Ice prevents freezing!

peppermint ice

Although I have a variety of computers, I mostly use three: a Macbook, a Samsung NC10, and a generic laptop that comes with my office at work. I use the generic laptop a lot, especially since I maintain a LAN in the school's admin block. But it came with only 200+ MB of RAM. Needless to say, the new releases of Ubuntu and OpenSUSE hardly get out of their starting blocks on this machine.

Enter Peppermint and especially Peppermint Ice! Instead of waiting, with mounting frustration, for the bigger distros to actually do something on this machine I can actually do my work through Peppermint without hassles. I prefer Ice since it's browser back-end is Chromium rather than Mozilla, and I also think it's slightly faster. Printing doesn't come with Ice initially but CUPS is easy to install via synaptic. All-in-all, I'm a fan.

Ruby Shoes!

Everyone knows of course (or should!) about Dorothy's famous ruby slippers in The Wizard of Oz:

they are justly iconic.








But have you seen this icon before?

These are also ruby shoes! 

Let me explain. From time-to-time I do some coding/programming, since I began using computers in the days when computers came with built-in programming languages; in those far-off days the only way you could have a program is if you wrote one (my first computer was a ZX-80, R50 at the time from South Africa). The languages I learnt back then were BASIC, LOGO, and PASCAL. Later on, I actually posted a few programs online for Mac OS 7,8, and 9. 

Well, recently I've been tinkering with PYTHON and RUBY. RUBY... aha! RUBY is quite special I think.

It got me considering how I might be able to teach some RUBY at school to the students. Surfing the net I came across SHOES, which is a mini-GUI kit for RUBY. When students start learning something they want to see quick results, and SHOES certainly provides quick results. Like RUBY itself beginners can see results from the get-go. I think it might be what educators are looking for. And it's not even difficult to get hold of. It's already in the Ubuntu/Mint/Peppermint repositories, works as call-to app, and (obviously) runs on ruby. More on this next week...

Rainy Morning Dream Song

My head
is full of places,
places I've been;
and faces,
faces I've seen. On
rainy misty mornings
like this one,
listening to Bach in the car,
I remember where they are
and who they were.

It's a different kind of travel,
unravelling a past,
exploring familiar spaces,
the pigeonholes logged and locked
in the recesses of a brain.

Children walk by, singing
It's raining, it's pouring,
the old man is snoring.

The rain continues to fall.

The memories pour out of me,
sing like children,
dream like the old man.

Peppermint outruns Meerkat

Well, I've been using Maverick for some four days or so, and I definitely like it, but these standard Ubuntu distros are becoming more and more RAM heavy. A lot of the time I'm using a laptop that only has about 200 MB of RAM, so after a while Meerkat begins to crawl. That's when I logout and fire up Peppermint which is like a breath of fresh air... however, I've installed the new UBUNTU font on Peppermint, so it's not as if the Meerkat hasn't changed my user experience! :)

Btw, there's no need to install Ice to get web-apps any more: I notice Chromium has a command dedicated to this in its Tools menu.

Maverick Meerkat 10.10.10 has arrived!

Well, Maverick has finally arrived (Ubuntu 10.10). I've been running the Release Candidate for the last 24 hours and it works fine so far. Cardapio is installed and still cool, Swiftfox is still speedy, and K3b is still the best CD/DVD writer ever! My other favourite apps are also fine.

Visually, Maverick hasn't changed much but from the activity I've seen going on doing the installation and updates, there's been a lot of changes under the hood. Next week--after the official release--I'll see if I can install and run SchoolTool on this newbie. Should be fine though.

Lush-Cardapio-Ice Desktop

Here's a grab of my current desktop, showing the Ubuntu Lush theme, the new Cardapio menu applet, and the use of Ice web-apps:

The drop-down menu at the top-left is Cardapio, and everything is in there; it's like a KDE or Mint Menu; then there are dedicated Ice-made web-apps for Facebook, Gmail, Yahoo mail, this blog, and my 4shared page. At the top right pidgin is inside the envelope and there's also a green button (not shown in the grab) that says that I'm available (online) through Mxit. For me, this is all very Mac OS 7-9, my favourite desktop era. This is all Ubuntu/Peppermint though, not Mac.

Lush is available through synaptic (in a collection of gnome-2 themes); Ice is available by adding the following ppa and then checking Ice in synaptic:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:kendalltweaver/peppermint

Cardapio also needs the ppa added:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:cardapio-team/unstable

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get install cardapio

Mxit is great on linux

Mxit, as many of you know, is the messenger of choice for thousands of Southern Africa's teens; and boasts millions of subscribers world-wide. Here in Swaziland it's used by every teen who has an internet-usable phone. Mxit distracts students during class at school and keeps them awake at night, long after the time they should have been asleep. We adults use it too. Of course: a single sms using Swaziland MTN costs 80 cents, but you can text to many friends using Mxit for three hours for just 60 cents.

There is no reason not to use Mxit.

But Mxit works on a laptop or desktop too-- at least it does using Linux and Pidgin. I use Pidgin (for Mxit) on Mint, Peppermint, Jolicloud, and even TinyCoreLinux, and it works seamlessly and without ever crashing.

Tiny Core Linux!

Well, this is fun. I'm posting this using Tiny Core Linux: an OS that works 'out-of-the-box', has a GUI, and is only 10MB in size! Downloading and installing apps is a breeze... now, if Prism or Ice was available as an extension, so I didn't have to even fire up Chromium...

Gnome Global Menu Panic!

Up until very recently I always added the gnome global-menu ppa to any new install of a system and added the applet to my top desktop panel. I loved having the extra menus available at the top of the page (probably because I was a Mac user for 15 years). But a few days ago I noticed that something was hogging my ram and making my computer move like it was sliding through molasses. I discovered that global-menu was the culprit. Somehow or other it was throwing the CPU into a panic attack and just kept recycling, using up to 98% of the processing. I disabled it and then removed it. :(

But I gather that something similar is set to arrive in Maverick... (Ubuntu 10.10). :)?

Radiance (Ubuntu) theme

Here's a screenshot of one of my laptops with the Radiance theme installed. I think it looks way cool. (I'm actually running Linux Mint Isadora, but of course Mint is built upon Ubuntu.) If you like it too, it's available through synaptic: just search for radiance...

Why Jolicloud is the new Holy Grail

The biggest reason why I'm keen on Jolicloud 1.0 is because its interface mimics those insanely great Apple iPhone, iPad, and other mobile interfaces. As I've remarked before, the future of the Internet/Web/Mail and the rest is how well desktop environments integrate with mobile environments (this is, for example, why google's WAVE didn't catch on). Jolicloud is built upon Ubuntu so there wasn't much danger of it not working-- but the interface has given it the edge over its competition.

Way back in 1984, when the first Macintosh computer was unveiled to an unsuspecting world, I became an instant fan. Apple's approach has been, indeed, insanely great. But it isn't the hardware or the apps that have brought about the revolution: it was the Human Interface Guidelines that did it. In other words, Apple realised that the user experience is at least as important as the quality of the hardware and software involved. Most users aren't geeks or nerds and don't want to be: they'll happily settle for less speed, power, or whatever, as long as it looks good. The equation is: If it works and it looks good, then it is good.

[At the moment I'm running Jolicloud 1.0 on my Samsung NC10, OSX (of course) and Ubuntu Lucid on my MacBook, and Mint Isadora, Peppermint, and Peppermint Ice on my run-of-the-mill laptop.]