One laptop per child

Giving one of this laptops to a child in the developing world(including Afghanistan) makes rational economic sense for buying a laptop for the kids in your life too. Where else does 399$ US buy you a kid proof laptop for younger kids? You could buy a used older laptop I suppose. For the 399$ your kid gets a designed for kids laptop and then another one is donated to a kid in a developing country. Sure they need water and food more than a laptop. But buy someone a meal they eat for one day. Teach them to grow a meal they eat for life. The laptop can be seen as a tool for building communities. Visit www.laptop.org

Memory upgrades.

It will cost about 200$ to buy 2 GB of Kingston PC5300 laptop RAM from Futureshop to upgrade the memory in my Macbook. I have not yet priced the 4 GB of RAM I need for my new desktop to bring it up to Maximum. I may need to reinstall Debian or find some way of repartitioning the hard drive because I want to adjust the swap space on the hard drive. Right now I have 2 GB of swap space and if the desktop can be upgrade to 4 GB RAM I will need to upgrade the swap space to 8 GB of Swap space. Swap space is space on the hard drive that is used like RAM for moment by moment memory needs. It is recommended that swap space be set to double the real RAM size. I think this used to be called Virtual Memory on early to middle aged Macs.

KPhoto

I did get KPhoto to upload photos from my SonyT20 camera. The camera connects as a USB device. I simply used the file browser in Gnome to copy and paste the photos into KPhoto. Or was it import from a folder they were copied and pasted too? So the photos can get into the computer. I have not tried printing them yet and Canon do not have Linux drivers for the printer I own.

Second Life viewer on Linux

I have been using the Second Life viewer successfully under Linux a few times now. It is almost like a new game and very responsive.

Leopard updated this morning

Leopard on the Macbook updated itself this morning. The IBM computer took some getting used to. I am still using Apple keyboard short cuts. I need to relearn or readapt to PC short keyboard cuts I found I could run Second Life under Linux. I also learned to use the Konqueror browser. I do need firefox for some web pages but so far can not install firefox under Debian using the Synaptic package manager. I also have not found K package yet I did just now while writing this post install KDM and may have KDE working soon enough. In fact, as I proof read this I was asked by the computer which default window manager I wanted to use and I selected KDM. I am restarting now and will see what happens.  I did not yet get KDE. I also in this install run/download installed numerous K packages. I also just got a DVD to play apparently violating some law perhaps concerning copyright. I downloaded some package that was a library for decoding DVD's. When I did this K package popped up. So with all of the above I am getting there with Debian Etch.

Only hardware issues so far with new IBM desktop.

The Debian Net install process is just downloading software as it is in the Select and install software phase right now. I updated the Windows XP first and ran Norton. The only issue I had was finding a caddy or really a piece of metal to hold the Western Digital 200 GB second hard drive. The drive is installed and formatted now. There are 30 seconds remaining in this phase. I will update more later.

Leopard is taking a little getting used to.

I have now been using Leopard for about 12 hours. I used it all day today from about 1 PM until now.

The Visual Studio project is done now.

I have a version of the Windows software installer now and just figured out one would make an installer as a sub part of an application. This was done as an exercise for school. I should touch it up a little bit now but I have one version now I can email to our instructor before Wednesday.

The Leopard install is complete now

Leopard is up and running on the Macbook. I have about 5 GB free space on the hard drive now.

The Leopard install has begun

I have placed the Leopard install disk in the Macbook and rebooted and then followed instructions. Everything seems fine as the installer checks the inegrity of the DVD disk. Is this a sexual metaphor "put the disk in"? Then what is integrity checking all about or choosing a hard drive to upgrade? May be gendered interpretations fall short? But may be they are right on!

One last task before install of Leopard is dragging out but that's because I am not working on it right now.

I decided I had better get some school homework done before installing Leopard. Allowing some waiting time is also allowing some build up of excitment here. All the backs up are now done. But I have some school work that I can only do at home on the Macbook. I could complete it at school too on lab computers. But it is much more convenient to complete it at home. It is almost done now. It really is not difficult because the teacher has made a step by step guide to the homework. Only the last step is not given and I have completed that once in the lab where we learned this a few weeks ago. The assignment is to make an installer project in C# using Visual Studio. Then we must add a license agreement. I am almost done the step by step part and when this is done I will log off WinXP on the Macbook and install Leopard.

Then Monday I install Debian 4.0 r1 on an IBM M50 desktop which should arrive that day. I have Monday off of work. I will post details of the Linux install after the Leopard install is done but I am right now also preparing for the Linux install but won't give details right now.

You should back up your computer before installing an upgrade or new OS.

Following the advice to back up my computer before the upgrade to Mac OS 10.5 I am backing up my Macbook.

So far I have burned four DVD's of the Desktop folder as of last night. I burned two of these DVD's on Kodak DVD's and two on Memorex DVD's. I also did this with four disks for the documents folder. All other folders than documents and desktop were considered two large for DVD back up.

I also used one external 250 LaCie USB hard drive to copy these two folders once. I also used my eMac and the LaCie back up software on the eMac to back up the user folder on the Macbook to a second LaCie 250 USB external drive attached to the eMac. These two computers are connected to a router in common which keeps them networked together.

Another step is still in progress and that is to use the LaCie backup software on the Macbook to back up many different folders like the systems folder, the users folder, the library, and the applications folder to a third smaller 160 GB LaCie USB external drive. So far backing up the applications folder this way has not worked so a copy of it was copied to the drive.

Windows XP is also installed on the Macbook so a copy of the major folders was made to the first USB external drive mentioned above and then this was copied to the third drive as well. Some Windows folders on the Macbook could not be copied due to permissions issues.

The last step will be to use the LaCie back up software to make one more copy of the user folder to the third drive. Then the backups will be considered completed.

Installing Leopard on the Macbook.

I will make a series of posts now about intsalling Leopard on my Macbook. I paid 109 dollars plus tax for this Mac OS 10.5 last night.

The community group web site will not close.

So the people in charge of the community group project decided not to close their web site after all. May be there is more paid work in web mastering? I at one time made a goal to earn just a little money making web sites. This I have now done.

Apple updates.

I just updated iTunes to version 4.5 and Quicktime.

New computer ordered.

I am happy to buy an IBM computer now that IBM have settled with thier workers in Italy. They held a strike in the on-line game of Second Life. I ordered a Pentium 4, 3 Ghz hyper threaded certified used desktop. It has Gigabyte ethernet, an 80 GB hard drive and a CD burner with DVD playing ability. I also ordered a Western Digital 250 GB hard drive to have a second harddrive for installing Debian 4.0. So again I will have a dual boot Debian Linux/ Windows XP box.

ProView 17" monitor works with Solaris machine.

I paid only 40$ for a 17 inch monitor. It is an old style CRT monitor not an LCD. But it works fine with the Solaris computer so I now have that machine looked after. The monitor is brand new though. I am still tempted to buy an IBM desktop or Thinkpad to run Debian 4. These certified used IBM machines are fairly cheap right now.