Adventures in linux over the weekend

I had installed Ubuntu 5.04 on my notebook, and everything worked great. I figured while everything worked, I’d put on 5.10 (while still in testing/beta) and couldn’t get it to install properly. So after it went live, I went after it again.

I sat on 5.10 (Final) for a while (seeding as the time goes by on Bittorrent) and also grabbed, Vector Linux, and traded 4 Ubuntu 5.04 disks for SUSE 10 Professional.

I installed Vector Linux first. Install worked great out of the box, but after 4 attempts, I could not get X to work, so I moved on to SUSE. I HATE multiple-CD installs. DVD’s are where it’s at, or a single install CD. Having 5 disks there to install stuff off of is a PITA. I like the install, it’s up there with Fedora/Mandrake, and I probably have to say I like it better than the previous 2. Great means to configure things during the install, and worked well.

Once SUSE was installed, I was having a hard time getting the network card to take any sort of IP Address. I had 3 other computers on the network, and all were able to get an address, but this box would not take an address. I manually assigned an address, still no luck. It did detect my hardware, and everything appeared to be working, but no dice. Other things I noticed, I liked the GUI, very nice, quick for what it was, and no problems. It did not auto-mount my USB Drive, nor any CD’s. Gone are the days of having to mount drives (or so I think). So no means to connect to the network, didn’t auto-mount my thumb drive, it wasn’t looking good. Might have to revisit it on on some older hardware to get a better feel for it, what I did see, I liked. I will tell you this. SUSE has been the ONLY distro to install my touch pad with all of it’s features ‘out of the box’. My Dell’s touch pad has a nice feature of having scrolling bars on the bottom and right so that you can just run your finger down the side to scroll down a page. It worked WONDERFULLY in SUSE (BIG plus!!).

On to 5.10. I was looking forward to it, but I wasn’t. Previously when I had tried to install 5.10, I was unsuccessful. But I figured it was 2 months later, and hopefully a lot had changed. Popped the CD in, and like 5.04, everything installed and worked great!! I’ll add this. Ubuntu has been the only distro that has let me run at 1900×1200 w/o any problems. SUSE wouldn’t let me run much over 1600×1200. Everything worked out of the box, and no issues to report right now. I miss my touch pad not working like it did in SUSE, and I wish Firefox was faster (I know the available fixes). I’ll say this, in 5.04 it did not detect my front multimedia controls, I had to configure those, and in 5.10 they worked! Neither 5.04 or 5.10 configured my touch pad correctly, but now I know it is possible, so I’m gonna give it a go when I have time to sit down.

What next? I’ll probably get a couple of Live CD’s lined up and see what’s out there. I’ve tried Knoppix, Slax, SimplyMephis, Phlak and knoppix STD. It was a toss up between Knoppix and SimplyMephis, with probably Mephis edging out. Didn’t like Slax at all, Phlak is really oriented towards network troubleshooting, but worked well. Will have to see what Knoppix STD brings to the table. I do know that Phalk .03 (?) will not load X on my Inspiron 6000 and Phlak .021 will not detect my wifi card.

all in time. enough blabbering

Tip: Forward/Back in Flock

In FireFox on the Forward/Back buttons you’d get an arrow to the side of the button that you could press that would drop down a list of sites. So instead of pressing back 4 times or whatever, you could press the arrow next to the back button and select the page 4 pages ago.

Well in Flock, I see no such arrows. But if you right-click either arrow, a drop-down menu will appear with the history there available for you for easier surfing.

Enjoy, and happy Flocking

Tip: Hyperlink in WordPress.com

If you’re typing up a piece of text and you have a hyperlink (url) and you want to test it before you post it to make sure it goes where you want it to. Press CTL + click the link. Should pop the link up in a new window.

I’m sure others know about this, but for those who don’t. There ya go.

Something Firefox should have had

I’m not sure why they didn’t have it. A neat trick I learned while reading Solution Watch

Update: Just noticed another helpful feature built into Flock. When you have multiple tabs open, you can click and drag each one of them to the left and right. You will see small arrows pointing down in the position to drop it. I have been wanting draggable tabs for a while in Firefox. (Thanks to Tristan and Tom who pointed out Firefox Beta 2 now has draggable tabs.) Great addition to Flock.

Flying with the Flock » Solution Watch

I have been trying to do this forever with Firefox, and sorting my tabs in a sequence that I want to sort them by, but seemed I was always stuck. So glad Flock has this feature!!!

Flock Shelf

I had no idea what Shelf was, until I stumbled upon this:

Update: Just noticed another helpful feature built into Flock. When you have multiple tabs open, you can click and drag each one of them to the left and right. You will see small arrows pointing down in the position to drop it. I have been wanting draggable tabs for a while in Firefox. (Thanks to Tristan and Tom who pointed out Firefox Beta 2 now has draggable tabs.) Great addition to Flock.

Flying with the Flock » Solution Watch

And it made perfect sense, wonderful little gadget. I’m sure it will get put to great use

The bug is caching, page does not refresh

http://bugzilla.flock.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1209

So I was having issues on a few bb’s and on e-bay. I would either login or make changes to my account in e-bay and the page would refresh and I was back to where I had just came from. It was frustrating going around in circles.

Got it all sorted out, and in a quick manner!

Another Test — Integrated Blogging with Flock

Now this seems like trick shit! I hope I can say trick shit. Anyways, very impressive. I have to say I like this a lot, even though I’ve only been using it a short time, and I’ve started to get a fair amount of extensions for firefox, in future releases stability will be there, hopefully better support for FF extensions and the sort, I see no reason to use FF or IE7.0

Eh, just a small test, we’ll see what it does.

My Outing with Flock

Just got it. I’ve got another WordPress blog, but my wifi network at home hasn’t been the most stable thing recently, so I haven’t bothered bringing up my server. Soon I hope!

I have to say, this is a different interface than what I’m used to at home, so I’ll have to determine what exactly is different, if there is a plug-in and USE IT!!

With that, my initial thoughts on Flock. Having only browsed a few minutes with Flock and doing this now, it’s quick, obviously firefox-like, but that isn’t a bad thing. Why didn’t the developers just support Firefox with extensions, I don’t know, but I’m sure I’ll find out.

So I’m at work, enough for now.