Niels R. » Linux

MonoDevelop 2.0 and Mono 2.4 officially released

Niels R. — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 08:05:05 +0000

The Mono project has announced the official release of Mono 2.4 and MonoDevelop 2.0. The new version of MonoDevelop introduces support for a long-awaited integrated debugging tool.

Full article at Ars Technica

Release notes

Wanna test it right away? Download VMWare images, LiveCD or packages at the Mono website.

Linux 2.6.19 released

Niels R. — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 10:24:39 +0000

A new version of the Linux kernel is released. The full list of changes/features can be found here.

Replacing Avant Window Manager with GNOME Do

Niels R. — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 12:48:05 +0000

I came across an article of Ars Technica about the release of GNOME Do 0.8.1. I’d never heard of it before, but after reading the article I decided to give it a spin.

After trying it out using a VM installation (Thank you, VirtualBox!) I’m convinced. I’ll drop Avant Window Manager (AVM) and install GNOME Do instead.

French Police Save Millions Switching To Ubuntu

Niels R. — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 09:55:53 +0000

Always nice to see positive stories about migrations from Windows to Linux. This time it’s the French police.

Read the full article on Ars Technica.

Linux holds back our children’s evolution

Niels R. — Fri, 12 Dec 2008 12:40:55 +0000

Or this is what a teacher from some middle school in the USA. She found out that a student of her was giving a demonstration of Linux to classmates and handing out discs of the HeliOS Project. She confiscated the discs and told her students not to use Linux. She also send an email to the people of the HeliOS Project claiming she wasn’t sure that installing Linux is legal and saying that software isn’t free.

Some people seem to be very afraid of the unknown. The story has a happy ending, though, so check out Microsoft Silverlight for Unix systems.

Check this nice article on Ars Technica for more details or surf to the Moonlight website to grab it right away.

NetworkManager 0.7.0 doesn’t manage my network

Niels R. — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 07:22:28 +0000

After an upgrade of my desktop machine to Ubuntu 8.10 Beta the NetworkManager in GNOME makes a mess of my network settings (Say truely, which “manager” doesn’t make a mess out of the thing he/she needs to… manage :p).

Anyway… my setup is very simple. One ethernet connection with a static IP. Can’t be hard, don’t you think? Well, NetworkManager manages to redefine an “Auto eth0″ (DHCP enabled) connection every time it restart and just ignores the nice “Static eth0″ I’ve added.

The config of “Static eth0″ is not in /etc/network/interface, but added through the NetworkManager. You would think that does the trick, but it ain’t.
Also, when I delete “Auto eth0″ and I set the “System setting” flag on “Static eth0″, the flag is reseted as soon as I open the “Static eth0″ details again.

There is a bug filed at Launchpad.
And another.
And another.

Gotta take some time to start trying the proposed solutions in this threads… I’ll report back to you!

Ubuntu is slowing down

Niels R. — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 07:20:37 +0000

The guys (or are they girls?) at Phoronix have done some benchmarking with Ubuntu 7.04, 7.10, 8.04 and 8.10 Beta. It seems that the oldest release is still the fastest…

Hopefully, Canonical and its Ubuntu team will work their asses off to improve this numbers in the coming release(s).

Full article at Phoronix

Google open sources Android’s source code

Niels R. — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 06:43:28 +0000

Check this nice article on Ars Technica: Google liberates Android source code, so start developing!

Google’s Chrome declining in popularity

Niels R. — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 08:38:57 +0000

A post on Slashdot states that Google Chrome is losing users. It started with a 4% market share and is now just above 1.5%.

Seems logical to me. The browser was announced with a lot of attention by the media (it was even on the Belgian VRT news), so everyone goes out and tries it.
After a day, you notice that it’s fast and sleek, but that it feels like a beta (because it is a beta). I’m still using it at work (Windows environment), but when I need to set a bookmark I fire up Mozilla Firefox because of the superb add-on Foxmarks.
Foxmarks is not the only add-on I miss when using Chrome. What about Adblock Plus, Firebug, Web Developer extension, IE Tab and ChatZilla?
Chrome has a basic DOM inspector, but it lacks a lot of stuff that Firebug has to offer us.
Besides that, I notice a lot of stuttering when using the Flash player on e.g. GarageTV (which I have to use daily for professional reasons).
And last but not least (I think) is the fact that it is mostly a Windows-only browser. The codebase (Chromium) is available for download, but builds for Linux and Mac OS X aren’t very stable.

The things I really like about Chrome (and what most of the user probably will): speed, clean interface and the startup tab with screenshots of most visited websites.

I honestly have to say that I didn’t try out a lot of Chrome add-ons yet. You’ll find some on:

So, let’s give Google some time to improve Chrome and it might become my standard browser.

Chromium on Linux/Mac OS X using Wine: