threethirty's blog

Adobe Pushes DRM for Flash

Sat, 08 Mar 2008 21:33:37 -0500

Just thought that people should know that Adobe is adding DRM to Flash 9. It is not going to be used by default but it is up to each website whether they turn it on or not. The DRM should be transparent to the user. There is no way for the end user to know if they are using a DRM'ed flash vid or not. The idea is that they can keep people from copying the vids to your hard drive. So because of this I have uninstalled flash, and have installed gnash instead. Gnash is a free (as in speech) flash clone. If you are as angry as I am please join my boycott of flash. blow is some more info from the EFF.

Okay NOW you have no reason not to not try Linux

Tue, 17 Jul 2007 19:02:20 -0400

Look we (the Community) have tried to make Linux easy for everyone, non-text installs, Live CD's and DVD's, LUG's, install-fest's, etc, etc. But now we have done the one think that makes trying Linux as brainless as installing Windows apps.

Now I'd like to show you Wubi.

Wubi is an unofficial Ubuntu installer for Windows users that will bring you into the Linux world with a single click. Wubi allows you to install and uninstall Ubuntu as any other application. If you heard about Linux and Ubuntu, if you wanted to try them but you were afraid, this is for you.

Wubi is Safe

It does not require you to modify the partitions of your PC, or to use a different bootloader.

One great thing about Ubuntu

Sat, 07 Jul 2007 23:33:27 -0400

I recently decided to do something I had never done before. I decided to do a dist-upgrade. Now a dist-upgrade is the equivalent to to running Windows XP and Being able to upgrade all of the packages to Vista via the internet and without any kind of disk media. This is usually not recommended (you really do accumulate a lot of crap and should blow your system clean every once in a while) but can be a fun experience. **NOTE** BACK UP BEFORE YOU DO THIS, SOMETIMES UNEXPECTED THINGS HAPPEN AND YOU DON'T WANT TO LOOSE DATA **

I went from Ubuntu 6.06 LTS "Dapper Drake" to Ubuntu Ubuntu 6.10 "Edgy Eft". This took an entire night over my DSL connection but I was still able to use the computer. It is really cool to have Firefox 1.5 open, close it for a little bit, and open it sometime later to 2.0. This actually surprised me because I was not watching the terminal for the status. after I got all of the available updates for edgy, I went ahead and dist-updated to the newest version of Ubuntu 7.04 "Feisty Fawn". Which the the whole next day.

An Important Security Patch to the MadWiFi driver

Sat, 30 Jun 2007 16:25:18 -0400

!!!ATTENTION THIS POST IS REALLY TECHNICAL!!! I'm posting all of this info becuase I'm sure there are many of you use this non-free driver in you Linux (and other free desktop systems) this is a huge flaw that isn't usually the kind of problem that you find in Linux...

At about 6:30 UTC, the flaw in the MadWifi driver has been patched for Ubuntu Feisty. Here is why this is important:

This patch fixes susceptibility to remote abuse of Channel Switch
Announcement Information Elements by injection of Beacon Frame
packets and improves the reliability of channel switch procedure under

K Menu Gnome (Fedora Core Package)

Fri, 15 Jun 2007 20:41:32 -0400

I was looking through the KDE Apps site to today and came across this,
and wish that it was for Ubuntu:

K Menu Gnome (Fedora Core Package)
Description:
K Menu with Gnome folder and extra icons for KDE 3.2 or later.

If you install both KDE and Gnome then K Menu will become a mess with
overpopulated submenus. Some distributions try to solve this by hiding
many Gnome apps in KDE and most KDE apps in Gnome. I do not like that.
I want to access Gnome apps in KDE and KDE apps in Gnome. So this is
my attempt to both maintain desktop interoperability and unmess the
menus.

Why should one install both KDE and Gnome at all? You might share your

Joost in Linux !?! Ehhh We'll See, Part One

Thu, 12 Apr 2007 20:10:58 -0400

I just got my invite for Joost (after a three month wait). Joost is an IPTV app done by the same people who did Kazzaa and Skype. I think the only reason I got into the private beta is that I said I would be testing it in Linux. Well it's only for Windows and MacOS X at this time. So.... I decided to try it in the Ubuntu 7.04 Feisty Fawn Beta on my laptop (Raptor). Here are my findings so far...

Wine:

I don't know much about Wine. So I installed wine-0.9.33 via apt, and believe it or not I got Joost to install. The installer put an icon on the desktop (which is worthless) [http://www.box.net/shared/jh93toovy9] but this was a good start. I looked in my menu and there was a wine entry on my Gnome menu [http://www.box.net/shared/kqrmz8jq7l and http://www.box.net/shared/mqenfpq006] (and again worthless). So let's try and run it in the terminal...

Mono Now Does Visual Basic

Thu, 22 Feb 2007 23:06:15 -0500

I know what most of you are thinking What is Mono? Well...

"Mono provides the necessary software to develop and run .NET client and server applications on Linux, Solaris, Mac OS X, Windows, and Unix. Sponsored by Novell (http://www.novell.com), the Mono open source project has an active and enthusiastic contributing community and is positioned to become the leading choice for development of Linux applications." - http://www.mono-project.com/Main_Page

What this allows you to do is run programs written in the various languages that are part of the .Net package and run them in a non-Windows environment. I have the link to download the package and I also went step by step on how to install it on any Linux distribution on my website threethirty.us. If anyone would like me to repost that here I have no problem doing so.

Jokosher: audio production made simple.... someday

Sun, 04 Feb 2007 14:10:10 -0500

Jokosher is a simple and powerful multi-track studio that uses Gstreamer. It provides a complete application for recording, editing, mixing and exporting audio, and has been specifically designed with usability in mind. The developers behind Jokosher have re-thought audio production at every level, and are creating something devilishly simple to use. It was started by Jono Bacon, the Ubuntu Community Manager for Canonical, and one of the hosts of LugRadio because Jono admitted that LugRadio is recorded in qbase in Widows. To which a bunch of the listeners "gave him a kicking. Less than a year ago they started this project and are about to release 0.9. 0.9 is really 1.0 but Jono and the team refuse to call it 1.0 until they have support for multiple input sound cards, this is not really a Jokosher problem but is an ALSA problem. If nothing else this project is improving Gstreamer and ALSA.

Local Linux group gets new website

Fri, 27 Oct 2006 14:41:47 -0400

The Richmond Linux User's Group has a new website at Richmondlug.googlepages.com.
This is the third home for the website, and we intend to stay here until Google dies. I chose Google Pages because of the generous support that Google gives to the Open Source community.

U-boon-too or U-bun-too and its meaning

Fri, 18 Aug 2006 15:27:48 -0400

I've been an Ubuntu user from the beginning and the pronuciantion of the name never mattered to me untill about a week ago, I heard Europeans calling it U-bun-too, while my friends and I were calling it U-boon-too. And I couldn't stand not knowing after looking up the word on Wikipedia [mind you this post has been changed since my initial quest] I decided to dump The distribution I was using at the time (Fedora Core 5-it was for the HP Learning Center's Linux 101) and install Dapper Drake, and to my surprise there was the answer staring me right in the face. A theora video called Experience Ubuntu, which had of all people Nelson Mandela (a Zulu) discussing what Ubuntu was.