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5 Reasons to upgrade from Windows XP to Linux Ubuntu

1. Ubuntu is more secure. Now that Windows is no longer supporting XP, many older systems are extremely vulnerable to viruses and hackers. Ubuntu is virtually virus free.
2. Ubuntu takes up less hard drive space. Many older systems are hampered by limited hard drive space. A full installation of Ubuntu only takes up 5GB of storage space. Users looking for a truly minimal version of Ubuntu should consider XUbuntu http://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=xubuntu
3. Ubuntu is faster than Windows XP. A fully upgraded version of Windows XP eats up a ton of system resources. If you don’t re-install XP every few years, it can become extremely bogged down, eventually rendering your computer unusable. A fresh install of Ubuntu will usually yield a significant performance boost on older machines.
4. Ubuntu comes bundled with better software. LibreOffice, Firefox, and the Ubuntu Software Center are all included with Ubuntu completely free of charge. Ubuntu can do everything that Windows XP can do, and all for free with no hidden charges and no bloatware.
5. Ubuntu is fully customizable and compatible. Most comouters running Windows XP can be seamlessly and painlessly upgraded to Ubuntu without downloading a single driver. Ubuntu will automatically detect your hardware. After a quick install from an Ubuntu live cd, you can be up and running in a matter of minutes. Ubuntu is so intuitive and feels so familiar that most people who switch will never look back. Get your copy of Ubuntu here. http://www.ubuntu.com/download/desktop

September 24th, 2012

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Android 4.1 Jelly Bean on the Kindle Fire

With the release of the new Kindle Fire HD 8.9” in November, a lot of Kindle users are going to be upgrading.  Amazon allows previously purchased content to be stored in the cloud and transferred between devices, so users will be able to transfer all of their books, apps, music and movies to their new device. There are going to be a ton of used last gen Kindle Fire tablets going up for sale of craigslist with hundreds of dollars in pre-loaded content.  I’m considering upgrading myself, and the lucky person who buys my old Kindle Fire is going to be enjoying a side-loaded version of Grand Theft Auto 3, over 500 books, and a dozen free music albums.   For all of the criticism of the device by tech writers, the first generation of the Kindle Fire was Amazon’s best ever selling device and maintains a rating of 4/5 stars. It has a reputation for being relatively free of defects or malfunctions. Most of the people I know who actually own a Kindle Fire love it.  When I stop to think about, I’m finding myself hesitant to give mine up.  A recent hack that allows users to run Android 4.1 Jelly Bean on my old Kindle Fire has me second guessing my decision to sell it. The Jelly Bean OS is still in the beta-testing stage on the Fire, but developers have worked out most of the major kinks. The International Business Times reports, “Issues with HD codecs are found to affect users on YouTube and Netflix. With Texas instruments reportedly updating the libion code for Jelly Bean, it should help Hashcode in fixing this issue soon. Apart from the codecs issue, the screen over-rotates while changing position, besides turning on UMS in the ROM appears to be a major difficulty.” A Kindle Fire with access to the Google Play store is defnitely a device worth keeping, especially when the alternative is selling it for 50$. It sounds like a more stable version of Jelly Bean for the Kindle could be released a few weeks after the new Kindle Fire is shipped and just in time for Christmas.   For now, users must manually install Jelly Bean onto the Kindle Fire in a relatively simple 4 step process.   Step 1: Download Android Jelly Bean 4.1.1 ROM for your Kindle Fire. It’s around 108MB and might be time consuming particularly on slower connections.   Step 2: Download Jelly Bean Gapps that needs to be flashed onto your device.   Step 3: Power off your device and boot into recovery.   Step 4: Flash the ROM/Gapps, which you downloaded in previous steps from ClockworkMod Recovery. Ensure you do a complete wipe of the data and cache. You are done. Just restart your device from CyanogenWorkMod (CWM) and your Kindle Fire should automatically boot into Android Jelly Bean 4.1.1. If you find issues with Wi-Fi after flashing, you just have to run the command: adb shell su fix-mac.sh and you are all set.

September 10th, 2012

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2012 Linux Computer Buyer’s Guide: eRacks

“eRacks – Another vendor that has been around since 1999, eRacks offers quite a few desktop, server, and laptop options with Linux installed. Its website gives you full customization over just about everything from motherboards to extra software. eRacks will install a number of Linux distributions, such as Ubuntu, CentOS, and Gentoo, several BSD variants, and even Windows. It offers laptops starting at $879 and desktops starting at $395.”-http://maketecheasier.com

September 5th, 2012

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FlightGear Open Source Flight Simulator

 

FlightGear Open Source Flight Simulator

On August 17, developers officially unveiled FlightGear v2.8. For the uninitiated, “FlightGear is an open source flight simulator with more than 400 aircraft, a seamless worldwide scenery database, a multi-player environment, a flexible open aircraft modeling system, multiple display support, and an open architecture.  Best of all, being open source, the simulator is owned by the community and everyone is encouraged to contribute.” The community has been around for over 15 years now, so the simulator has a ton of people contributing to the project.  It’s easily one of the best flight simulation programs in the world. As always, FlightGear is available for download completely free of charge through their website.

FlightGear 2.8 sports a number of new features. My favorite is a new automated system that allows users to make changes to the scenery. Users can now also select between summer and winter textures in-sim, and an improved atmospheric scattering and terrain haze model means the lighting of the terrain is more realistic.  The world scenery now includes over 20,000 airports. It has gotten so large and detailed that it now takes 3 DVD’s to hold the entire scenery database.

Want to know if your computer can support FlightGear? You’ll probably need a computer with a dedicated GPU. I imagine that the any computer with the new integrated Intel HD 4000 would be able to run FlightGear at a playable level.  According to the developers, “FlightGear requires a reasonable hardware accelerated 3D card with OpenGL drivers to achieve smooth frame rates. Software-only rendering typically yields frame rates in the neighborhood of several seconds per frame. But, with a 3D accelerated card you can expect much higher. On a 2-3Ghz class CPU with a GeForce card, frame rates in excess of 60 fps are reasonable to expect in most situations. The actual frame rate varies of course with scene complexity (which changes from area to area and changes as your view direction changes) and the specific details of your hardware.”

August 29th, 2012

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Proper alignment of your SSD using Gparted open source software

I recently bought a laptop from Amazon. I found a really good deal on a Sandisk Extreme 240GB solid state drive, so it only made sense to swap out the hard drive.  Rather than going through the hassle of re-installing Windows from scratch and then installing a dozen drivers, I decided to go the easy route and just clone the hard drive with Clonezilla onto the new SSD. I loaded the SSD into an external hard drive enclosure, connected it to the laptop, and fired up Clonezilla. In less than an hour, I had a perfect copy of Windows on my new drive. Well, almost perfect. If your hard drive has failed, ASAP Data Recovery can help you recover your invaluable data in no time.

I ran a quick test with AS SSD Benchmark and it became clear that my write speeds of 85 MB/S were a slot slower than they should be.  The SSD was clearly not aligned properly.  After doing a little research, I found a great open source program calledGparted that was able to align my SSD.  The program runs off a bootable disk, so you have to download the file, mount it as an ISO with PowerISO, and then burn the program to a CD/DVD.  Then, re-start your computer. You’ll probably have to change your boot order in to force your computer to run from the Gparted live disk.  I wasted five minutes trying to open Gparted in Windows until I realized that it was bootable disk.
Lifehacker has a great tutorial on how to use the Gparted software, so I’ll borrow some of the instructions from them.  “Start up Gparted and find your SSD in the upper-right dropdown menu. Select it, and click on your first partition in the menu. Hit the Resize/Move button in the toolbar. Change the “Free Space Preceding” box to 2MB, uncheck “Round to Cylinders”, and hit “Resize/Move”. (If you’re using a newer live CD, check the “MiB” box). Hit Apply once and let it do its thing.” If you have a ton of data on your hard drive, this might take a while. Gparted has to move all of the data on your drive.
“Now hit Resize/Move again, and change the “Free Space Preceding” box to 1MB. Uncheck Round to Cylinders again, hit Resize/Move, then click Apply. Note that if you have multiple partitions on your SSD, you’ll need to repeat this process for each partition, not just the first one on the disk.” Again, all of your data has to be moved, so this step is going to take some time. After the program is finished doing its thing, your SSD will be perfectly aligned. You can verify this by running the AS SSD Benchmark test again and checking your read/write speeds. After alignment, my read speeds went up 30% and the write speeds on my SSD increased by over 300%. I definitively notice the speed increase. Windows 7 is booting in less than ten seconds. I’m going to run some speed comparison tests on Ubuntu this afternoon. I’ll do another post on the results.

 

 

August 20th, 2012

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