Aureyr

I have talked about free music in the past and I must say that it’s incredible. Ever since I discovered this world of open creativity, I have been thinking about the general perception of people about it. And the answer sadly is that no one really knows or cares about free music!

Basically I have to explain the concept of freely sharing,distributing and enjoying music with others, traditional media apparently has  changed the mindset of a lot of people and that is something that we should strive to change. The sad thing is that the content providers: the musicians,writers,artists and other who contribute to this great movement cannot really market their creations, since everyone thinks that if something is free, the paid version is always better.

Well can someone then explain to me how for example Ergo Phizmiz has created a 2gb project and shared it online for everyone to enjoy? That’s  14 hours and 10 minutes of playback time!

Now can you imagine how much hard work and dedication this has costed? And the content creators obviously have no problem distributing it for everyone to enjoy? According to most people this doesn’t make sense, where is the logic of this?

Well it’s time to change our mindset! I for myself enjoy free 8-bit music from the .net

Note that gnome-shell is currently alpha/beta status and full functionality is not present.

Ever since the announcement of gnome-shell a few months ago, the whole Linux world just went crazy and created a huge debate about gnome-shell, which is comparable to the Mono threads. I have always liked running alpha/beta software, that are promising to be desktop-changing, so a few hours ago I initiated an apt-get command on my Ubuntu system and in a few minutes I got it installed. In order to run gnome-shell I needed to disable compiz and then start the gnome-shell –replace command from a terminal or a run dialog. And it started.

Previously I have never tested it, I have only seen a few screenshots and videos on youtube and I must say, I am very-impressed! The interface is lighting fast, well at least on my laptop and I have not found any bugs yet. Those who know me, know that I like clean designs and this is definitely great for me. Gnome-shell removes the obsolete panels, which in my opinion should be obsolete in 2010 and replaces them with something better. Just a workplace, where there are no panels hanging on the top or the bottom of the screen, letting me work in my applications, saving me screen estate.

This is amazing and something like this should have been made long ago. I would definitely recommend to anyone to try it!

This is what a desktop should be like! Clean, efficient, but still powered by a great system on the inside

Desktop Linux is a topic that no one can possibly cover in one post. That’s why I will share my experience of using Linux in the past three months, that is the about one month before the end of last year.Back then I was on Ubuntu 9.10, which was actually pretty good. I upgraded to lucid lynx, the version under development and I had no trouble at all. However due to the slower of up-to-date packages and my boredom I decided to thrash Ubuntu and try Archlinux, which proved to be quite an interesting experience. First the installation disc had some problems with my wireless module, so I had to go to the nearest computer shop and buy a cat5 ethernet cable, so that I can use that install and then update the system.Package management, compared to ubuntu’s apt was amazingly fast, I have been using dpkg/apt for about five years and never had a problem, but pacman was simpler and it did the same job.

First I wanted to try the latest hyped release of KDE, so I installed it. In the past I used to like KDE3, but about the time gnome 2.18 or was it 20.20 came out, I ditched it. To be frank KDE seems a little too bright and the many menus simply didn’t attract me. Also the applet for networkmanager for some reason didn’t want to connect to my wireless connection (I tried both an encrypted and an open one).

I reinstalled the system again, but with Gnome(I like to reinstall stuff, so that I can do the installation procedure for a second time.It’s fun) and the speed was again pretty amazing. The thing which I loved the most was pacman and the fact that it is a rolling release, which for me was not a small thing.I had some problem with getting my Canon printer setted up, but I managed to resolve that problem with AUR.Overall it was a really amazing experience with Archlinux, however then I needed to run a few apps on Windows, so I had to remove it. It was quite sad to see such an amazing distribution being formatted by Microsoft. However I hope that in the future more and more applications will be ported to Gnu/Linux.I just need to clarify, I don’t use Windows all the time, I only run it occasionally, since for some reason Acer’s drivers are not very-good, from time to time my windows OS just freezes and I have to wait for 2-3 minutes for it to recover. I only run it to play a few games and some software, which unfortunately has no supported version under Gnu/Linux or it’s emulation with wine is not perfect.I now dual boot Windows 7 and Ubuntu 9.10 and I hope to see Archlinux again soon in the near future!

It’s been far too long, since this domain has been inactive, however now I have decided to reactivate this blog and possibly motivate myself to write more and be more active in the community.

First I would like to clarify what this is going to be about. It’s all about me and my personal interests, since they change often you will probably find a plethora of information about a great many things. However my main talking points are free software and open culture, music and philosophy.

Enjoy my writings, I also had a few other blogs, scattered across the web, I will import some old posts from them too, so bear with me.

Recently I came in a disussion about portable music players and almost everyone said iPod and how much trouble they had with it under Gnu/Linux. If it works, when it works it would often be a chance or some king of good work. I still fail to understand why people flock about a product that deliberately doesn’t want to acknowledge that Linux users exist. There are far better alternatives.

I bought for around 50EUR a media player made by Transcend. It supports all popular formats, including .ogg and .flac. Yes it works really well and is three times cheaper that the ipod. It also has a microsd expansion slot. What can you want  ? It even has a dedicated page for Linux users.

That’s how we show our support, we support the companies that support Us

What makes a distribution is  it’s identity, it’s originality, the thing that separates it from another project. It’s important to emphasise the word community project, because when we talk about Gnu/Linux distributions, we talk about a product that is made not just by the developers, but from the community that surrounds it. That includes both users and developers and sometimes even third parties. These third parties for example are other projects, who are looking for a good example among the already created projects and are trying to brainstorm something innovative. Again innovation should be our driving force.

When building a distribution, the first thing that one should define is the slogan. What purpose would the project serve? Which group would find it useful to use the product? This is something that is really important, because it defines the philosophy. For example Ubuntu is famous for it’s philosophy ” Linux for human beings”.

Once we know what we want, then we can start choosing our base, our technology, the services that are going to do the work. Do we need a graphical user interface, what kind of programs should we put on, which services to enable and other related questions.

The final touch is the theme and the integrations. This is what the users will perceive as the visual identity of the distributions, by choosing it’s colours, the users can relate the project to it’s idea. For example we relate brown with the Earth, something that is familiar to us, something friendly and welcoming. Green and blue are other popular choices, while black and red would give us the idea of something more radical

Many users tend to stand between free software and proprietary components, thus finding the middle ground. For example every Ubuntu user installs the “restricted” codecs almost right away after the base installation. Unfortunately we are still living in a proprietary codec lockdown and many countries have legislations which prevent the redistribution of the binary-only blobs that enable us to play our content. It is true that there are alternatives to Adobe Flash, but the solutions are not complete. And then not a lot of people are familiar with vorbis or theora. People just want to be able to play their .mp3 files without all those annoying popups and warnings. Yes, some distributions do it, but others don’t.

Ubuntu has made success by doing the perfect approach, it does not include them by default, but if people truly need it, then the system happily installs it. However it is difficult to educate the users not to use .mp3, but to use .ogg. Most hardware vendors simply don’t want to adopt the open technologies. What is there to fear, I ask? There are millions of petitions,letters and what not, but we are not going to be in the open world, at least not soon. That is unfortunate …

My relatives used Ubuntu a few years back and they loved it.It was fast,beautiful  and quite simple for them to use.However it was difficult to install a driver in order to get the wireless to work.My cousin never really got his tv tuner to work under Linux.There are people who like it really much, but when essential things don’t work they abandon it.

What I am trying to say is that there needs to be a massive user-driven campaign to make the vendors release drivers for the Linux platform.Not just specifications, but complete fully-working drivers!As long as everything works on a Linux system, users will come to our camp.

As I am typing this I am still waiting for my card reader to be supported under Linux.It is not a bother to me, I use an external one, but not everyone has my nerves.

Gnu/Linux is the living incarnation of the people’s dream.It’s core philosophy is to be freely redistributable, changed, improved and modernized.As such it is the logical choice for all people, especially now when most of the problems with hardware vendors not supplying drivers and support is nearly eliminated.There exist projects, that would create truly open source drivers for all of those vendors, that refuse to make support for Gnu/Linux.According to most people in about three years, we would probably have  fully working and problem free open source drivers for all hardware, including ralink,broadcom,nvidia and so on.Such steps would then present a fully working environment for all users.

Kernel taint would no more be a problem.The only problem, that we still have is codecs-related.Fortunately people are now moving to .ogg and .flac, so that .mp3’s domination would come to an end.More and more people are seeing the advantages of the free formats and that is something that we need to develop further.

One of the greatest advantages of the Gnu/Linux OS is that it employs the latest technology and is constantly developed and improved.Even as I write this more and more things are becoming a standart base of the mainstream distributions.However most of them are released on a schedule.Developers take the newest things,freeze them and then try and stabilize them.After this is achieved it is released after (usually) six months.That seems to work in most cases.

However the developers should try and integrate more bleeding edge stuff, even experimental!This would bring even more innovations and ultimately lead on to even more technological superiority,compared to other popular operating systems.Instability/freezes and other bugs and problems are not a rare thing in the mainstream distributions, making a few more additions would not create a more different situation.