I thought I’d try something different and install Debain, but I ran into the same problems as Ubuntu with the machine freezing. I did some digging and found a fix of sorts, so now I can boot into Debian quite happily (an environment I am using right now!)

The problem seems to be generic, so I’ll try installing Ubuntu tomorrow with this fix and see what happens…

I really wanted to run Ubuntu on this new laptop of mine. It’s a Compaq Presario F500, but for some reason Ubuntu jsut will not run properly, even from the live CD. There seems to be some issue with the graphics card, as what is consistent is that if I boot into anything other than Safe Graphics mode (and then, only sometimes), once the OS starts up the video drivers the entire machine freezes solid.

The Laptop runs an NVIDIA 6100 GeForce Go video card, which seems to be the problem. I also know the CD I used is fine, as I’ve already used it to install Ubuntu in a partition on my Sony laptop (whcih runs an ATI card).

Having played around with Ubuntu under various hardware configurations and having run into problems running 3 monitors, I’me rather familiar now with the xorg.conf file - and the drivers were set to vesa, which are pretty much guaranteed to work. NVIDIA cards do require restricted mode drivers, so it’s a bit hard to update and install them when you have no connection to the net and no shell to work in!

I even tried to alternate CD, which worked fine right up to the point where it tried to install a kernel - then it entirely failed to find any one of the three on the CD. The installer directed me to check one of the virtual screens, and when I did I saw the error, and then the laptop froze solid.

So all in all not a great experience installing Ubuntu so far, which is a real shame as I really wanted this laptop to be my first all-Linux machine. I may have to wipe out my old Vaio and install Ubuntu on that instead. I have managed to get Vista running in a way I’m happy with though - UAC’s turned off, I have a decent AV program and a decent firewall, and some custom-written rules means the OS can’t actually communicate across the internet, Rocket Dock means I have a toolbar launcher, and Yod’m 3D gives me a Beryl-like 4 desktop cube rotator, which is incredibly handy.

Oh, and World of Warcraft actually runs quite well, so that’s gaming sorted too.

I’ve bought myself a new laptop (last Thursday evening actually…), and during the set up the decision had to come about what to install as my word processing software - use Works that came with the laptop or spring for another copy of Word/Office. I’ve posted before about how much I dislike Office 2007 and the ribbon device (the UI is so different from every other vendor’s application, yet consisent across Microsoft applications that it feels like a concerted effort on microsoft’s part to get peopel used to another propretary interface), so I wasn’t sure what to do.

During my investigations into Ubuntu (which I’m not using on this laptop - unfortunately the 7.04 release doesn’t run properly - more on that in another post) I started messing about with Open Office instead.

And now I’ve made the change permanent - this brand new laptop has Open Office installed as the primary and only suite of office-type applications. There is a learning curve to deal with, mostly as I’ve been using Microsoft-style menus for so long that I use keyboard shortcuts, most of which aren’t mapped exactly in Open Office, yet for day to day work I think Open Office has the edge, especially with the built-in PDF export functionality. I can even import all the old Word and Excel documents I have, and save out if I need to.

So, all the functions I need from Microsoft Office for the bargain basement price of - free!

I posted this over at the Mobile Weblog earlier today:

As many of you will know, for the past 9 months or so I have been working hard on the Pitch Mobile Social Network, a mobile service that takes the best of sites like Myspace, Flikr and Youtube and mashes them all into a single site you can access seamlessly via your mobile or the Web. Pitch includes multiple types of chat, between mobile and web, picture and video uploading, sharing, commenting and rating, with all formats converted to both mobile and web to allow users to watch mobile video in their browser, or easily upload web video to download to their phone.

Now the parent company has decided to focus on other aspects of their subscription-based mobile content business, and not on the social networking aspects, which means the time has come for me to move on.

So, I’m currently accepting offers of freelance or other work! Drop me line to say hello regardless, and let me know what you thought of Pitch - I’m very proud of the service I developed.

Update: Mike over at Tbites has posted about my departure, with a scary picture of me!
Update 2: Ewan at SMS Text News has also posted, saying nice things about me.

I took my first tentative, real steps away from using Microsoft Windows last night by installing Ubuntu 7.04 (Feisty Fawn) on a partition on my laptop. I’ve been playing with Ubuntu through Wubi, the disk-file installer for Ubuntu that lets you install and run the Linux OS under Windows.

But this is different: I’ve cleaned out a block of space on my hard drive, wiped out the old Windows partition, and installed Ubuntu natively - so I now have a dual-boot laptop.

The installation went very smoothly and was complete in about 20 minutes. After install, there were 5 updates, for a total of a 3Mb download, and everything just worked straight away - even my onboard ATI graphics card. So of course I installed Beryl for a bit of eye-candy. And again, it installed and ran first time.

The only issue I have is with my wireless networking card, but that’s not Ubuntu’s fault - by default the OS does not come with WPA support, and I happen to run WPA encryption on my wireless LAN and I had the same problem when I was running under Wubi. So once the final piece of software is installed, I’ll be up and running with a dual-boot wireless laptop.

One really interesting thing I’ve come across already is the way Ubuntu configures my laptop trackpad. By default it maps the right-hand edge to vertical scroll (with the bottom edge horizontal scroll), allowing me to scroll up and down by sliding my finger on the pad, rather than using mouse buttons. I cannot, for the life of me, get this working natively under Windows.

Technorati Tags: Ubuntu, Beryl, Microsoft, Windows, Windows XP, Linux

I’ve been so busy recently working on Pitch and other projects that I totally lost track of the date, and had to be reminded that AlienPants is now six years old!

A little digging through files has thrown up a quick way to disable the loading of custom themes in Word 2007, except for the default (which still puts the theme fonts at the top of the font list, the very last place I want them as I do not use them and do not want them.

Anyway, to disable all the other themes, go to “C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\” and rename the folder “Document Themes 12″ to something else. And the themes are gone…

Now to make the default theme disappear.

I finally got to work with Windows Vista yesterday, on a new laptop with Vista Home Premium. After waiting nearly 45 minutes for the laptop to start up for the first time, and after creating a single Administrator account, the first thing that happened was that Windows Vista decided I did not have enough permission to copy a file I created from a network computer I was administrator on to a folder I created on the new laptop.

So the very first thing Vista did was stop me working.

I’ve not been able to get around this issue either, so I’m basically stuck with a bunch of files that I created but am not allowed to work on, since Vista has decided that it knows better than I do whether or not I should be allowed to work on files I created.

I spent several hours trawling the Web regarding this issue as well, and it seems to be a common one, and one that Microsoft have been entirely silent on, leaving many people unable to access their own documents if they’re stored on a remote Windows XP computer. To answer some of the common ’solutions’:

• I don’t have Kaspersky AV installed
• I have a single Administrator account which has taken ownership of the entire hard drive - except those bits that Vista has decided I’m not allowed to take ownership of. Sorry, I thought this was my laptop?
• UAC is disabled.
• I have full administrator permissions on the remote XP network share.
• This is an issue that is not being addressed at all by Microsoft, yet it continues to affect people. From what I can gather, there’s absolutely nothing being said by Microsoft about what is causing this, or why this is happening.

Which leaves me unable to work using Windows Vista, and in the situation where I no longer have control over my own computer. Microsoft’s love affair with security has reached insane levels, and has literally got to the point where someone in America has more control over how I use my own computer than I do, and is essentially dictating to me what I can and cannot do with my own files on my own computer. And we’re not talking ‘protected or commercial content’, we’re talking about files I own and created, where the rights are mine. Vista is stripping me of the right to work with my own intellectual property.

I’m just glad I can still buy a copy of Windows XP over the counter, because even though this new laptop came with Vista pre-installed (and I had no choice in the matter), it’s likely to be wiped in favour of Windows XP, which at least lets me have control over my own files.

Update: I found a workaround for transferring files - install an FTP server on the remote machine - to get around Vista’s insane security issues. However, Vista had another trick up it’s sleeve. After transferring several gigabytes of files (yes, gigabytes) to one of Vista’s default folders, an attempt to move the contents of this folder resulted in Vista deleting all the files in the folder. All of them. And it didn’t move them to the recycle bin, or to the desired location, it permanently and irretrievably deleted them.

Vista is proving to be more of a headache than an upgrade, and there is serious thought to reverting back to Windows XP by buying a retail copy, or installing an alternative OS. Ubuntu or switching to Mac are looking attractive right now. Except for gaming, there is now nothing I can’t do on Windows that I can’t also do on either of these OSes.

Update 2: There are a number of new games coming soon that will only run under Vista with DirectX 10, including the incredible-looking Crysis. However, having now worked with Vista for a few days, even my desire to play a game like Crysis will not make me install Vista - I’m too worried that Vista will suddenly decide I don’t want some of my files again and arbitrarily decide to delete them without telling me.

Perhaps I’ll have to build a second gaming machine with Vista on it that’s not connected to the Internet, and just use it to play DX10 games and nothing else - I certainly won’t ever trust any of my work machines to have Vista installed.

The feature I hate most in Word 2007 is the new user interface - the Ribbon. I’ve been using it for a couple of weeks now, and I have found that all the new ribbon does is serve to frustrate me when I am working with Word documents. All the functions I used to use are hidden and not easily available. Word now insists that it knows how I want to format my document better than I do, and consistently display unwanted, un-needed and inappropriate options for formatting.

It takes more clicks to find the function I want, and often times I’m unable to find what I am looking for. Here’s a very explicit example:

When working on a document, I rely on document styles to mark up parts of the document. Document-derived styles are hidden under a very small button, and the ‘quick styles’ can not be set to the document styles, only those that Microsoft think I want to use.

The same goes for colours. There’s a colour missing from the default colour set: Blue. That’s RGB #0000FF. There are variants on the shade of blue, but not blue.

Then there’s the ‘themes’. Apparently when I select a font, what I want is a font from one of the ‘themes’, rather than a font I’ve already used. And you can’t disable themes, much as I have no use for them and never want to use them.

Lastly, I used to have all the functions I wanted on a single toolbar, and could access them all with a single click. Now it takes several (3 or more) to access common functions that used to be a single click away.

The upshot is that Word 2007, even after using for a couple of weeks and ‘getting used to it’ is having a detrimental effect on my productivity.

Oh, and don’t get me started on the 3 second pause whenever I bring the program into focus…

I’ve got a new PC at work, and with it comes some new software in the form of Office 2007 (and not Vista - if I ever get given a PC with Vista I think the first comment I run will be FDISK…)

Already, after a day of using Office 2007, I hate it. I know there’s been a lot written about how it takes a while to get used to, and it certainly does as it changes all the accepted and usual paradigms about controlling software.

I can deal with the new menus, that’s not a problem. What annoys me though is that the close document button (the little x in the top right) has disappeared…

Update: Guess who can’t spell…