AnandTech ran an interesting (and VERY thorough) review of Ubuntu 8.04. I wanted to highlight my favorite section.

Titled CPU Benchmarks, they test applications running on both Windows Vista and Ubuntu. The amazing thing is the applications running on Ubuntu via Wine performed better than they did on Windows!

Let’s let that sink in for a moment…the open-source project written ½ by volunteers and ½ by commercial interests, intended to duplicate the Windows API on Linux, actually outperforms the software it’s intended to mimic. That’s amazing to me. Read the rest of this entry »

Meld is, by far, the best diff viewer & editor that I have used. Earlier I posted about getting Meld up and running on OSX and overcoming a couple of issues. With the current version of MacPorts (1.7.1) and Meld 1.2, it’s much easier :) Read the rest of this entry »

Humor works. Humor + Negativity works even better. Here’s how I found out.

While this post will certainly not become viral, I have been studying viral marketing and wanted to share about a small experiment I did. I read a book called World Wide Rave: Creating Triggers that Get Millions of People to Spread Your Ideas and Share Your Stories (Kindle Edition) in which the author states

It turns out people react to negatives. Several years ago, I worked on a site where we included a link “For Executives Only,” which generated more traffic than other links. Words like worst, don’t, and only are interesting, and people want to know what’s there.

This got my creative juices flowing and I decided to experiment. Continuing to read in the World Wide Rave we see an example of a blogger, Mark Hinkle, who did a satirical article on Ubuntu. Just so happens I have a blog on Ubuntu. I copied the idea by making a negative article of “Top 10 Reasons I’ll Never Use Ubuntu.” This list was not serious at all, actually it was a list of 10 things I love about Ubuntu. And it was hastily written, jotted down in about 10 minutes.

It worked! The blog normally receives 200 visitors per day. After 20 hours of my post being live it had 2764 visitors. It had been picked up by a couple of Linux blogs, it got dugg, it was Stumbled, it was twittered, it made it into Ubuntu forums, and it sparked some rather interesting conversations in comments.

Only one other time have I had that kind of success on my Ubuntu blog, and it was an article that I spent hours on.

Yesterday Steve Balmer made an interesting claim that Linux is a bigger competitor than Apple. I would not have guessed that, but his pretty graph illustrates the proof.

Steve Balmer shows us that unlicensed Windows and Linux are their two biggest competitors

So far the best diff viewer I have used is Meld, which up to now I could only use on my Ubuntu Linux partition. But now, thanks to Macports, I got it running on OS X. Yeah!

Update

I wrote this article about a year ago. As usual, technology advances, and this time it is in our favor. The hack for the .xinitrc is no longer necessary. On my machine I can install Meld straight from MacPorts and it runs straight away.

This took a bit of work, but I finally got Meld to run on OS X. The installation is very easy…just tell Macports to install Meld. In your terminal type:

sudo port install meld

Getting Meld to run on OS X was a bit trickier. When launching it normally I kept getting this error: Read the rest of this entry »

One of the great benefits of Linux is the wealth of great opensource software. Prior to this experiment I thought all this software could only run on Linux, but recently I discovered that this is not true. Much of my favorite software on Ubuntu Linux can be run on OS X :)

Geany running on OS X

Read the rest of this entry »

This is a response to an article asking why people switch from Windows to the Mac OS instead of Ubuntu. The author concludes “So why are people not going over to Ubuntu? Beats me.” He even resorts to calling these switchers stupid: “Is it the snob value or stupidity that make people consider a Mac over Windows and not Ubuntu?”

I started this blog in July as a public exploration of my experimentation with Ubuntu. In that time I have tried to use Ubuntu as my default OS in replacement of the Mac OS because I wanted to see how feasible it was. While the simple answer to “can if be done?” is “yes,” it’s really not very easy. So my comments below come from someone who truly enjoys using Ubuntu Linux (I still use it daily) but who has come to appreciate the finer nuances of the Mac OS.

While the author of the aforementioned article does make a few good points about how far Ubuntu Linux has come he fails to recognize a few very basic advantages of the Mac platform that I have come to appreciate during my experiment:

Read the rest of this entry »

If Ubuntu Linux had not won me over yet then it certainly has now. Ubuntu Netbook Remix is a fantastic set of tools for running Linux on small screens and boosting productivity in a limited workspace. The official description of the project says:

Ubuntu Netbook Remix is a ‘remix’ of the standard Ubuntu Desktop 8.04 release to enable it to work better on devices with small screens, such as Netbooks (sub-notebooks), although these packages will work on any 8.04 installation.

The Remix instantly captured my attention because of its focus on small screens. I have a 13″ MacBook laptop. Its 1280 x 800 screen can feel cramped sometimes, especially compared to my dual-scren iMac setup at work.

Given that my entire Ubuntu experiment is about productivity I had to give it a go. I have grown fond of how easy Linux makes experimentation. I knew that I could very easily install the Remix, test it, and just as easily uninstall it when I was done. But I’m keeping it. Here’s why. Read the rest of this entry »

I thought this would be valuable to some of you that are new to Ubuntu. Being rather new to this Ubuntu Linux thing myself, I have struggled to get the terminal commands for fixing the .dmrc permissions issue just right.

The problem

When logging into Ubuntu 8.04 I would see this error message. It explains that the permissions on my user’s hidden .dmrc file and home directory are wrong.

A photo of the .dmrc permissions error I was getting when logging into Ubuntu 8.04