This area is reserved for my occasional ramblings and musings.
On 2009-11-26, I wrote to Acer UK to establish what its policy was regarding the Microsoft Tax. This was its response:- Hello, Thank you for contacting Acer. Regarding your enquiry, The value would be £33.95 for vista home premium. This can only be refunded within 30 days of purchase and to get it refunded you…
Editor’s note: This article is old and outdated. Blubuntu was eventually fixed in 2010. KDE4 also went on to be really rather good too. That was until they messed it up again with KDE5, but that is showing signs of being rather good now (2018-12-27) too. Seems that Canonical has woken up to the fact…
Editor’s note: this petition dates back to 2009 and can no longer be signed. However, you can still visit the site if you wish. The patent system is misused to restrain competition for the economical benefit of a few but fails to promote innovation. A software market environment is better off with no patents on…
This is a relatively quick and very effective way to beef up your (K)Ubuntu installation. In other words, it’s how to install all your favorite Ubuntu apps all in one go! Note this primarily applies to (K)Ubuntu 9.04 & 9.10 (Jaunty & Karmic), 64 bit versions. For (K)Ubuntu 8.04 please visit earlier (and possibly outdated)…
Firstly, as ever, please back up anything that is important – as you would with any major upgrade on any computer system! Then you can either use the Synaptic package manager or in this instance it is probably quicker to install from a Terminal window. First you need to ensure the system is fully up…
This is the fourth article in a series of case studies illustrating the difficulty one has purchasing a PC in the UK without being forced to pay a “Microsoft Tax”. We use Linux on all our PC’s and have done so for several years. Therefore we do not need, nor should we be forced to…
We eventually did hear back from Laptops direct. Amazingly, its sales team openly admits that it ignores the Microsoft EULA! So nil penguin points! But if there were a category for honesty then it would get plenty of penguins! The emails are in reverse order and since I guess the sales person is just “following…
Rationale At the moment, everyone who buys a PC from a UK supplier has to buy a Microsoft Windows license whether they want it or not. One has no choice, it is included in the price one pays. So, even if you are using one of the many free alternative operating systems such as Ubuntu,…
Minority interest? Yes. Only used by geeks & programmers? Not necessarily… Ubuntu is a minority interest insofar as it only has a fraction of the users that M$ Windows has. Moreover, despite great improvements in recent years, some configuration issues with Ubuntu are still a pain. However I disagree that you need to be a…
This is an update to the Dell OS-free laptop fiasco:- http://www.garfnet.org.uk/joomla/index.php? option=com_content&view=article&id=182&Itemid=331 Seems that whilst Dell cannot be bothered to respond to our enquires with regard to buying laptops OS-free, or whether it is prepared to refund customers for unused Microsoft licenses as per Microsoft’s EULA, it is however perfectly happy to spam its customers…
This is the second article in a new series of case studies illustrating the difficulty one has purchasing a PC in the UK without being forced to pay a “Microsoft Tax”. We use Linux on all our PC’s and have done so for several years. Therefore we do not need, nor should we be forced…
I always found dual booting is a pain and I’d far rather have removable boot disks that can be sized and optimised for the OS they contain. In the old days when we used to run Windows, I fitted removable boot drives in our servers & desktops and cloned the boot disks so that if…
This is a new series of case studies illustrating the difficulty one has purchasing a PC in the UK without being forced to pay a “Microsoft Tax”. We use Linux on all our PC’s and have done so for several years. Therefore we do not need, nor should we be forced to pay for any…
This is the third article in a new series of case studies illustrating the difficulty one has purchasing a PC in the UK without being forced to pay a “Microsoft Tax”. We use Linux on all our PC’s and have done so for several years. Therefore we do not need, nor should we be forced…
Sometimes your Ubuntu sound system can stop working. Often this is caused by a media player plugin in your web browser. You might also notice that your computer goes very slowly and that if it is browser-related, then the browser will perform at a snail’s pace! As a Linux user, you will no doubt consider…
Two events this week could herald in the clash of the titans as the two global IT giants, Google & Microsoft slug it out for global internet dominance. Or so one might believe. MS started rolling-out its much-hyped Microsoft Online Services (MOS). The new services are scheduled to be available to customers by mid-July 2009….
Unfortunately the new Google Chromium open source browser is not included in the Ubuntu software repositories yet. Therefore installing it is a little more complex than other Ubuntu applications. But it still takes less than five minutes. Here’s how… 1. You need to tell your system to connect to the appropriate software repository. That is,…
Editors note: Gerfnet radio tuner was effectively made obsolete by the fact that most modern browsers play media directly. However, some reader may find our static Internet Radio page helpful for finding stations and addressing other problems that may arise. The internet radio tuner is cross-platform compatible and should work on any modern operating system….
GarfNet’s upgrade to Joomla 1.5.x is now complete. Even better, the rather nasty “$live_site” bug reported in our last site blog item is now fixed. Many thanks to Joomla developer, Ian MacLennan for providing us with a timely patch:- http://joomlacode.org/gf/project/joomla/tracker/?action=TrackerItemEdit&tracker_item_id=16930 We still have our doubts whether Joomla 1.5.x should be deemed to be in its…
Editor’s note: the Garfnet internet Radio player has been discontinued and this article amended accordingly. However the streams have all been updated and can be played through your browser or separate media player. This is a brief introduction to Internet radio. In a nutshell, we finally had to abandon GarfNet’s somewhat ageing internet radio &…
LAMPP – sometimes written as “LAMP” – is an abbreviation for Linux | Apache | MySQL (database) | PHP ((Pretty) Hypertext Pre-processor) | Perl (programming language). Today, many Linux distributions come with Apache, MySQL, PHP, Perl & Python anyway – or they are very easily added from the distributions software repository. If you want to…
Editor’s note: this article dates back to 2009 and is VERY obsolete. It is here for historical interest only. Currently we are evaluating a number of quite different Content Management Systems. For the main part of the site it was a battle between Joomla & PHP-Nuke. Both are good systems. However Joomla’s administration tools are…
Editor’s note: Things have changed since this article was published. Today’s Debian installer is excellent and many of our desktop and laptop machines now run Debian “stable” branch. We have also found that in many cases Debian runs faster on old hardware than Ubuntu. Currently the editor’s own laptop is running Debian “testing” branch. Yes…
We believed it would make managing GarfNet much easier. However, recent issues upgrading to Joomla 1.5.x have brought this decision into question. Related Images:
Editors note, as of June 2024 this web server, and indeed most of our web servers now run Debian. As do many of our desktop and laptop machines. In 1995 our ISP set us up on a server running FreeBSD. Then in 2005 we built our own server, moved to Linux and chose a ‘live…
