Archive for May 17th, 2007

I must mention some things that I thought were obvious. Today I was working with someone that did not know the scroll wheel on a mouse could be used to move a browser page up and down. To scroll down the page, he moved the mouse to the scroll bar on the right side of the screen and dragged it down.

When I showed him that the page could be moved up and down without moving the mouse, he thought it was the best thing ever.

Not only can the scroll button be used to move the whole page up and down, if the cursor is inside a text box with its own scroll bar, the text box can be scrolled with the wheel.

My mouse has left and right functionality too. Not all mice can do this, but mine will scroll the page back and forth if there is a scroll bar across the bottom of the page. I also talked before about using Ctrl-scroll to zoom in and out.

This functions work in any application that has a scroll bar on the side of the window.

TSPY=2.84

Last year at this time I downloaded a full copy of SUSE Linux to see how easy it would be to get it running. This year I decided to try the educational version, of Ubuntu. It’s called Edubuntu.

What a difference a year makes.

Last year the installation worked just fine. It was the same this time. I downloaded the ISO, burned a CD and booted from the CD. Edubuntu can now run from the CD without an install. That’s handy. I plan on using the OS a little bit so I did a full install.

After answering a couple of username/password questions, I was finished. When everything was finished, it kicked out the CD and told me to hit Enter to reboot.

When the OS booted I logged in and tried the acid test. I connected to my home server and grabbed some MP3 files. Last year SUSE couldn’t play an MP3. This time the Totem Movie Player told me the file needs a codec. It went online and found one that plays MP3 files. It worked just like you would expect. After giving the OS my admin password, it installed and played my MP3. Wow!

Edubuntu is designed for school use. It has Open Office installed for word processing, spreadsheets, databases and presentations. Gimp is included for graphics. Firefox is the default browser. There are some games but nothing particularly for education… unless you consider Sudoku educational.

I’m running Edubuntu on a five year old Dell Inspiron 2650 laptop (1.7 GHz, 512 MB RAM). It works just fine. I think I’m going to play around with it for a while.