Alvin's Educational Technology Blog

After nine hours of downloading from the mirror at OSU, my connection was lost.  I tried one of the torrents just to compare the download time.

Twenty minutes later, I had the ISO on my hard drive.  What a great way to distribute software.

I didn’t get to install the software until this morning.  The install is very simple.  I have a Dell laptop (Latitude D800) that I use as a sandbox machine.  It had XP on it when I started the Ubuntu install.  I told the Linux OS to use the whole hard drive and replace anything on the drive.  It got to 15% and stalled.  It couldn’t kill off the existing OS.  That’s no big deal.  I pulled out the Death and Destruction Disk (DDD).  Years ago I needed a way to format a disk in a minute or two without answering any questions.  I went through all the steps of manually formatting a disk.  Once it was blank, I made a Ghost image.  The image fits on a floppy with the Ghost software.  It takes 90 seconds to erase any hard drive and leave it boot-able to only DOS.

After I blanked the hard drive, Ubuntu had no problem doing the full install.  All my hardware was auto-detected and the login screen came right up.  On the first boot, I was told that a non-supported driver was available for my NVidia video card.  The splash screen said I could only do 3D graphics if I installed this driver.  So I installed it.

I had to reboot to enable it.

That was the end of that.  My graphics were completely hosed.  I could see half the screen and everything flickered.  There were no icons, just a solid orange rectangle.  I rebooted and did a safe-mode “get me back to what was working” thing.  Without too much pain, I got everything running again.

I am not impressed by this interface.  All the text looks rough.  I don’t know if there is an anti-aliasing setting that I am missing, but things look long in the tooth here.  If I have to look at this all day, it needs to be cleaner.

When I connected to my music server, it wouldn’t play an MP3 without an encoder download.  This is easy?  It won’t play a standard non-DRMed MP3 out of the box?

Here is the deal breaker.  I connected my Dell monitor.  It’s a standard 1024×768 flat panel.  I couldn’t get it to work at all.  I fiddled with it for an hour.  It’s basically a solid color matching the laptop background, but random ANSI characters flicker all around the screen. 

My laptop has to connect to an external display (monitor or projector).  Without that, I can’t do my job.

I let the kids play around with it the rest of the day.  They had no problem browsing the Internet and doing IM.  I suppose if I wanted to setup a lap in a school for just that, this OS would be fine.  The mere fact that most of the kids are not going to know how to install software will keep them from do too much to the machines.

Let me repeat yesterday’s question.  What does this OS do that my current OS doesn’t?  Nothing.  There is no incentive to switch.  In fact, a switch would involve a lot of pain that I don’t have right now.

Here is something I stumbled across today. I was looking for a way to dump a lot of files into an online location so that those files would be easy to access from other sites. My files are Word docs, Excel spreadsheets and PowerPoint presentations. I found Scribd. The service is free and you can upload as many files as you like.

Take a look at the file below.  It’s Alice in Wonderland (a document in the public domain) formatted in Word.  I added some pictures and all the formatting found in a normal Word document: page numbers, chapter headings, etc.

Here are a couple of really cool things about the way Scribd handles files.

1 – The files are displayed in a browser.  The original application (Word, Excel, etc) does not have to be installed on a machine to see the formatted documents.

2 – I can make my files available to the public or keep them private.

3 – If I choose to make my files public, I can control the format that is downloaded by public users.  I can permit the original file to be downloaded in the original format.  Other options include text only and PDF.  Because one of the download options is PDF, I now have a free web-based file converter.

4 – All the Creative Commons licensing options are included in the publishing area.

I have uploaded my private document library to the private area.  I haven’t tried PowerPoint files.  I’ll upload my eTech presentation as the acid test.  If it can handle all 327 slides, I will be impressed.