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Oranges and apples, Windows 2000 printer fail
Its an oranges and apples comparison comparing Windows 2000 to Ubuntu 9.10 Linux, but the comparison is somewhat valid because of the situation. A former volunteer came in the other day with a Windows 2000 computer he bought several years ago through the community MAR (Microsoft Authorized Refurbisher) program. He was having a problem getting a Hewlett Packard USB printer to work with Windows 2000. He had his install CD for the printer, we confirmed that his computer more than met the minimum specifications, and that he had sufficient service packs and updates to run the printer.
Old systems web site (in pictures)
I was stumbling across different web sites this morning looking at older computer hardware when I came across Eski Biligisayarlarim's collection of old computer photographs. There are some truly hard to find pieces in this collection. If you're a fan of old computers you'll really appreciate this web site because not only does it look at the external look of most of the machines, but almost all machines also have photographs of the "guts" of the systems as well.
A look at Fedora 12
Introduction
With all the problems I've had with Ubuntu 9.10 on my Lenovo 3000 C100 notebook I decided it was time to give another distribution a try. I briefly considered Debian GNU/Linux, Linux Mint, and OpenSUSE, but settled on Fedora for a few reasons:
- Red Hat Linux (before Fedora) used to be the bomb both in home and business.
- Red Hat Linux still is the bomb in business use.
- Of all the "mythtv" distributions I've used I've had the best success with MythDora, the Fedora-based distribution.
Year of the ebook reader?
One of the more intriguing devices of 2009 are all the different ebook readers that have sprouted up. Really this is old technology with some newer twists. Without a doubt the Amazon Kindle is the trailblazer of eBook readers. Not long after the Kindle's wild success Sony announced their own eBook reader. Another lesser known company offering eBook readers is Astak.
Dual boot setup on 80GB hard drive
Supporting both Windows and Linux, but being a pretty much die-hard Linux fanboy, I broke down a couple of days ago and installed both Windows XP Home (the license on my notebook is home) and the latest Ubuntu Linux on my system. If you've been keeping up with my posts you'll know I'm not a huge fan of either. Windows tends to be too easy to infest with nasty things and Ubuntu 9.10 has all sorts of problems (power management for one) it's predecessor 9.04 didn't. But what I thought you might find interesting was the slightly oddball partitioning scheme I chose.
Coreboot work...
Lately I've been a bit quiet, mostly because Maria and I have been swamped with Christmas preparations. Of the little time I have had outside of work I've been concentrating on taking 5 minutes here are there to submit information about different motherboards to the Coreboot project.
Because I really need to remind myself what I've done I've documented everything on this Coreboot Project page. My goal is to submit 50 motherboards that haven't been documented yet.
Find basic system specification information in Linux
One of the things we do a lot of in Computer Recycling is find the specifications for a donated machine. Typically we go into the BIOS or look at the hardware, but sometimes there's a need to find system information from within a booted Linux system. Since the command line is pretty much universal the following command should work on just about any Linux system:
cat /proc/cpuinfo | grep 'model name' > sysinfo.txt | cat /proc/meminfo | grep MemTotal >> sysinfo.txt | df -hH >> sysinfo.txt
