Alexis Bauchu - On est pas des machines

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vendredi, novembre 20 2009

Google releases the Chromium OS open source project

Par Alexis Bauchu le vendredi, novembre 20 2009, 15:44

This had to happen, Google has entered the OS business. Well, they're not in the Desktop OS business, their strategy is to win the market of the eBooks, those really small and cheap computers aiming at connectivity. The main idea behind this product (Chrome OS) is that people are 90% of their time on the internet. And that... ok they tell it very well themselves, just watch this video:

Done? Ok. It seems quite logical to get to this point. With all the services that we use on internet, most of our data is alreay in the cloud, so this all fits. When I saw Chrome on Windows for the first time, with its task manager, its separate processes for each tabs, its workers (similar to threads, they're part of HTML5)... I realized that the browser was really becoming the new OS. No problems of portability (well almost), your data always available all around the world... The advantage of this approach is that you can then build a really cheap and really fast computer just designed to go on the internet. Google also provided a video live demo:

So this is not the OS proper for now, just the open source project, so that devs can already dive into the code and collaborate or experiment with it. It's all there: the Chromium projects.

Note: I thought I remembered that they already had released somehow a desktop OS, called gOS, but they did not. gOS stands for "Good OS" and is a modified version of Ubuntu with an emphasis on web 2.0 apps and "in the cloud" data.

samedi, septembre 26 2009

No Sound in Jaunty (Ubuntu 9.04) with nForce 2

Par Alexis Bauchu le samedi, septembre 26 2009, 17:55

I had some problems with the sound after installing Jaunty on my old computer. I followed a lot of instructions from bugs reports, from forums, and nothing worked. I could have sound in Totem with the OSS mixer, but not Alsa. The rest was not working: Firefox, Flash, VLC, none of them deliverd any sound. All the parameters seemed fine with Alsa, but I couln't get any sound with it. Weirdly, alsamixer wouln't run because it couln't find any device and Pulseaudio couln't recognize my nForce 2 sound chip. I though it had to do with the hardware and the drivers.

And then by accident, I noticed that when logged in other sessions than mine, everything worked fine, with the same parameters. So it got me thinking and I figured it out: I had that user account on that machine for a very long time. And every time I was upgrading Ubuntu, I was keeping the old files in /home/myname. So versions after versions, sound drivers files added up, but not nicely. So I did some cleaning, removing option folders from software that hasn't been installed in years on my machine and moved everything remotely related to Gnome or Alsa. Then I logged in: BAM! Everything was working again!

wild_jaunty_jackalope

Booting my old computer (Ubuntu 9.04 Live CD, I love you!)

Par Alexis Bauchu le samedi, septembre 26 2009, 17:00

I'm stuck at my parents with the flu right now. So I don't have nothing to do all day but to repair my old computer here. When I moved to Paris I took everything with me: cables, peripherals, CDs, speakers, everything. So there's not much here. Yet I HAVE to make that computer work because I still have unfinished business with my school, reports and stuff.

So I explore the house in search of stuff I could plug in to make it usable. The internals are ok, but I need a keyboard and a mouse at least. I find an old keyboard from the Windows ME era, I find an old PS2 mouse in the back of my cabinet. The plastic is yellow-ish now and it has a ball, but luckily is has a wheel, so yay! I start the computer after I gathered a few cables to give the machine some juice. Ow... I didn't remember that I had made it a server. No graphical environnement. I still can install stuff with the command line (Thank you Aptitude!!) but downloading the last Ubuntu CD and burning it is gonna be a nightmare. That's the time my brother chooses to enter and say that this is stupid and that I should just ask someone to download it for me.

- Can YOU download it for me?
- ...
- Please?
- OK.

I like the Live CDs from Ubuntu. They made me switch to Gnu / Linux. This one is really good: even though my machine is really old, it loads really quickly, the system is very responsive. I steal the RJ-45 cable from another device at home, plug it in, and BAM! I'm on the internet. I start the install and then I go answer some e-mails and stay in touch with friends on Facebook. By the time I've done all that, the install is over! It's quite fast and your not even blocked during the procedure. What else can you ask for?

Because I always organize my Hard Drives in distinct partitions, one for the system and one for data, all my old stuff is right there when I reboot the computer! The icons on the desktop, my wallpapers, my pictures, my home page in Firefox, my hotkeys, e-ve-ry-thing.

Seriously, it's THAT good!

ubuntu9.04cover

mercredi, décembre 31 2008

Ubiquity for Firefox

Par Alexis Bauchu le mercredi, décembre 31 2008, 08:03

Ubiquity is a prototype extension for Firefox developed by guys of the Mozilla labs. It proposes to use a command line using human language in Firefox to create mashups, uses web services, do searchs, etc. But if you don't know that awesome extension yet, the following video will explain everything:

Lire la suite...

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