I am a keyboard junkie, and I encourage others to use it more than the average use and experience the change, whether it is in the console or one of the modern keyboard-driven launchers. One of the complaints I keep hearing is that with the command line, people have to type in name of the executable to open a document. Whereas in the GUI world, you just double-click on a document, or on the application icon. [Continue]
Till now I was a loyal Arch Linux user. And before that I was an avid Kubuntu, another one from Ubuntu family, user. It might seem as if I am back to square one, but in fact I have learned a lot about the organization of a Linux distribution, and interaction between various components. [Continue]
Ubuntu Netbook Edition has dropped OpenOffice in favour of Google Docs. One of my friends asked me if this was because a netbook’s resources were not enough for Ubuntu and OpenOffice. I doubt. [Continue]
One of the ways of making command line more usable is by providing auto-completion. It is a non-intrusive way of freeing the user from the burden of remembering options. Bash provides something called programmable completion which can be extended for your own applications. [Continue]
What unique thing does my Linux box do that makes other OS jealous? The biggest feature that my Linux box offers is choice, and that helps me grab many more. This choice is not limited to desktop applications like editors or browsers or media players or email clients, it also works for desktop environments, window managers, sound daemons, firewalls, right down to a specific kernel version, even my own. [Continue]
Intel has turned over Moblin, an OS for mobile devices, to the Linux Foundation. Andy Updegrove has a nice round up, and explains why it might be better for Moblin to be governed by a neutral body. As a mobile user, I am waiting for the tight coupling between mobile hardware and mobile software to break. [Continue]
The recession might bring an accelerated adoption of Linux, IDC survey says (pdf). Of course, as Andy Updegrove says, this is something good coming out of the bad times. I expected to see results like these to come out during economic downturns, because even today cost is seen as the biggest factor in favour of Linux. [Continue]
Google Chrome have decided to go with Gtk+ for the Linux version. However you still see mentions of Qt in the developers mailing list. I too had wondered the same after Qt went LGPL. [Continue]
It will be 1234567890 day this weekend. That is, we will get 1234567890 seconds old since the Unix epoch (00:00:00 UTC on Jan 1 1970), on Friday, Feb 13 2009 at 3:31:30 PM PST, which is Saturday, Feb 14 2009 5:01:30 AM Indian time. On most of the Unix systems you can find out your local time for this Unix time using date -d@1234567890. [Continue]
What do you think of Linux minus the command line? HP Mini Mi is the netbook powered with Linux, sans command line. The general efforts of making Linux more usable seem to be going against the command line. [Continue]