Hacks Tips and Tweaks for Cross Platform Geeks
Back for the first episode of 2023, Knightwise is joined by a couple of guest hosts this week to talk technology challenges, and working in a world of ubiquitous data availability.
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The action is happening over at our Discord server: Join by clicking this link
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A quick mini-podcast this week inspired by the Knightwise.com community and a discussion over on the Discord.
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DISCORD
The action is happening over at our Discord server: Join by clicking this link
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The Discord roundtable is back again this week with the perennial discussion among technology and open source enthusiasts – Will we ever see the year of the Linux Desktop?
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Welcome to 2020!
This week Knightwise takes us through a list of projects to help stretch our geek muscles and maybe try out some new ways to use or think about technology as we slide into the new decade. We’ve got, things to learn, ways to protect your privacy and your data, projects to try and services you might want to support.
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Sliding from operating system to operating system is always cool, but the borders between the different OS’es sometimes make things hard. What if we took those away? We show you how using Virtualbox to merge your machine’s, your applications and your files using Virtualbox.
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This week Knightwise talks about cutting the cable and some thoughts about what this could mean for not just your pocketbook, but also your sanity. There are tons of places you can get content that you source and curate yourself. Come join us to hear about a few.
Producer’s note: Originally recorded in 2017, but not originally aired in KW Season 12.
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We bring you a showcase from an interview we did on the Nosillacast podcast that is perfect for the holiday season. Find out ways to make your geeky and non geeky friends happy with this free geek gift guide, packed with tips and tricks to make the ultimate stocking stuffer .. without spending a single sliver of gold pressed latinum.
Shownotes.
Give a free computer.
Storage
Backup
Remote assistance
Communications
Pictures
The gift of free applications
The gift of free music
The gift of free knowledge
Signout.
With the end of the month approaching the new release of Ubuntu is coming ever closer. With 12.04 we are seeing the 3rd incarnation of this popular operating system featuring the highly contraversial Unity interface. Canonicals bold move in choosing a completely different way of letting you interact with your desktop have been the subject of much debate. We’ve seen die hard Ubuntu fans leave in a huff and switch to Linux Mint and even the revival of older graphical user interfaces like Kde or Gnome2 because people don’t like to “switch” to Unity just yet.
Its a good thing linux is open source. You will always have a choice in what desktop you want to work with. What if you DO want to stick with Ubuntu (and not move to mint) but don’t want to use Unity ? Perhaps you might want to give Lubuntu 12.04 a try. Featuring the nice LXDE interface it gives you something that “kinda looks like Gnome 2” without being outdated and does give you Ubuntu 12.04 underneath the hood. The video below features the Alpha release , by now Lubuntu has moved on to an even more recent version.
So what are your plans for the end of April ? Are you still sticking to Gnome 2 ? Have you faced the music and dance to Unity ? Or are you silently crying on Mint 12 ? Share your thoughts in the comments and Download Lubuntu here.
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The word alone sounds repulsing to me.
Proprietary : The word alone sounds repulsing to me. Being an open source – cross platform fetishist, anything that is locked into the boundaries of a certain manufacturer is probably comparable to the used toilet paper of satan himself. Anything that veers away from open standards and locks users into the steel confinements of a certain brand or manufacturer is no worse then the sing sing prison. Just think about it. Special document formats that implore you , no , FORCE you to buy a certain peace of software in order to open them. A peace of hardware that only has drivers for a certain operating system. Or an on line music store that will only allow its content to be played on one brand of players. Anything that promises advanced functionality at the cost of the consumers liberty to buy what he wants is something Cruellla Devill would probably love. I hate proprietary stuff. Whether its office document formats, Itunes-music-store restricted music, or even some fancy sort of USB connector variation that will only fit on that one stupid dell machine. If it ain’t open , I don’t want it ! I scream in defiance. What good is a fantastic slideshow made in powerpoint if I can’t open it on my mac, Why the frack would I buy a song on Itunes if i can’t play it on my cheap ass mp3 player, Why in hells bells would I encode my music in WMA format if my linux machine won’t be able to read it.
Oh ow , caught in the net.
But , willing or unwilling, i have slipped into the net of these close quarters and have witnessed the power of this fully operational battlesta.. erm .. proprietary software. This week I installed my old Mac Mini as a server at home. Giving it some extra firewire storage-space I bestowed upon it the tasks to store all my pictures and music , and do some video capturing on the side. Your basic run of the mill media server. Using a great program called SHAREPOINT i was able to share any folder I liked using the universal SAMBA protocol. For reasons beyond my comprehension mac does not allow sharing just any folder, just the home folder. Probably to prevent you from turning your mac into a file-server , but hey , come on .. its MY MAC remember ? Nevertheless I got it working nice and dandy. Writing a little logon script with automator gave my other macs access to the shares and that was that. Then I stared using Iphoto and Itunes on the mac server to manage the pictures. That way a boring server was also good for some music playing and photo slide-showing. Think of my mac mini as a power-station (not quite a server , but not quite a workstation). When I got downstairs on my macbook (after connecting to the shared folders using my Ubuntu workstation) i booted up my Itunes and saw…. The mac mini’s music directory.. magically shared through the wonders of AFS (apple file-sharing system). And behold : The Iphoto library on the server was available as well ! And it was surprisingly fast. Sharing files (streaming video) between macs using AFS was faster then doing the same thing with my linux machine over the open source standard of SAMBA.
Its magic .. damn you !
So there you have it . By some technology indistinguishable from magic my macs had talked to each-other and decided on a little functionality to brighten up my day: Share pictures and music just like that. Wether the other kids in the room ( my Ubuntu station and Windows machine) could join or not (they couldn’t) was none of their concern. Too bad really. I mean , I feel good about the fact i can share pictures and music from a centralized place .. but am appalled at the fact that somewhere somehow I have fallen for the proprietary marketing trick. It comes with its advantages of course. But the next time I sit behind my Ubuntu workstation … and curse for not being able to access my Itunes .. I know i’ll curse : Damn you proprietary devil !
To top it of ? A video for you guyz 🙂
Keep it simple.
If visitor statistics have proven one thing in the last few days, then it is that keeping it simple works best. A small article about configuring a Ubuntu workstation for grandma turned into a site-rush overnight. The moral of the story ? Linux is being presented as an operating system that is way to hard. Somehow I think that the one thing that is holding back de destribution of Linux desktops to the mainstream is … The Linux community itsellf.
Blame the community ?
Now don't get me wrong. Whenever I was in need of Penguin related information, I knew where to turn. Tons of forums, newsgroups and websites where jam packed with information. And they where more then happy to provide it …. Only .. it was presented in a way that was only comprehensible for “the inner circle of linus-ians “ They where friendly and nice, and the howto's started out pretty friendly and easy , but three posts later in the thread the learning curve had gone allmost vertical and they where talking Grep this and Ls that and what have you. When this sudden increase of complexity startled me and I asked or a little more directions I was redirected to another thread that dealt with that problem on its own. Its like asking somebody to help you because your car door is stuck, and as an answer they give you a manual in automechanics.
My wires are crossed.
Wireless support in Linux is a pitfall in that account. When it works out of the box , its fine , when it does not : You're screwed ! And this is sometimes the fault of the evil hardware manufacturers that don”t want to release their drivers (poor Linux heroes even reverse engeneer them to get it to work). But other times there IS a way to get it going, but you have to edit this, copy that, compile this , download that … AAArg ! By the time I have figured that out my laptop will be outdated anyway.
And once more all together : AUTOMAAAATIX !!!
An example that it CAN work is the famous automatix script, instead of posting a gigantic textfile with a complete list of applications you can make, they decided to script it in a little Gui so people could click and pick what they needed. Is it Linux-geeky cool : NO ? Would bash-brawlers frown upon this de-geek-i-fi-cation of technology ? YES .. Does it work ? Hell yes !
Strip the technobabble from the how-to and bring it down to playschool level : Copy this, past it there, click that. No pipes , no grep, no compile, no wget .. just copy paste and click. And the result : A newbie proof way that has done MORE for the linux community since its early rise a year ago , then pages and pages of “man” files have done in years. I'm not saying we don't need these because we do and they are a wonderfull work of patience and passion, but to somebody who just gets started .. they just don't work.
It can be for dumb people too.
And the other thing is : Using Linux does not mean turning it into some major command line operating system that will be able to run the planet should the white house ever decide to pull the 64 k of ram out of the presidents head. It can also mean using it for a simple system. Or a safe-surft computer. So you see my bearded linux-zealots ! Keep'in it simple is keepin it popular !