A few days ago, I caught a special on Geeks.com for a refurbished Dell Studio 1747 with the Core i7-720QM CPU, 8GB of RAM, a 500GB 7,200 RPM hard drive, and 17-inch display at 1,600×900 resolution. It’s priced around $1,000 new as configured, and the Geeks price was less than $900. I was looking for a good laptop that had enough horsepower, storage, and screen space that it’d be equally useful in the home office and on the road and it looked like the Dell fit the bill.

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Ohio LinuxFest Speakers Announced and Registration Open

Columbus, OHIO — August 9, 2010 — The Ohio LinuxFest is proud to announce that registration is now open for Ohio LinuxFest. The schedule has also been announced, and this year will feature a fantastic line-up of talks for new and experienced Linux users. The 2010 Ohio LinuxFest takes place in Columbus, Ohio at the Greater Columbus Convention Center from September 10 through September 12.

As always, the main schedule takes place on Saturday. The schedule kicks off with a keynote from GNOME Foundation Executive Director Stormy Peters, followed by five tracks of talks from open source and Linux experts like Tarus Balog, Amber Graner, Catherine Devlin, Dru Lavigne, Paul Frields, and Jon ‘maddog’ Hall. This year’s OLF also features a special medical track for those interested in the use of free and open source software in medicine.

The final keynote will be a real treat for Linux and open source enthusiasts interested in free media. Christopher “Monty” Montgomery of Xiph.org will be talking about next generation open source media formats.

Once again the Ohio LinuxFest is free to all, but space is limited. Sign up today at http://ohiolinux.org/register.html. If you want to support OLF, the organizers have made a supporter package available for $65 that includes lunch and an OLF t-shirt. For those who want to attend Friday’s OLFU sessions, a professional pass is also available for $350.

Hotel rooms are also limited. The Ohio LinuxFest organizers have made arrangements with Drury Inn for a low rate available on a first-come, first-served basis. Note that rooms usually sell out, so book early! More info is available at http://ohiolinux.org/hotel.html.

About Ohio LinuxFest

The Ohio LinuxFest is a grassroots conference for the open source community that started in 2003 as an inter-LUG meeting and has grown steadily since to become the midwest’s largest open source event. It’s an annual event for Linux and open source enthusiasts to gather, share information, and socialize.

So, why is GNOME 3.0 slipping? That was the first question I had for GNOME’s Executive Director and GNOME developer Vincent Untz when they contacted me earlier this week. The simple answer is that the GNOME Release Team evaluated the components that make up GNOME 3.0 and decided that they’re not ready to go gold. GNOME 3.0 is more ambitious than the average GNOME release.

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Have been using the Android since, and really like it. It has a few flaws, but overall I’m enjoying it and probably won’t go back to the iPhone (though it’s nice having a spare phone just in case…).

Android Pros, Cons, and miscellaneous…

Some of the things that have struck me so far about the Android/Nexus One vs. the iPhone or just in general:

• The touchscreen/interface seem less responsive than the iPhone. Especially the home button and such. Feels like I really have to punch them to activate.  Swiping between home screens usually takes more than one try.
• The Nexus One has only dropped one call since I have been using it, vs. lots of dropped calls on the iPhone. More testing needed, but generally feels like the Nexus gets better reception than the iPhone 3GS in the same areas.
• On the other hand, still not getting very good reception from AT&T in my own house. Occasionally will get “no reception” in some areas of the second floor. Ugh.
• Any app I want. The Nexus One lets me add other app stores or download Android Apps that aren’t “blessed” to appear in the Android Marketplace.
• More info about Apps. When installing an app, it verifies that you really do want to do that and tells you what the app will have access too. Which leads me to:
• WTF? Many of the apps try to access way more than what should be strictly necessary. For example, looked at a ringtone app that wanted to access my contact list and location. Um, no. Didn’t install that one. Would be nice to see some pushback on that, and telling developers “yeah, no – you’re doing a ringtone app, there’s absolutely no reason you need that.” I’m looking at you, Ringtones.
• Games… the Android is so vastly, massively behind the iOS here. I’ll be keeping my iPhone if for no other reason than to be able to play some of the games I enjoy. So it’s now a glorified iPod Touch, but still…
• Google Voice – awesome. Can make calls seamlessly on the Nexus One using Google Voice.
• Applications – for the most part, aside from games, I can find what I want on the Android. Dropbox, Evernote, Twitter, Mustard for Identi.ca, etc.
• As one would expect, integration with Google services is excellent. I use Google calendar and such, and they integrate very well with the Nexus One.
• Camera is far better than the iPhone 3GS, including a flash. No front-facing camera, though, and not sure how it compares with the iPhone 4.
• Speed is comparable or faster than the iPhone.
• Seems ever-so-slightly less stable than the iPhone. Had to reboot it today by popping the battery out because it stopped responding entirely to input. Including holding down the power button.
• Haven’t yet tried movies and music on the Nexus One, excepting a small sampling of the freebie MP3s they pre-load on the phone. I doubt I’ll use the Nexus much for music or movies since I have an old-school iPod with 120GB of storage and an iPad for watching movies.
• Battery life is horrible. Really, really bad. Especially if you leave it on the defaults of syncing data in the background, etc. No way I’d make it through an entire day of heavy use without a charger nearby.
• Being able to replace the battery? Priceless. I have my eye on an expansion battery that doubles the life of the existing battery and comes with a new back to the phone to accommodate the size.
• Accessories … the Nexus One is going to fare poorly here. Millions of iPhone 3GS models in circulation, vs. maybe tens of thousands of the Nexus One.
• Storage – the Nexus One is provided with a 4GB data card, and that can be swapped out for a larger card. Given what they were charging for the Nexus One unlocked and through Google, I’d expect more storage. It’s nice to be able to swap out cards, but the onboard storage is pretty skimpy.
• Overall, I like the Android interface and the fact it’s not quite as rigid as the iOS interface. It can be themed, you can add widgets, have spiffy animated backgrounds, etc. However, it’s not quite as pretty as the iOS interface. Really, Google should hire Jakub ‘Jimmac’ Steiner and set him loose on Android. That would kick ass.
• Turn by turn navigation – major win over iPhone. Far better than the AT&T app that comes with the iPhone.
• What, no compass?
• The default clock app sucks compared to the iPhone app. No time zone / world clock, no timer. The alarms setup is clunky, though the repeat alarms are nice.

Where the Android doesn’t quite live up to the iPhone, it’s usually a matter of missing by a few inches, not falling yards short. Where Android is better than the iPhone, it’s a night and day comparison. Is Apple likely to open the App store so competing apps will be available? Hell no. Is Apple likely to open up iOS? Of course not. Will Apple license iOS to other manufacturers? Doesn’t seem very likely — especially after buying their own chip design company.

Is iOS a better user experience? Yes, but by a slim margin. It’s not like the difference between the iPhone and the Blackberry, where being poked in the eye with a sharp stick seems preferable to using a Blackberry all day…

That’s all for now. It’s only been a few days, so we’ll see what the next few uncover. More than likely, though, I’m going to be sticking to Android. Despite its shortcomings, I like the fact that it’s based on Linux, more open than the iPhone OS, and I can get Android devices in several shapes and sizes from different vendors/carriers.

Mandriva is a bit of a standout among Linux distributions. It doesn’t quite fit with the community distributions, and it doesn’t quite fit with the corporate distros either. Mandriva provides a free distribution on DVD that’s all open source software, and a PowerPack edition that contains some proprietary software like support for non-free multimedia codecs. The business model that Mandriva has pursued over the past 10 years hasn’t been particularly successful — the company has been through bankruptcy once and has been having financial problems again recently.

But the company does provide a solid and user-friendly Linux distro. To test out Mandriva 2010.1, I grabbed the DVD for x86 and gave it a spin. Mandriva also provides a live CD version, but I wanted to try out GNOME, KDE, and LXDE.

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We’re looking for speakers who can address a wide range of topics related to Linux and open source. Talks suited for beginners or experts, or in-between, are welcome. We’re particularly interested in talks on current topics like Android, MeeGo, KVM, Python for System Administration, WordPress, GNOME, KDE, Ruby on Rails, Django, Linux distributions, and more. And just because it’s a LinuxFest doesn’t mean we won’t welcome BSD-related talks with open arms. In short, if it’s relevant to the OLF audience, we’d like to hear your ideas.

Get them in quick, though! The call for presentations is online at http://www.ohiolinux.org/cfp10.html. You have until July 7th to submit your best proposals, speakers will be notified approximately two weeks after the CFP ends. Successful proposals will be detailed, interesting, and free of marketing content.

Keynote speakers for Ohio LinuxFest are already selected. Speakers will be on the same schedule as GNOME Executive Director Stormy Peters, and Ogg creator Christopher “Monty” Montgomery. Have questions about the CFP? Shoot an email to speakers@ohiolinux.org.

The Ohio LinuxFest is an annual conference dedicated to Free and Open Source Software (FOSS). Held in Columbus, Ohio every Fall, the Ohio LinuxFest is the largest FOSS conference in the MidWest. More than 1,300 people attended last year’s OLF. Registration is free and open to anyone interested in Linux and open source. For more information on Ohio LinuxFest, see http://www.ohiolinux.org/.

Let me start off by saying, I agree with the FSF’s basic mission and philosophy. I want to see free software, not just open source, succeed. Open source has really already succeeded. Look at any organization and you’ll see it using open source. Look at any major company involved in the software industry, including Microsoft, and you’ll see it contributing to open source to some degree. Much of the infrastructure we all use on the Internet every day is open source, and it will continue to grow.

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The last openSUSE release came out in November of 2009. It was the last openSUSE release before the project went onto a fixed eight-month release cycle. It’s a bit slower than the Ubuntu and Fedora projects but gives a bit more time to work on the release. Lots of good stuff has been developed since 11.2.

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The basics of grep are simple: to search for a given pattern, run grep pattern file. This will look through one or more files and return any lines that match the search pattern. Note that grep returns lines of text and the filename, if you’re searching through files rather than standard input or the output of another command.

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Note that not all versions of find are created equal. The find command you’ll use on Linux is slightly different than the find on BSDs, Solaris, or Mac OS X. Much of the syntax is shared and can be used between systems, but not all.

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