Thrilling heroics at an affordable price.
{ Category Archives }
A couple of my friends plus two of their friends (who are no-doubt equally cool) are trying to get to linux.conf.au and need the internet’s help to get there.
You can do one (or more) of the following things to help:
I donated $50. Beat that, suckers!
!!!
Is the music manager “Banshee” new or something? Why have I never heard of it before? And why is it that it appears to actually work?! Including with my ipod! It seems to work better than gtkpod, and I don’t need to run it with sudo to transfer files.
I’m… shocked.
And I’m knocking on wood like my life depends on it.
Ok, so what do I have left that’s holding me back from switching entirely exclusively to Linux now? Photoshop (the Gimp hates me), and I can’t make flash not be stupid in linux. Oh, and wireless on my ibook isn’t possible for someone of my intelligence.
Anything else…? I can’t think of anything. The take-over of Emily is almost complete.
If rebooting my ibook was faster, I’d dual boot EXCLUSIVELY so that I could use Open Office on linux rather than using it with X11 on my ibook. Not having a decent free word processor for OSX is a major major problem for me.
special hello and thanks to people visiting me right now from this thread on the ubuntu forums.
ooh I’m so self-referential! (self-absorbed maybe?)
I’ve posted the following to a bit ago because I wanted to get some nifty conversations going. I also wanted to keep a record of it in my own livejournal in case anyone on my friends list wants to contribute to the discussion, and so i can tag and save the entry for future reference with my own tagging system. Anyway, welovegeeks link, and a similar blogspot entry that hopefully will get googled better.
Hey all, I was thinking about some geek related things over the last few days, and I wanted to see what all of you thought about this, and maybe we could start a discussion/exchange info, yadda yadda.
Anyway, yesterday, a friend of mine told me that I exist in this really unique niche as far as my geek-tech-linux-gender identity. I’m a female undergraduate English major who uses ubuntu as an end-user. In other words, I use linux the way the rest of my department (and the world?) uses OS X or Windows, and I don’t use linux because I’m a system administrator or because I’m a programmer or spend a significant time developing tools for myself.
I use Ubuntu for several really specific reasons: it’s free and I’m a very poor college student, it forces me to maintain a slightly higher-than-average internet-usage literacy without overwhelming me with forcing me to understand everything about my hardware or even the software I use, and it encourages me to stay away from pirated software for Windows. The fact that it also allows me the freedom to dive much deeper into learning about advanced computing, web design and hosting, programming etc when I do have the time to mess around for fun really is just an added bonus. Oh, and I forgot to mention that I don’t have to deal with spyware, virii, malware, etc.
I’m also really interested in gender and the internet, gender and tech-consumption/usage, the changing face of gender in gaming, and general literacy and technology issues from a very human and “end-user” point of view. I’m interested in doing serious internet research on this, and maybe even setting up a blog specifically for this kind of discussion and research even. My friend suggested that if I dove into it and really devoted myself to this, I could end up getting hired as a pro blogger somewhere down the line. (wow, wouldn’t that be nifty?)
Anyway, I never really thought about this as being as unique or significant as he seemed to think it was until he pointed it out to me and tried to make me see it in that way. (he’s been working for mozilla for a year, and has been deep into the tech and web industries for a long time, so I guess he’s got his thumb on the pulse of something that might make him know what he’s talking about, right?)
How many of you are also interested in these kinds of issues? Anyone here use linux purely as an ‘end-user’ or desktop user and not as a developer or programmer? I think that this is partly the philosophy of Ubuntu actually, and I’d be interested to know how many other “less technical” users there are out there.
This is all also partly inspired by my failed attempts at getting fellow liberal arts students into linux… I ordered a bunch of pressed cds and tried to give them away to others (particularly girls), but it didn’t catch fire at all…
Anyway, anyone have links to sites or blogs exploring this sort of thing? I’m interested in collecting info and doing some research for fun (and to increase the level of meaning I feel my life has in general), and perhaps to set up a really focused blog about these kinds of topics.
[Anyway, the content and “meat” of this post has been partially cross-posted in my blogspot blog, because blogger gets more google attention…]
So, after my compy being winblows-free for SO LONG, I reinstalled win2k last night on my smaller hard drive so that I could put ubuntu on my newer bigger one, and it’s funny… before I even could finish DOWNLOADING firefox, I was already getting gambling and porn popups and requests to add hotsex38382.com as my homepage. My second step was going to be getting all the updates and stuff, but shit… this was not even HALF AN HOUR after I installed!
Then, this morning, I woke up and installed one tiny thing (a game I miss), and win2k crashes and I have to reboot. hahaha. it can’t even hack 24 hours of uptime! (my machine is probably fucking pissed at me for temporarily removing ubuntu.)
oh well. at least the firmware in my rio karma has been updated after about a year and a half of running on what came with it in the mail.
In Other News: I have a new sore throat. AWESOME.
Original post: yesterday, a friend of mine told me that I exist in a really unique niche as far as my geek-tech-linux-gender identity. I’m a female undergraduate English major who uses ubuntu as an end-user. In other words, I use linux the way the rest of my department (and the world?) uses OS X or Windows, and I don’t use linux because I’m a system administrator or because I’m a programmer or spend a significant time developing tools for myself.
I use Ubuntu for several really specific reasons: it’s free and I’m a very poor college student, it forces me to maintain a slightly higher-than-average internet-usage literacy without overwhelming me with forcing me to understand everything about my hardware or even the software I use, and it encourages me to stay away from pirated software for Windows. The fact that it also allows me the freedom to dive much deeper into learning about advanced computing, web design and hosting, programming etc when I do have the time to mess around for fun really is just an added bonus. Oh, and I forgot to mention that I don’t have to deal with spyware, virii, malware, etc.
I’m also really interested in gender and the internet, gender and tech-consumption/usage, the changing face of gender in gamining, and general literacy and technology issues from a very human and “end-user” point of view. I’m interested in doing serious internet research on this, and maybe even setting up a blog specifically for this kind of discussion and research even. My friend suggested that if I dove into it and really devoted myself to this, I could end up getting hired as a pro blogger somewhere down the line. (wow, wouldn’t that be nifty?)
If any of my readers knows of other bloggers/websites who are interested in these sorts of issues, could you forward me some links? I’d like to read up on what other people are talking about as a sort of first-step toward maybe, MAYBE starting up a new and very focused blog.
[some of the content in this post was also posted in welovegeeks because, while blogger gets more google attention, that lj community is more active and discussion-focused.]
(This post and comments were originally in my livejournal)
I was digging around in del.icio.us instead of reading for finals, and I stumbled across Chris Del Checcolo, Ricky Hussmann, and Dougald Brown’s video about setting up a dual-boot system with Windows XP and Ubuntu Linux. I thought “hey wow! perfect for Marci (my roomie who’s almost ready to make the switch)” and I emailed her a link. So, anyway, the video’s funny and good imo. informative, light etc. Until the very end when one of them makes some joke about how this type of thing isn’t going to help you (male audience) get dates, because “girls hate linux”.
Just in case this was true, I pulled down my pants to make sure I still had a vagina.
Seriously folks. No, I didn’t get all hussy and pissy like I used to. Frankly, I’m getting used to people assuming my gender is stupid-until-proven-otherwise. And to be perfectly honest, it’s no longer flattering or cute when guys FREAK OUT AND CAN’T BELIEVE IT when they discover that I know how to scp a file to a remote machine or that I switched to linux for ideological (as well as financial) reasons. Anyway, I emailed Ricky to both thank him and his buddies for the video and to throw in my two meager female cents for the “girls are too dumb to like linux” type of comment at the end of their film. I also mentioned that I’d be “sooo bloggin this”, and since he has a penis, he’ll no-doubt know how to google my name and find my blog and will no-doubt read the partial cross-post I have on my blogspot blog. (So, Ricky, I apologize in advance for sort of using your guys’s comment as a jumping off point for a rant. I hope you understand my non-hostile motivations and understand that I can be pissed about your comment and still appreciate the video. I just hope you (and any other guy) realize that the more you tell yourself that girls are stupid, the more true that will seem to be and you’ll never meet anyone or get laid (for free) ever. Even though your comment was probably a total joke, and you probably all three have great girlfriends, it’s still exactly the wrong way to attract chicks to computers or linux.)
Anyway, I just wanted to share, and see if I could rock the gendered-geek boat a little bit just for fun.
I was digging around in del.icio.us instead of reading, and I stumbled across Chris Del Checcolo, Ricky Hussmann, and Dougald Brown’s video about setting up a dual-boot system with Windows XP and Ubuntu Linux. I thought “hey wow! perfect for Marci (my roomie who’s almost ready to make the switch)” and I emailed her a link. So, anyway, the video’s funny and good. informative, light etc. Until the very end when one of them makes some joke about how this type of thing isn’t going to help you (male audience) get dates, because “girls hate linux”.
Just in case this was true, I pulled down my pants to make sure I still had a vagina.
Seriously folks. No, I didn’t get all hussy and pissy like I used to. Frankly, I’m getting used to people assuming my gender is stupid-until-proven-otherwise. And to be perfectly honest, it’s no longer flattering or cute when guys FREAK OUT AND CAN’T BELIEVE IT when they discover that I know how to scp a file to a remote machine or that I switched to linux for ideological (as well as financial) reasons. Anyway, I emailed Ricky to both thank him and his buddies for the video and to throw in my two meager female cents for the “girls are too dumb to like linux” type of comment at the end of their film. I also mentioned that I’d be “sooo bloggin this”, and since he has a penis, he’ll no-doubt know how to google my name and find my blog and will no-doubt read this. So, Ricky, I apologize in advance for sort of using your guys’s comment as a jumping off point for a rant. I hope you understand my non-hostile motivations and understand that I can be pissed about your comment and still appreciate the video. I just hope you (and any other guy) realize that the more you tell yourself that girls are stupid, the more true that will seem to be and you’ll never meet anyone or get laid (for free) ever. Even though your comment was probably a total joke, and you probably all three have great girlfriends, it’s still exactly the wrong way to attract chicks to computers or linux.
Anyway, I’m quoting my email here, just for fun. You don’t have to read it:
Hello hellodel.icio.us helped me find your linux dual boot tutorial video that’s available on google videos… which I thought was funny and straight-forward and totally useful by the way.
Also, talking about how girls hate linux is DEFINITELY the best way to get more girls to get into linux. That totally made my day.
Basically, I went searching for resources to help my (female) roomie switch to ubuntu, and yours seemed like the most accessible… And yet, us chicks are still seen as dumb bimbo linux-haters! That’s sooo 1999. *scolds*
Anyway, thanks for the video. it made me feel warm and fuzzy until that last bit about girls hating linux. I’m pretty sure it’s stuff like that (or just assuming girls aren’t into computers) that makes it hard for engineering guys to get dates. We love to hear about how dumb we are.
(or wait! I could reply to your stereotypes and talk about how it’s really the fact that engineers never shower, and they have bad breath, and they never make eye contact that makes it hard for you guys to get dates!)
Have a spiffy day. feel free to write back, forward this to your partner in crime, or whatever. :) sincere thanks for the video. but don’t disregard my feminazi critique of the end of it. :)
Emily Nashif
P.S. i’m sooo blogging this. :)
Anyway, off to read and study for my Liberal-Arts (aka “artsy-fartsy”) education. Or maybe I should sleep.
Edit: Just in case anyone is interested, there’s a little discussion simmering about the cross-post I made to a livejournal community for girls who like geeks.
Hey! People visiting from search engines! leave me a comment so that I can tell if this post helps you or if I can help you in any other way! This is by far my most popular post directly from the search engines.
….for the benefit of other people who might find totally jargonized help-files or howtos or documentation completely opaque, I’m posting in PLAIN HUMAN LANGUAGE about my amarok problems and how I finally solved them.
I’m using ubuntu breezy, and I installed amarok from synaptic package manager, which pulled sqlite and the kde binares/files that it also needs.
At one point, I tried to delete all files from my amarok collection so that I could re-load them to solve what I thought was a problem with it missreading some id3 tags. After I tried to uncheck the folder for my music library, amarok was unable to rebuild my collection successfully. I suspected that this was a problem with the sqlite database, but I couldn’t locate the database file itself and didn’t know how to interact with sqlite through the command line, so I tried to uninstall everything and reinstall everything from scratch to try to solve this problem. (Also, i didn’t want to take the time to learn how to configure mysql and switch to that database instead.)
I ran into problems locating all the hidden files to successfully remove them after I uninstalled amarok and sqlite from synaptic.
The following are the two major locations of amarok references that you have to manually remove in order to completely uninstall amarok and sqlite:
~/.kde/share/apps/amarok/
~/.kde/share/config/amarokrc
In nautilus, go to View and choose “show hidden files” and browse to the .kde directory.
Another step I took was to install Deborphan and use it in synaptic to create a custom filter to find all orphaned dependencies. Also, DON’T FORGET TO EMPTY YOUR TRASH.
I also used sudo updatedb and then sudo locate amarok and sudo locate sqlite in the terminal to locate references to the name (once I learned about these commands).
I tried using the application called Beagle to search for instances of keywords in my filesystem in nautilus, but it never found a single file I was looking for so I consider it useless.
I also rebooted for good luck before I reinstalled but I don’t know if this is necessary.
I consider this kind of thorough manual search-and-destroy method a good technique for uninstalling most user-installed applications and programs in linux (presumably debian based OSes like Ubuntu… since that’s all I’ve ever used.) Use synaptic or apt-get first, making sure to tell it to remove it completely, and then manually go in and destroy all config files.
Anyway, after all instances of amarok were gone from sudo locate amarok output, I simply reinstalled Amarok from synaptic and it pulled sqlite and all the other missing dependencies just like normal and just as if it was a fresh install.
Asking for help from my journal readers too. :)
I upgraded to breezy a few weeks ago, and mostly everything has been working fine for me. There are just a few things that for some reason didn’t “show up” on my machine after the update and I know they are supposed to be here.
I’m missing the ability to edit my gnome menus. What would be the command to open the editor that lets you add custom things to the entire menu so I can check if it works at all? If it’s not there, what would be the first step to fixing this? I’ve googled “ubuntu missing gnome editor” without luck…
I’m also missing the spiffy-hawt startup splash screen. I’ve tried googling also, but I can’t find a solution.
Can someone point me in the right direction so I can try to solve these minor problems?
cross-posted to .
log of advice from other post:
nabbyfan
Smeg, a GNOME menu editor, is included with Breezy. It should be in System Tools, as Applications Menu Editor (or something like that). And to the get the splash, just type in sudo dpkg-reconfigure linux-image-`uname -r` in a console, then reboot.
ouij
you might want to try running # apt-get -f install.
As for gnome menu editing, that is a constant annoyance (it makes me long for GNOME 2.8, sometimes). The interim fix for now is smeg, which is gettable via # apt-get install smeg
kazriko
You might try installing the “ubuntu-desktop” package. Sometimes when upgrading distros some packages will get removed. This should reinstall many of the default packages. (Use Synaptic under the System->Administration menu.)
What I did: reinstalled ubuntu-desktop. This fixed the missing smeg. I ran dpkg-reconfigure linux-image-`uname -r` and got this:
sudo dpkg-reconfigure linux-image-`uname -r`
Not touching initrd symlinks since we are being reinstalled (2.6.12-9.23)
Not updating image symbolic links since we are being updated (2.6.12-9.23)
Searching for GRUB installation directory … found: /boot/grub .
Testing for an existing GRUB menu.list file… found: /boot/grub/menu.lst .
Searching for splash image… none found, skipping…
Found kernel: /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.12-9-386
Found kernel: /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.10-5-386
Found kernel: /boot/memtest86+.bin
Updating /boot/grub/menu.lst … done
Not sure why it can’t find the splash image… :(
