I have learned a ot anyway. I’ll try to share some of what I learn later – assuming I understand any of it well enough to try to explain it to anyone else!

Hey, I did good!

It has been a while since I have felt good about something I did, so today I am going to toot my own horn a bit.

Last Saturday somehow the wireless on my husband’s laptop stopped working.  The machine is only six months old, and he and I were both pretty disgusted.  He spent most of the last week trying to get it to work.  No luck.

Then a couple hours ago I asked if I could take a look at it.  I tried several Linux distros (He was running Mint Debian when it stopped working.) all to no avail.  I searched forums and tried everything I could even halfway understand how to do.

Then, I tried one more command.  And it worked!  I restarted the machine and it still worked.  I gave it back to him and it still worked!

Hurray!!!!

I like doing that kind of work. I am patient and just keep trying things until something good happens.  (Occasionally it takes more than a couple hours, of course!).

I wonder if this is something I should investigate as I try to figure out what I want to do with my life.  Could I be a computer person?  I wonder…

They did it!

The HeliOS Project was “liked” by enough people that they won a spot at the Rock a Charity Event, scheduled for February 18th. Congratulations!

 

A wasted day?

Yesterday was beautiful:  sunny, in the low 70s, not too windy.  My husband and I both said we should go outside and do something.  And neither of us did.   Instead, we spent the day working on our computers.  But I don’t regret it for a minute.

I got a new laptop, a Toshiba Portege r705, and I had to get Linux set up on it.  For a variety of reasons, I wanted to try something other than Ubuntu, and it took a while to find the distro that worked with my hardware.  In the end, I ended up with Fedora 14, and I am quite happy with it.  I have never used Fedora before, so there was a little bit of a learning curve, but it wasn’t bad.

My husband, who got my “old” Lenovo (Don’t feel too bad for him.  It is only about 7 months old and it is the computer he told me was perfect and I had to buy it. Unfortunately, I never really liked it.  He does.), spent the day making the machine his own. It had Ubuntu 10.10 on it, but he, too wanted to move away from Ubuntu.  It took a little playing around, but he got Mint Debian up and running on it. That’s what he has on his old machine, and he really likes it.

So today, when it is cold and damp (34 F and 81% humidity), we are happily playing away on our computers, unhampered by the glitches that plagued us yesterday!

Was it a wasted day?  I don’t think so.  It made the upcoming days a lot more pleasant and productive.

Linux on my Dell Mini 12… and on my very first laptop

Although I haven’t written about it in a long time, I am still using Linux exclusively on my personal computers.  Aa little over a year agoI got a Dell Mini 12 that came with Ubuntu 8.04 on it.  I loved the machine, but I didn’t like being tied to the Dell  version of Ubuntu.  Everything I read told me I wouldn’t be able to get other Ubuntu versions to work on it.  When 10.04 was in Beta, however, my husband suggested I give it a try.  Lo and behold, it worked perfectly!   I  ran it for a month or so before installing Ubuntu Netbook Edition 10.04,  which I am pretty happy with.  Even with a “big” 12″ screen, the netbook adaptations are nice ones.

We also decided to set up a computer to run the printer through.  (With Ubuntu we can print to it wirelessly from any computer in the house.)   We dug out my very first laptop – a Compaq Presario 705US.   It has a 20 G hard drive.  The hinges don’t work, so the screen has to lean back against something to keep it open.  When we  turned it on, we discovered that my husband had put a beta version of Ubuntu 6.06, I think it was  – Dapper Drake.  We had to go through a rather convoluted series of upgrades  but ended up with Ubuntu 10.04 on it, too.  The printer runs perfectly through it – freeing up both my laptop and my husband’s.

I know I’ve said it before, but I would really advise you to check Ubuntu out.  If you tried it in the past, you will be amazed at how much easier everything is with the newer versions.  And you can put it on an old machine that is totally worthless with Windows on it and get years of use out of the computer.  It can save you money and it puts you in control of your computing.  I can’t recommend it enough!

Linux and ESL

I read Ken Starks’ Blog of HeliOS because he works more tirelessly to promote the use of Linux than almost anyone I have ever even heard of.  Today I was surprised to see that he was talking about teaching English.  This is not Ken’s usual topic by any means.  I was intrigued, to say the least.

He starts out:

I’ve been told that English is one of the toughest languages in the world to learn.

I disagree.

I believe it to be the toughest language in the world to teach.

He then goes on with a hysterical – if all too predictable to us professional language teachers – description of trying to teach his first wife English.  He, of course teaches her about silent e and long vowels:

“OK honey…this is simple.  We are working with 4 letter words, every word has a vowel as the second letter and a silent “e” at the end.  When you see words like this, you will know that the vowel carries a “long” sound.  Like the letter “a” will sound like you are saying the letter “a”…not “ah”.  Here are some examples.”

Home.

Bone.

Came.

Safe.

If you are a language teacher, you already know what is coming next, but for those of you who aren’t, let me continue.

The next day his wife wanted to know about the word gone.  Why didn’t it follow the rule he had taught her the day before?  But we all knew that, right?  (I think the most important thing I have learned in my many years of teaching is not to talk about pronunciation rules! In English, that is an oxymoron!)

I laughed, of course.  And I kept reading.  Because I knew that eventually he would bring the subject around to Linux.  And, of course, he did!

Those were just a couple of incidents that helped make the decision to send her to a professional English as a Second Language course.  Teaching someone your language is not a task for the weak-willed or uncommitted.

But in remembering this, it brings to mind what new Linux users may be going through…and more to the point, what we probably need to remember in teaching them.

Sure, we speak the language…it’s second nature for us. We think nothing of a file system with identifiers such as .etc and .var.  Sudo apt-get and sudo gedit /etc/apt/sources.list rolls off our fingertips as if we were navigating  the simplest of tasks.  Some find the /.init/.d folder and subsequent commands second nature.

But to the New User, it’s as if we are digital geniuses, blazing a trail through black screens and cryptic symbols running in endless strings.  We are speaking a language they cannot understand.  Hitting the tab key to complete a command string is voodoo to them…most of them anyway.

Linux users, like English speakers, speak in code all the time.  We need to make an effort to explain things to people who don’t know that code.  Don’t think they are stupid because they don’t know it but recognize that we ourselves had to learn it once.

But now I would like to turn this back around.  If you have learned English, you can probably learn to use Linux!  Why not give it a try?

Anyway, check out Ken’s post.

Using Linux in Portales

Yesterday was Software Freedom Day, and we celebrated it in Portales with a Linux Installfest at the univesity.  We had 7 different computers set up with different varieties of Linux on them and gave people an opportunity to play with them.  There weren’t a lot of people who came, but the ones that did seemed to be happy to have a chance to see Linux in action.

If you haven’t tried Linux, why not check it out?