Mozilla's Prism and BBC Radio iPlayer streams make a neat combo.
Once you’ve settled into using Linux on the desktop you may be interested in how you can start doing things a little more productively, or writing short scripts to do away with some of the more repetitive tasks. Theres no getting away from the fact that a GUI can be limiting for some tasks. Linux Command offers a useful introduction to the Linux shell. The guide takes you through file management and permissions, job control and I/O redirection.
Graphical user interfaces (GUIs) are helpful for many tasks, but they are not good for all tasks. I have long felt that most computers today do not use electricity. They instead seem to be powered by the “pumping” motion of the mouse! Computers were supposed to free us from manual labor, but how many times have you performed some task you felt sure the computer should be able to do? You ended up doing the work by tediously working the mouse. Pointing and clicking, pointing and clicking.
Technorati Tags: Linux, desktop, shell
Responding to consumer demand Dell is in the process of certifying Novell’s desktop Linux product for its corporate machines. Computer Wire reports:
“We are listening, and as a result, we are working with Novell to certify our corporate client products for Linux, including our OptiPlex desktops, Latitude notebooks, and Dell Precision workstations. This is another step toward ensuring that our customers have a good experience with Linux on our systems.”
Read the complete report here.
So, now you know a little bit about what OpenID is, and how it benefits you. The next step is to sign up! Because the OpenID network is decentralized, there are many providers. Here is a handy list of those I know of:
There is a degree of trust required when choosing a provider. If you know how to administer a web server, you can host your own identity. Expect information on this in a future post. Please let me know if you know of any more OpenID providers in a comment.
The UK Government has set up a website allowing people to submit ‘e-petitions’ for any cause they deem worthy. David Heathcote has created a petition requesting that the power limit for UK radio amatuers be increased from 400W to perhaps 1kW to bring it in line with some other countries. The reasoning suggested is that the limit to 400W makes it harder to compete in contests. This is an interesting suggestion. What would the ramifications be if this were to be allowed? Would it make life more difficult for those who stick to 50W and below? Would a raise in power cause interference in places 400W doesn’t?
The petition currently has 54 signatures. To the few petitions I have subscribed the Government has provided a response. It’ll be interesting to see how Ofcom reply to this.
Just a quick note to let any random browsers know that I’ve chosen to sync some of my other blog posts with this site. This should give anyone who visits this site an idea about who I am and what I do, which is the point of this blog 
. So, if some posts appear that don’t appear on topic compared to what I’ve posted before, thats why.
Currently I am syndicated a blog about OpenID, which contains news, information and guides and Pan Linux, which talks about the Linux operating system and desktop.
Linux Magazine has an interesting article discussing the possibility of Dell supporting Linux on their retail desktop machines. After Dell asked for customer feedback through their Idea Storm website last week they received a large responses asking for the option of Linux being bundled with their machines or opting out of an operating system altogether. Good article, worth the read.
For Dell to offer a Linux desktop, they’d have to tie up with one of the commercial distributions — Red Hat or Novell. They would then get to field all of the complaints from everyone that wanted [insert favorite niche distribution here] but they could spin the fact they were the first tier one vendor to really throw their weight behind desktop Linux as a positive.
Read the complete article here.
Hi there, and welcome to my new OpenID themed blog. In the next few sentences I’d like to take the time explaining what OpenID is and how it benefits you. During the next few months I’ll be blogging about websites that start providing the option of identifying with OpenID and the news that comes along with that.
OpenID, in technobabble, is an open, decentralized framework providing digital identities for folks like you and me. What makes this useful? Well for starters, the word, ‘decentralized’ has a huge impact. Rather than simply having many overlords such as My Space, AOL and Microsoft providing a digital identity via their services, you can grab one from any provider. Because the OpenID network is, well, open, anybody can set up a server and provide IDs. So, this offers the obvious bonus, one username and passwords for the dotcoms that choose to adopt the system. Also, this allows for some cool things - such as your username becomes a universal resource identifier (URI). So, rather than ‘billybob33′, I can be known as, for example, ‘billybob.bloghost.com’. This advantage of this is that I now have an identity that points to an accessible resource where I can publish more information. Neat, huh?
That’ll do for the first post. Thanks for dropping by! In the next few posts I’ll explain the hows and whys and talk a bit more about the pioneers of OpenID.
土人天堂 has published a useful post describing how memory is used under Linux. To the untrained eye Linux can look memory hungry - this article describes the reasoning behind that.
This entry is for those people who have ever wondered, “Why the hell is a simple KDE text editor taking up 25 megabytes of memory?” Many people are led to believe that many Linux applications, especially KDE or Gnome programs, are “bloated” based solely upon what tools like ps report. While this may or may not be true, depending on the program, it is not generally true — many programs are much more memory efficient than they seem.
Read the complete article here.
Just a quick note to let you know that I’ve added the option to subscribe to Planet Ham’s feed by email. If you would like to try it out click on the Subscribe to Email link on the Planet’s right hand menu bar. The service is provided by FeedBurner, so it should be reliable. Please let me know if you have any more ideas for the site.
Ubuntu Geek has put together a useful list of problems people have encountered when upgrading the Ubuntu Dapper release to Ubuntu Edgy. Well worth a read if your looking for a solution.
We have already discussed how to upgrade ubuntu dapper to edgyeft and some people are complaing after upgrade they had problems related to x server and update problems.I have collected some of the common problems and their solutions from ubuntu forums.
You can find the list
here.
