God Mode: Kinda cool :)

Create a new folder
Rename it to GodMode.{ED7BA470-8E54-465E-825C-99712043E01C}
Enjoy!

Works on Vista, W7, W2008.

Profile URL in Google Wave

You have to prepend your Google Wave profile URL with http:// in order to make it absolute; otherwise, Wave will treat it as relative and open something like http://wave.google.com/wave/www.yoursite.net upon clicking it.

You don't have to do it within a wave; here, www.yoursite.net will suffice.

First contact with Google Wave

Well, as long as nobody else you're in contact with regularly is using it, it's pretty much useless.

But the HTML GUI is as cool as it looked in the preview :)

"Ubuntu 9.10 for a Lazy Windows XP User" on a SAMSUNG NC10 - Part 3

Well, the "Net" in "Netbook" actually doesn't mean "well-connected office LAN", right? You've gotta be mobile - and still connected - with these babies, haven't you? Right.

The weekend is drawing nigh and I know that at least on Saturday, I will spend almost two hours with my netbook. I figured that it's time for

Part 3. Let's get mobile!

I've got a HUAWEI-based UMTS stick from T-Mobile that works pretty well under Windows and Mac so let's see if it's gonna bring our Koala online. I used the drivers from the stick itself - for those few still unfamiliar with this but nevertheless reading this blog: first time you connect it via USB, it presents itself as a CD-ROM drive containing software for Windows (drivers + mgmt. utility), Mac (drivers + mgmt. utility) and Linux (driver + VERY basic installation manual which you shouldn't need anyway, because: what do you do with a *.tar.gz which is the only file in the Linux driver folder? extract it, and then there's an install.sh in there, even marked as executable text file already. Piece o'cake, even for the lazy Windows user...)

Well, OK, 'nuff said. Let's stick the stick in and install.

My findings here seem to fit well among the other ones. The installer script runs without issue and requires a reboot. After that (the UMTS stick is still connected) I open the Networking mgmt. applet and add a new Wireless Broadband connection using the wizard. It doesn't show any devices on the first screen but allows me to go on setting up my UMTs, so go on I do. T-Mobile is listed among German provides, albeit with an obsolete APN of internet.t-d1.de. I know you don't need to supply an APN name with T-Mobile at all but nevertheless correct it to internet.t-mobile.de just in case. I also punch in my SIM's PIN even if it might be considered a security risk.

Then I pull my Ethernet cable, tell the Networking drop-down to connect, a small animated icon appears and... I'm online. Here at the office, I measure 2,2 Mbit/s downstream and 550 kbit/s upstream which is not that bad at all!

DISCLAIMER: T-Mobile really makes it easy to setup a connection. With other providers like Vodafone, for instance, you might have to specify a lot more info - APN name, DNS server addresses, username, password etc.

I will see if I can VPN into the office tomorrow :)

Koala findings

Well, I did find one glitch: Java is not installed by default which probably is a good thing if you're not going to use it :)

"Ubuntu 9.10 for a Lazy Windows XP User" on a SAMSUNG NC10 - Part 2

It's been a couple of days. I have enjoyed playing with the Koala, which brings us to

Part 2. First impressions.

The short story is: I haven't encountered a single problem, not even a 'glitch', in these three days. The netbook has been sitting on my desk; I connected it to the outside world via cabled and wireless LAN at the office.

The long version:

• All built-in hardware devices were recognized at install and worked.
  
• Localizations (I am using the German language UI - who knows, I might want to keep Ubuntu for a while...) had to be downloaded from the Web, but as far as I can see, everything I used so far is localized properly (with some rather unimportant exceptions, see below).
• As many other community members pointed out, the default desktop theme sorta sucks... but the one in XP does, too, doesn't it?
  
• The default screen font is slightly larger than the one I was used to from working with Windows, but it's very clear and good for readability. The overall graphics experience is as good as or even slightly better than that under XP.
  
• Boot time to login prompt is about the same as in Windows XP; from login to desktop, it's slightly better, but then again I have more apps installed in XP, some of which preload stuff, so no fair comparison here.
• It is my unconfirmed impression, but the Koala seems to produce much less hard disk activity than Windows XP which probably is a good thing when you're mobile.
• Still, there's no magic in Linux - you can't have a full-featured graphical OS running on an Atom N270 with 1 GB RAM and a standard laptop HDD under the hood and not experience delays sometimes. Loading Evolution takes as long as loading Outlook; GNumeric doesn't load any faster than Excel does.
  
• Network browser works fine, no problem accessing shares on member servers or workstations. I haven't measured (yet), but the perceived SMB perofrmance equals that of Windows XP. Well, OK, the NC10 is equipped with a lowly Fast Ethernet NIC, but still.
  
• FireFox is preinstalled as standard browser and works flawlessly, including Plugin Finder etc. I installed Opera and it seems even a bit faster, but I think the taskbar icon is a bad idea, given the limited screen space on a netbook.
• Evolution is preinstalled as the standard PIM client and works very well with my Exchange 2003, at least in online mode. I will test the offline mode as a part of my mobility experience.
• Skype (2, still in beta) installs and runs without issues. Sound input and output (using the built-in mic/speaker) are as poor as they are in Windows. A generic USB headset (Genius) got recognized at once and delivered a very good experience, as Skype goes.
• Remote desktop to my Windows 2003 Terminal Server required installing an RDP client, which was delivered by Synaptic within seconds and worked perfectly. I have very little experience with Linux based RDP clients so I chose rdesktop. Apart from having to start it via command line, it just worked.
• Office apps... Well, OpenOffice.org never was among my favourites, but it is preinstalled and works out of the box. GNumeric runs waaaay faster, but seems to have a localization glitch somewhere.
  
• Video player works well, plugin search was not 100% successful, but those were rare encodings.
• PDF viewing experience in the preinstalled file viewer is rather basic; the ePDFViewer from the Synaptics list has a slightly better rendering (which surprised me since they both use the same library) but is still pretty basic. Adobe Reader 9.2 installs without issue (you save a couple of precious minutes if you switch from the .bin distribution preset by Adobe to the .deb one) and offers the expected PDF viewing experience plus forms support etc.
• I have always used MindJet's MindManager for mindmapping and have zero experience with other programs. Synaptics offers two packages here: VYM and KDissert. Both lack the comfort of MM and have localization glitches, albeit different ones. But MM wasn't free either, so I will download iMindMap from Tony Buzan and see if it does the job better.
  

This sorta covers what I usually do on a netbook.

Next week, I'll be testing more interesting stuff: Mobility with 3G and printing, so make sure to check back here :)

"Ubuntu 9.10 for a Lazy Windows XP User" on a SAMSUNG NC10 - Part 1

Tim Berk from the Minasi User Group recently threw in the announcement of the new Ubuntu release here which, in turn, drew my attention to the Netbook Remix or UNR ("Karmic Koala"). I was playing with partition sizes on my SAMSUNG NC10 anyway and decided to give it a whirl while I'm at it.

Part 1. Installing

I have been using Linux quite a lot on servers and appliances, but hardly ever under a GUI. So now I'm putting my 'experienced user' hat on and... well, checking out a new netbook OS just like I would do with a Windows Netbook release if there were one.

The netbook already has a working XP installation at the beginning of the hard drive and a data partition at the end; I want to keep them as intact as possible and install Ubuntu in the middle. There is 30 GB of free space I could use for it.

Downloading the UNR went as fast as my Internet connection allows. However, my NC10 wasn't too eager to let it install from thumb drive, and since my objective wasn't debugging this, I simply burned the CD and used an external USB DVD-ROM drive for installation.

I chose the "manual" partitioning option and created an ext3 (28 GB) and a swap partition (rest) within the free space, selected to install GRUB into the newly created Linux partition at the end of the installation wizard (you have to click "Advanced..." to get there), and the netbook did boot into Windows XP after installation - not as bad as I feared :).

Now to making it dual boot. Remember, I am a user in this excercise so as little commandline as possible :)

Booting from Ubuntu CD again, this time choosing to "Try Ubuntu Linux (Computer will not be changed)".

In my case, the Linux partition was /dev/sda5. Extracting the boot block into my Documents folder:

cd Documents
sudo dd if=/dev/sda5 of=./ubuntu.bin bs=512 count=1

The lazy Windows user that I am, I just pop in my 16 GB SDHC card and copy the ubuntu.bin file onto that (Ubuntu detects and mounts it automatically), reboot into Windows XP, copy ubuntu.bin from the SD card into the root folder of the C: drive and add a line to the boot.ini as follows:

c:\ubuntu.bin="Ubuntu Netbook Remix"

Voilá!