Linux Rants

Recently, the cord on my extremely uncool (but functional) pair of headphone have started to bother me. After a near miss on my usual bus, I found myself wandering the isles of our friendly neighborhood Fry’s Electronics. I found myself a nice set of Bluetooth headphones to go with my phone. They work like a charm.

As I was sitting at my computer the other night, I thought that it would be a good idea to get myself a Bluetooth adapter for my computer so I could use my new wireless headset with some of my games, and of course, Skype. Again, I found myself wandering the isles of Fry’s Electronics, and found a nice, cheap little Belkin adapter that would barely be noticeable attached to my computer.

After my purchase, I realized that I was in a great position to do a little head to head comparison of how Bluetooth would work in Windows vs. Linux. My computer dual boots Vista and Ubuntu 10.04.

I started with Vista.

The process was pretty normal, with one little hiccup that I don’t consider a deal breaker. After opening the case, I was informed that the disk didn’t have a Vista driver, and they pointed me to the website. I click a few links, a 200MB+ download, and the driver is in my possession.  Run the Setup.exe file, and it installs all the software that I’d ever need to use the Bluetooth headset. Sure enough, connects first try. No fuss no muss. Other than the driver glitch, not a bad process.

On to Ubuntu.

I was a little nervous about this as I’d never done this before, and there was no mention of anything about Linux in the little dinky book that came with my little Bluetooth adapter. I figured the process might be similar. Find me a nice little driver out on the website, download, install, done. After firing up Ubuntu, I was in for a pleasant surprise. There was already a Bluetooth icon in my upper panel. The first thought that crossed my mind was “that can’t be it.” I was wrong. That was it. I clicked on it and connected to my headset first try. No installs. No software downloads. No setups. It’s just there.

The funny thing is, people say that Linux is hard.

A release candidate for the newest Ubuntu Linux has been…. well….. released.  You can find it here.

There’s a great review of Linux Mint Celena located here.  Celena is an Ubuntu based Linux distribution.  Looks pretty nice.  Has anybody tried it?

Gutsy Gibbon Beta release is HERE!! If you’re feeling adventurous, you can download it here. Let me know what you think!

I admit, I usually don’t use printers. The closest thing to a printer I normally use is PDF printing, and even that is usually reserved for doing taxes at the end of the year. Today must have been my day. I needed to print something at work. I could have moved it over to the Windows box that goes largely unused on my desk (planning on making it Ubuntu 7.10 when the full release comes out), but that just annoys me. Why not configure a printer today?

The process itself was relatively painless. I am currently using Ubuntu 7.04 on my D800 laptop. Just clicked the menus and entered the nework information, and BAM (man, I hope that’s not copyrighted), I had a printer installed. I fired off a test print and waited for the familiar sound of my printer warming up. Nothing. I wander over to the printer to see an error on the screen. No paper in Tray 1. OK, no biggie. Tray 1 is the manual feed tray, so I steal some paper out of Tray 2 and put it in the Manual Feed Tray. Right away, the print job comes out in vibrant grays. OK, no major issues so far, and I’ve got a working printer. Just need to fix the tray problem. There’s the rub. It doesn’t seem to matter what tray I tell it go to, it always goes to the Manual Feed. I can’t make it go anywhere else (other than to another printer).

Stupid printer.

I’ve been running Windows Vista Ultimate Edition on my desktop computer for a little while now. I picked it up because I was able to get a massive discount on it. Less than $50. If the price had not been so low, I would not have bothered to buy it. I’ve been demoing the new Gutsy Gibbon Tribe 5 release of Ubuntu, and have been really liking it. Liking it to the point that I’m seriously thinking about ditching the hugely expensive (normally) OS for a free one. Today I was reading about the people that are complaining about the Windows Vista Ultimate Extras package, and while I didn’t pay nearly as much as other Windows Vista Ultimate users did, I have to agree that Microsoft has treated us with indifference, if not disdain. Their treatment of their customers only pushes me closer to leaving their OS behind entirely. Is there any reason that I shouldn’t?