The Great Ubuntu-Girlfriend Experiment: “I’ve toyed with Linux since 2002, when I first installed Mandrake. With the latest release of Ubuntu, I was interested to see how far Linux had come since then in terms of being used easily by the mainstream. So, I tricked my grudging girlfriend Erin into sitting down at a brand new Ubuntu 8.04 installation and performing some basic tasks.”
I’ve played Assassin’s Creed only on XBox 360 and I don’t recall the procedure to quit the game being as byzantine as it is on the PC version, shown below:
How to Get Skype Running on Your 64-Bit Linux Box: If you’re running Linux on a Core Duo or AMD64-based machine, you haven’t been able to run Skype on it…until now! If you’ve got a 64-bit machine running the latest Ubuntu — version 8.04, a.k.a. “Hardy Heron”, enter the following on the command line and you’ll be Skyping away (and not just text chat, but audio and video as well): sudo apt-get install ia32-libs lib32asound2; wget -O skype-install.deb http://www.skype.com/go/getskype-linux-ubuntu; sudo dpkg -i --force-all skype-install.deb; (there’s also stuff for getting Skype to work on previous 64-bit Ubuntus and dealing with a webcam that refuses to work).
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Learning Curves for Text Editors
Freedom is a Mac OS X app that temporarily cuts off your network access so you can get work done. It disables wireless and ethernet networking on an Apple computer for up to three hours at a time, after which it re-enables your network, restoring everything as normal. The only way to circumvent Freedom during its imposed blackout is to reboot the machine; it’s believed that the hassle of rebooting will be enough to keep you doing it. Freedom is free as in beer, but if you find it useful, its makers encourage you to send a donation.
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Cartoon Silhouettes
All tech articles and no play makes Jack a dull nerd. Here’s a fun little exercise — can you identify the cartoon characters by their silhouettes in the illustration below?
Click the image to see it at full size.
Image courtesy of Miss Fipi Lele.
I’m installing the latest version of Ubuntu — version 8.04, a.k.a. “Hardy Heron” — using Wubi, the installer that lets you install Ubuntu directly from Windows. It’s a Windows app that retrieves and installs Ubuntu files and sets up a separate partition. As ITWire puts it, “No more burning a downloaded ISO image to CD. No more booting from the CD to install Ubuntu. No more disk partitioning decisions. No more Grub boot manager.” I’ll let you know how it goes.