I have been thinking for a while about how to get more exposure for Free and Open Source Software. I work in a school district which, like most, is owned by Microsoft. I have tried for several years to get more FOSS on the desktops and I have had only minimal success. Firefox is now installed on most if not all machines, and we have Audacity, GIMP and even Blender on some machines. Open Office exists on a few that I have managed to infect, but that is about it. However, I have come to realize that Open Office is the one application that could really help to start a changeover.

One of my biggest complaints about technology in schools is that it is used almost exclusively to produce documents. There are some other isolated uses like video editing or producing school yearbooks and newspapers, but most classroom related activities almost always end up with students typing up a paper or a PowerPointless presentation. I believe this is an issue that sorely needs to be addressed before technology becomes an actual enhancement to education rather than what I suspect is mainly a detriment. Think about it. Learning is supposed to be hard and require effort. Students are supposed to be challenged to reach just beyond their grasp in order to learn and the bar is continually raised to encourage them to keep climbing (see Vygotsky’s work on scaffolding and the Zone of Proximal Development for example). Productivity software on the other hand is used to make things easier. (Note: the appropriateness of office software in education is an entirely different subject and not the focus of this post. I will take this up in the near future so stay tuned.)

Despite this flaw, MS Office is installed on all machines and it is the one application that everyone seems to feel is most necessary. Therefore, if one could manage to get large and entrenched educational organizations to move to Open Office, that would start a process that would not only save a good deal of money, but would also open the door to much more Free Software in schools - much of which is actually likely to bring about real learning opportunities. Once an organization dumps MS Office and adopts a free alternative, they have broken the keystone in the locked in, proprietary software model. Once MS Office is no longer viewed as essential, organizations can then start to reevaluate the need for Exchange and Active Directory as well and even the overall value of Windows based computers. Like any business, schools need to use cost-benefit analysis and really demonstrate that costly software actually achieves their goal of educating students, and if it they cannot they need to address that.

Therefore, I believe it is important for every parent and taxpayer to contact their school district’s superintendent and/or IT department and voice their frustration over the money spent on a fairly useless education tool like MS Office when entirely sufficient free replacements exist. Parents and taxpayers need to make it known that wasting public funds in this way is not appropriate and may very well impact their votes on future funding efforts like bonds and mill levies. The problem is that most people do not know there are free alternatives nor do they understand the relative uselessness of office productivity software in education. Those of us who do need to take the lead in our communities and get this conversation started. I recently did this and I encourage others to do this as well. The more a superintendent hears this, the more likely they will be to put pressure on IT departments to justify their spending and hopefully bring about a move to more Free Software and important savings as well.

Yesterday, my blog topped 100,000 views. Most of those probably belong to my mother, but thanks to the rest of you who have expressed an interest in my “ramblings”.

100,000 and counting...

/me wanders off to ponder how much one can actually make with Ad Sense…

Tags: blog stats

I finally got my hands on a Mini 9 yesterday and as seems typical with hardware these days my feelings are mixed. I’ve been looking for the “perfect” netbook to serve as a mobile lab computer in a high school. We have looked at the HP 2133 Mini note, the Asus eee 901 and now the Dell Mini 9. All of them have their strengths and weaknesses, but so far none of them strikes me as good enough for the task. The main reasons for looking at netbooks are price, portability and battery life. A cart of 30 full size laptops is quite heavy and bulky. We are hoping a bunch of small laptops will be easier to manage. Battery life seems good on some and all are quite a bit cheaper than a Dell Latitude or similar enterprise laptop. There is also the added bonus of being able to sell students and IT on Linux on them over Windows as it can help with price and maintenance and is quite user friendly. Okay, enough of that. For anyone looking at the Mini 9 here are my thoughts.

Dell Mini 9 - Review:

Out of the box this is a very slick and lightweight laptop. The gloss black case is attractive but prone to fingerprints. The screen is quite nice. It’s bright with a glossy surface that helps contrast. When angled wrong it can reflect but the market seems to be going toward gloss now (like new MacBooks) and it certainly helps the screen look nice. The 1024×600 resolution is nice for a screen this size - high enough for good readability with a good text size. The overall design is thinner than the eee, especially at the back, and more narrow than the HP. As a result the keyboard is wider and more functional than on the eee but not as nice as the HP. While nice for casual typing, it is still too small and cramped for writing papers on. Only the HP Mini Note seems up to that task.

As for performance it’s as good as any I’ve tried. It boots fast and apps, even Open Office, open quickly. It does not seem to get very warm at all and the lack of a fan means its rigged for silent running - perfect in a classroom environment. In contrast, the HP is hot and loud. Battery life seems very good. I’ve not done any formal testing but it seems like it will easily go four hours or more.

It has three USB ports as well as Ethernet (now why couldn’t Apple fit one on the Air?) as well as headphone, mic and VGA out. Unfortunately the VGA did not work with a 24in monitor - something the Asus eee could do without issue (other than the max resolution being less than the native 1920×1200). A white light on the front indicates when it’s on, sleeping or charging. A separate orange light blinks when the batter is low.

The modified Ubuntu OS is one of it’s stronger points. It works well and combines the ease of use of the eee Xandros tabbed OS with the power of the full Ubuntu desktop. In fact, you can switch back and forth between the launch bar and a regular desktop via a new menu option. The launch bar has nice effects with zooming in on each category’s apps while bluring the background. It gives it a very modern and professional feel. Students who tested it didn’t comment at all about the UI being different (in contrast, they all complain about not knowing how to use the new iMacs we have). Overall, the Dell Mini 9 is a very nice for the price netbook. Unfortunately, for a school environment its problems are too numerous and likely a deal breaker.

Perhaps the biggest “fault” of the Mini 9 is its fairly cheap construction. It has a fair bit of flex when opening and the plastic hinges seem unlikely to wear well with lots of use/abuse. The plastic case also does not inspire confidence and it’s likely a single drop will crack something. The battery is also a tad bit loose fitting and adds to the overall cheap feeling. The trackpad seems molded out of the case plastic rather than something separate which seems like a good idea but combined with the somewhat sloppy buttons just increases the feelings of lower quality.

In addition to being a bit too small for the job, the keyboard has some changes that will likely frustrate users. The shift keys, particularly on the right are small and easy to miss. Punctuation keys like the period, comma and question mark are also smaller as is the semi-colon, tab and several others. Prolonged typing could lead to frustration and frequent errors. Students may not care about the missing F keys but other users will. Many of the shortcut keys like screen and sound are controlled via the Fn key and the number keys. This is an acceptable solution for most things. For some odd reason the “windows” key is used to full screen an app.

I’ve also run into issues with networking. After working fine yesterday with wifi, all networking was dead today. I had to manually re-enable wired networking and wifi no longer works at all. NetworkManager also fails to load on boot up but can be run from a terminal. However, it does not indicate it has any wireless networking. Running ifconfig in a terminal only shows the loopback and eth0 interfaces. I spent about an hour on the phone with Dell today being transferred in circles (no less than 8 times - really) before someone mentioned that the Ubuntu team doesn’t work weekends. Great support. Although it is nice that Dell does offer support, it would be nice if other support staff was aware of their hours or even if the answering system would tell you they were closed instead of forwarding calls back to the wrong department.

Despite its strengths, I can’t see the Mini 9 holding up under moderate to heavy use as part of a school lab. Too bad really as Dell is even introducing a mobile cart to hold, charge and transport them in the school environment. Unfortunately, the somewhat flimsy construction and small keyboard mar what is otherwise a fairly nice laptop. Home or business users looking for a lightweight computer for travel and visits to coffee shops will likely enjoy it. I’d also like to see the modified Ubuntu available for other systems. The Ubuntu Netbook Remix is nice but Dell’s offering seems more polished.

Of the systems I’ve looked at, only the HP Mini Note seems suitable for schools. Unfortunatley its battery life is horrible (90 mins or so) and runs very hot and loud. HP has released an updated version for consumers with an Atom CPU and better battery life but it’s also made of plastic instead of the original aluminum. It is next on my list to try but I’m hoping for an update to the enterprise model.

Tags: Asus eee, Dell Mini 9, HP Mini Note, Netbook, ubuntu, Ubuntu Netbook Remix

Well, I finally got around to upgrading my WordPress install. I put it off for about a year and there have been a number of updates since then. I was a bit worried about doing it as I didn’t really even recall how I set it up in the first place. I also had forgotten my login for my host. After a bit of trial and error, I got logged in and then just followed the directions from WordPress. In all honesty, I kind of didn’t pay much attention and my backup was probably not very good (I didn’t have access to the mysql database). When I finished I had a blank blog and was a bit worried but after some more trial and error the whole thing came back like magic. I’ve also moved to a new theme which I think is working now.

If anyone notices anything odd, please let me know.

However, the whole process took about 10-15 minutes (not counting the download of all the files for the backup). WordPress really does a nice job with everything. Thanks WordPress!

Tags: upgrading, wordpress

Every six months there is a tradition of sorts in our house. I put on some comfy sweats, grab a beer or three and take over all the computers for a few days as I upgrade everyone to the newest version of Ubuntu. The kids agree, it’s better than Christmas, and my wife is so happy she even mows the lawn while I’m concentrating on iso downloads, progress bars, graphics errors and broken wifi.

Well, for my seventh upgrade I decided to try something new - a little tool called update-manager that somehow can do an upgrade too. Instead of my usual download, burn, boot, reinstall routine, I grabbed a laptop and did Alt+F2 “update-manager -d” and then for about an hour I watched as my third party sources were disabled, 1000+ updates were downloaded and installed, and 80-some obsolete packages removed including a half dozen kernel versions. When it was done, I rebooted expecting the work to begin. Well, I have to tell you the whole experience was quite a let down. There were no surprises, no fireworks, no broken X. My GRUB menu was even cleaned up. There simply wasn’t anything for me to do. The computer restarted and everything - even my spinney cube thing - just worked.

I’m sorry, but if this is going to be the future of Linux then I’m going to have to go back to Windows. Where is the fun in all this? I need an excuse to get out of the lawn work and this isn’t going to cut it. I mean, hell, my wife could do this herself leaving me with the grass and the cooking. She’ll probably start drinking my beers too.

So, Canonical, for us geeks could you include just a little X failure or something? There’s nothing like a big scary error message to ensure my job security and protect my beer supply. Maybe you could make it all red with skulls and crossbones too.

Many Thanks.

Tags: beer, ubuntu, upgrading

EDIT: it seems my chosen theme is broken or at least broken with my current version. I’ve had to revert back to the old, stale theme for now. Bummer.

—

Well, like a pair of well-worn but soiled underwear I’ve decided my old theme had to go. For the two or three people who care, don’t be shocked or think you are lost. It’s still me, just with new digs. I am also sadly in need of upgrading my WordPress install. I see version 2.7 is due soon so I think I’ll wait and upgrade then. However, having never upgraded before I’m expecting to break things, so if things are down bear with me. I’m also looking at mirroring content on a Wordpress.com site. I don’t like the default themes but it seems a good way to backup content. It would be cool if adding posts to one site would automatically feed to the other. Anyone know if that’s possible? In any case, my sister site is ubuntukids.wordpress.com. It’s not quite up-to-date yet but will be - at least until I get too lazy to keep it that way. Maybe I just need a new hosting solution - one that does the inevitable WordPress upgrades for me. I don’t suppose anyone knows of a good free one?

And speaking of upgrades, I’m running the Hardy to Intrepid upgrade on my laptop. I’ve always avoided doing it that way thinking a new install was easier so we’ll see how it goes. By the way, if you are thinking of upgrading on Thursday - don’t. Past experience has taught me that will take 10 - 20 hours depending on server load and sometimes fails. Do it a day or two before or wait a few days.

Tags: ubuntu, upgrading, wordpress

I couldn’t wait any longer so I did a 100% new install of Intrepid yesterday. For the past couple years I have upgraded to the new release by just installing it while preserving my /home. The upgrade tool never worked well for me and a new install only took 30 minutes so once I learned about keeping /home on a separate partition I’ve always done it that way.

However, I’ve read a few comments that caused me to question whether reusing all my settings and such with each new release was really a good idea. I kind of assumed that each new install would write new hidden files as necessary but I really don’t know for sure (can anyone enlighten me?). Therefore, I decided that is was time for an entirely new install. It takes a lot of faith to wipe out 200GB of data. I backed it all up - twice, but it was still kind of unnerving. However, I’m happy to report that my new Intrepid desktop is running beautifully and all my data survived, I hope.

Impressions:

I’ve used Ubuntu since Breezy and every time a new release comes I am impressed by the advances. This time is no different. I haven’t delved into the innards nor will I, but anecdotal evidence suggests it’s faster and cleaner. I like the little changes like how removable drives can be ejected with a click in Nautilus. The logout icon now has a drop down rather than the popup window. It’s a loss of some gloss but it’s faster and easier. I’m not sure if it’s new or not, but compiz now has a feature where instead of a cube you have a cylinder when rotating. Totally pointless but fun. To all the naysayers I will say that I love compiz and do find it a time saver and productivity tool. Obviously a lot of the effects are just that, but the scale tool (brings all windows up as small windows to choose from) is a great little time saver for me. It also is also fun to have effects that neither OS X nor windows has and helps excite new users.

I’ve also noticed that boot up time and login time seem a bit faster but I didn’t take any measurements. There is also a new system cleaner tool but I haven’t figured out what exactly it does. At the moment it wants to “clean” all my Open Office 3 debs. I’m assuming that means files used to install but no longer needed. I do wish OO.o3 was included, but I guess it came too late for inclusion. It is easy enough to install though. It does include version 2.6 of GIMP which is nice but I haven’t really played with it yet.

My understanding is that the first release after an LTS is a chance to take some risks and see what kinds of evolutionary leaps can be made. Edgy was aptly named. With Intrepid, however, I don’t see any major changes yet, I’m not sure what might have changed under the hood. From what I can tell after just a day it’s just solid advancement and so far has not presented any major or even minor bugs. Overall, it is a nice upgrade to a great OS.

As an added bonus, it’s my understanding that new kernel now supports some broadcom wifi cards out of the box. I have not yet installed on anything using broadcom, but I did install the proposed kernel in hardy on another system with broadcom and all seems well there. I look forward to trying Intrepid on a macbook. I believe that could be a marriage of great hardware and design with a great OS.

Thanks again Canonical for another great release.

The Obligatory Screenshots:

I’m still waiting for a release that looks as good as it runs. Both Hardy and Intrepid were nice right out of the box, but didn’t wow me. This is my modified desktop using included themes but new icons and wallpaper.

Intrepid Desktop

Rotating the Cylinder

Tags: ubuntu, upgrading

Okay, not really Linux news, but it seems some of the new MS ads were created using a Mac. I wonder what else they aren’t telling us? Might be the ad agency but still funny.

A while back I wrote about some problems with the eee 901 model - namely the update tool seemed broken and the eee download site that allowed one click install of a variety of apps didn’t work. Well, I reinstalled the Xandros OS the other day and was pleasently surprised to see that both these issues are fixed. My update installed and I was able to click and install Opera and a few other apps from the website - pretty slick actually. Maybe Asus didn’t think these would be issues for their average customer, but it would have been nice if their tech support could have said they were aware of the issues and working on them. While I’m glad they eventually fixed these problems, I think thier tech support could still use some work.

I know a lot of people don’t seem to like the simple, tabbed Xandros OS, but for a device like this I think it works well. Even with desktop Ubuntu or XP most people will just use a computer like this to surf the web and maybe play various media content and Xandros handles this just fine. It’s great that Linux is finding a home on these types of computers. I think it bodes well for the future of Linux.

On a related note, I noticed that the Dell Mini 9 will ship with what looks like a modified version of Ubuntu. It seems a bit of a cross between the simple Xandros OS and desktop Ubuntu. Who knows, maybe this is the magic combination. I ordered one to test for work, and I thought it was interesing that the configuration I wanted (1GB RAM, 16GB SSD, 1.3 mp webcam) only came with Ubuntu. I was actually going to order it with XP as that is what my district supports, but through the education store they said my build would have to come with Linux. I thought that was actually pretty cool - that Ubuntu was an option but not XP. Usually it’s the other way around. I should be receiving this soon and will share my thoughts when I can. In the meantime, this site has a few screenshots.

Tags: Asus eee, Xandros