...making Linux just a little more fun!
Mike Orr [sluggoster at gmail.com]
Thu, 26 Oct 2006 10:11:15 -0700
[For the Mailbag, regarding my Aug 9 letter about a Nokia tablet article.]
The more I looked into the Nokia Internet Tablet 770, the more I became concerned about its speed, capacity, and cost of add-ons I considered essential. I finally ended up going to the dark side and getting a Macintosh laptop. [1] So if anybody wants to do an article on the Nokia or on Linux or Open Source use in palmtops in general, we're looking for one.
[1] Well, it's not that dark, it's only twilight compared to a
certain other OS. But it was strange reading a 6-page license
agreement when I hadn't used proprietary software for nine years. And
I still use Linux at work. 
-- Mike Orr <sluggoster at gmail.com>
Faber J. Fedor [faber at linuxnj.com]
Thu, 26 Oct 2006 22:09:08 -0400
On 26/10/06 10:11 -0700, Mike Orr wrote:
> [For the Mailbag, regarding my Aug 9 letter about a Nokia tablet article.] > > The more I looked into the Nokia Internet Tablet 770, the more I > became concerned about its speed, capacity, and cost of add-ons I > considered essential. I finally ended up going to the dark side and > getting a Macintosh laptop.
Welcome to the Not-So-Dark Side. I picked up a Macbook a few months ago; I needed a new laptop and it was either a Macbook or Ubuntu on a Thinkpad and I can install Ubuntu on anything, including the Macbook.
We in the FOSS world would do well to steal a few ideas from OS X. I know some KDE people have already ripped off^W^Wemulated Quicksilver[1]. I love the idea of an application being self-contained [2] and I am very impressed with how quickly Spotlight updates its search database[3].
The OS X GUI ain't bad but it's not as great and wonderful as I've heard.
[1] Quicksilver is a free third-party app that is like a "GUI command line" but is much more. KDE has an app called Katapult which is similar, IIUC.
[2] Most OS X packages I've come across are just file system images. You double-click them and they are mounted (presumably via the loopback device). You can then click and drag the "application" to your Application folder. The "application" is actually a directory structure containing all of the executables, libraries and other files necessary to run the app, similar to what Firefox does.
[3] Think of Spotlight as a GUI-ized 'locate' and 'fgrep', i.e. if I untar a file from the command line, Spotlight has already stored the contents of the files in its database. I'm thinking it's done at the kernel level.
-- Regards, Faber Fedor President Linux New Jersey, Inc. 908-320-0357 800-706-0701
Kapil Hari Paranjape [kapil at imsc.res.in]
Fri, 27 Oct 2006 09:12:45 +0530
Hello,
On Thu, 26 Oct 2006, Faber J. Fedor wrote:
> Welcome to the Not-So-Dark Side. I picked up a Macbook a few months > ago; I needed a new laptop and it was either a Macbook or Ubuntu on a > Thinkpad and I can install Ubuntu on anything, including the Macbook.
You can install Ubuntu on anything but can you get it to work? The new Intel-powered Mac notebooks have some non-Intel wireless cards unsupported by the default Linux kernel. There is probably some "laitessht" driver you can download from some site and make it work.
On the other hand everything you need for using Ubuntu on the Thinkpad is already on the Ubuntu archives. This is not specific to IBM; the same applies to Dell, HP/Compaq, Toshiba ... Those companies are (at least somewhat) interested in trying to make their hardware work with Linux---if only to sell cheaper laptops in Asia. Apple does not have any such interest.
Beware the white and bright side---it may blind you to the evil that
lurks within I prefer to remain in the darker depths of Debian, GNU
and Linux.
Regards,
Kapil. --
Jimmy O'Regan [joregan at gmail.com]
Fri, 27 Oct 2006 10:42:04 +0100
On 27/10/06, Faber J. Fedor <faber at linuxnj.com> wrote:
> [3] Think of Spotlight as a GUI-ized 'locate' and 'fgrep', i.e. if I untar a > file from the command line, Spotlight has already stored the contents of > the files in its database. I'm thinking it's done at the kernel level. >
Beagle (http://beagle-project.org/Main_Page) can do that: http://nat.org/demos/beagle-2.html