Join Diaspora Alpha

2nd September 2011 UPDATE: I received a reply on twitter from their Diaspora account, indicating this is Parr of their decentralisation plan for social networks. I received an invite to Diaspora... or D*, as it's becoming known in the twittersphere.

I was asked what my thoughts are, and it's simple and complicated at the same time.

To put it bluntly, D* has the potential to be just another social network struggling to fight against the established giant that is Facestalk, or the social network and service to end all social networks.

Ubuntu 10.04LTS on Acer D255E - Card Reader ENE UB6250

Here's the problem, Mrs Six3Seven's Acer Aspire D255E netbook has a card reader that doesn't work.

There are some details in this bug report, and the solution can be found in comment #149.

Dell Latitude E6320 and Fresh Build of Ubuntu 'Classic' 11.04

After having great success with Xubuntu 11.04, the damn thing stopped responding to the power button. A small niggle, sure, but one I wasn't willing to live with. After trolling forums and trying to find a solution until 1am this morning I went to bed without success. Less anoying, but equally difficult to find a solution to was that when you used the panel power button to 'shutdown', Xubuntu would log out to the Xfce login screen. Balls.

Time to have another look at trying to get Gnome working on Ubuntu. Last time I tried to install Gnome 3, but it broke. This time I decided to install Gnome 2, but after just minutes of searching I discover Ubunut 11.04 comes shipped with 'Ubuntu Classic' mode. I felt so dumb.

Clean build of Ubuntu 11.04 'Classic' with 'New Wave' theme

So time for another 'Fresh Build' post. The following is how I've set up this machine...

Installing Virtualbox 101

I use a virtualisation of windows inside my linux builds so I can deal with my windows dependency quickly and easily. Let's not kid ourselves, some things just won't work (easily) in linux. Take Dynojet's Powercommander software...

Dell Latitude E6320 and Xubuntu 11.04

Hardware issues continued with the new Latitude. The Ubuntu certified E6320 has a different hardware spec to the machine I bought, and while I might be able to extract some of the hardware devices from the E6500, I wanted a more complete OS solution.

UPDATE, 27 August 2011: I'm using Ubuntu 11.04 'Classic'... see this post to see how stupid I was being and some set-up instructions.

Ubuntu 10.04LTS on Dell Latitude E6320

Wireless Networking (wlan)
There was a drama with the install... when I bought this thing I was half expecting to have compatibility issues with the 3G card, but I wasn't expecting the Intel(R) Centrino(R) Advanced-N 6205 (802.11 a/b/g/n) WiFi card to be a problem. Bleeding edge, huh?

New Geek Toys on Their Way

This week I dropped the hammer on a Dell E6320 i5 laptop, and a Samsung Galaxy S II.

They both should arrive early next week, so I might do some unboxing pics and a bit of a review.

The E6320 will work with my E-Port Plus docking station, 13.3" screen, i5 2.5GHz (+ 'turbo'), 4BG RAM and a spinny hard disc and cost $728 delivered.
Plan for the Dell is to install my 64GB SSD, install Ubuntu 10.04LTS install, with W7 32bit running in Virtualbox. I'll also run a 1.5TB Seagate FreeAgent with eSata transfer adapter to carry data.

The SGSII is a 1.2GHz Android device with 2GB of internal storage.
Plan for the SGSII is Oxygen ROM install. Should be pretty swift.

Bulding a Light, Full Featured Linux Portable USB

Ever needed to help someone fix their Windows computer that won't boot?

Ever wanted access to your own email, bookmarks, or applications?

Perhaps you want a persistant operating system on a USB flash drive... this is part one of an experiment I am doing. Step one for me is to decide on a build of Linux to run from flash memory. Step two is to try an put that into practice on the USB storage of the HTC Desire Android phone.

Problem with the Android phone is the USB storage doen't seem to wake up fast enough for the boot loader on my laptop to pick it up. I'll work on that later...

For now, I want to practice setting up a build. I have a 4GB SanDisk Cruiser Blade flash drive I picked up for about $7 from Office Works. It's small and light and should suit the key ring fine.

Oxygen 2.2 Released Today

UPDATE: 3rd August 2011.
A new hboot for Oxygen 2.2 can be found here, see post #16.
Direct link is here, and md5sum.

Adam Green release Oxygen 2.2 today over at the Oxygen forum... here's what he has to say about the release: