Real World Computing

A bit of Dell and Microsoft Bashing This morning when I arrived at work, my computer had installed a Microsoft Windows XP update (for Office 2007, which isn't even installed on my PC - it's running 2003) and rebooted. The result was that my screen was now partially blurry. Something had screwed around with the video drivers. I wasn't sure if it was a problem with the video card or the monitor but there's an easy way to find out. I booted from a handy Ubuntu boot CD (my trusty Bart PE didn't seem to work on the DELL). These boot CDs are brilliant. They let you get work done without having to install an operating system. In my case, I was able to connect to the network and open some large documents to assure myself that the monitor blurriness was gone. When I booted back into Windows, the blur came back too. I called DELL and explained my actions and was given the extremely helpful advice (NOT), that since it was obviously not a monitor or video card problem, ...

IBM Lotus Notes 8.5 got released last week and I eagerly downloaded it on Friday for a quick play. Fortunately IBM seem to have made a few changes to their download site in the last few months and I had no trouble at all finding the software (well done IBM). I downloaded the Windows 32 bit version, the Mac OSX version and the Debian Linux version. Ubuntu Linux Normally I can wait for software releases to become accepted but in this case, I was keen to get my hands on the Linux version. My earlier attempt at installing Notes on Linux had ended in failure and I'd heard that IBM had improved things with 8.5. I was not wrong. I'm truly a beginner on Linux. I don't even know the commands properly and I've deliberately not read any books or technotes on the subject. How else am I going to figure out how "people friendly" the OS is? I put my downloaded CD in and proceeded to klutz my way though, simply double-clicking on things. Nothing much seemed to be happen...

Over the years I've made quite a few tests on Ubuntu to see whether it was ready for general consumption. Until now, it's never lasted more than a few hours on the device I've loaded it on because I've either had no time to test it properly or I've become too frustrated with driver setup problems to continue. This time, I loaded it on a laptop which just didn't seem able to run Windows XP. The results were astonishing. The Good For a start, the laptop which has 512 mb of ram runs quite well now. On XP SP2, it took literally about 5 minutes to boot, under Ubuntu, it take about 15 seconds. Google and Firefox Similarly, Firefox was already installed and all of my favourite google apps and bookmarks worked a treat. VPN and Remote Desktop I found some instructions for VPN setup and was remote desktopping onto my work PC within a few hours. Between Remote Desktop (to Windows) and the web apps that run in firefox - and of course Open Office which was also already i...