mandazi

It’s looking good so far. I see they mimic’ed Mac’s “icon finder thingy” (forgot what’s the proper term) on the left. It loads faster.

So far so good.

I had installed Ubuntu 10.04 with the Wubi installer since it was simple to do and I wanted to try out Ubuntu.  After several months of using it decided to break on me.  I upgraded some of the applications as well as upgraded to 10.10 and it stopped booting.  Every time I would select Ubuntu from the list it would just cycle back to the menu.

So I decided to officially install Ubuntu without the Wubi installer (since that is only for people to try it out).  I then faced another issue that many users who buy HP laptops (and maybe other companies) will also face: 4 primary partitions already partitioned from the hard drive.  They are for Windows 7, the system, the recovery and then HP Tools.  I did some Googling to find out what HP Tools does and concluded that it was harmless to get rid of that for Ubuntu (you can only have 4 primary partitions on a hard drive). I used the Windows Disk tool to delete the HP_tools partition.   I then created a Ubuntu 10.10 64 bit live USB drive and booted from it.  The Ubuntu installer has a partitioning tool that I used to format the free space that I created with the Windows tool and installed Ubuntu on there.

Now I have Windows 7 and Ubuntu 10.10 installed on one hard drive easily booting into both.  No more Wubi upgrading issues.

I was having issues with loading the Blocks Editor when using the Google App Inventor then I saw this:

Tips: If you are using GNU/Linux, then you should use Sun Java rather than OpenJDK. App Inventor does not work well with OpenJDK.

Ubuntu by default loads the Blocks Editor with OpenJDK, so the solution is to install Sun Java instead.  I installed it with the Synaptic Package Manager. Then the next time you open up the Blocks Editor, don’t use the OpenJDK.  Instead select other and locale this file: /usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun/jre/bin/javaws and you should be good. You can use this from now on.

So I signed up to get an invite to use the Google App Inventor for Android and was excited to see an email welcoming me to it. I started reading the beginner’s guide and setting up my environment. Since Java is the language used to write Android apps, I installed Eclipse. Google has an add-on for Eclipse called the Android Development Tools or ADT plugin. I attempted to install this, but got this error:

An error occurred while installing the items   session context was:(profile=PlatformProfile, phase=org.eclipse.equinox.internal.provisional.p2.engine.phases.Install, operand=null –> [R]org.eclipse.cvs 1.0.400.v201002111343, action=org.eclipse.equinox.internal.p2.touchpoint.eclipse.actions.InstallBundleAction).   The artifact file for osgi.bundle,org.eclipse.cvs,1.0.400.v201002111343 was not found.

After googling, I found out that installing Eclipse via the Ubuntu Software Center doesn’t fully install all the necessary files for Eclipse.  Installing it with the Synaptic Package Manager installs everything needed.  So I un-installed Eclipse via the Ubuntu Software Center and installed “eclipse” along with the rest of the required packages using the Synaptic Package Manager.  By the way, when you select “eclipse” package it asks you if you want to install the other required packages.  Make sure you do, or else it will not work.

I’ll be posting more about developing for the Android in the coming weeks.  Can’t wait to build my first app!

So I couldn’t get ColoZilla working on Ubuntu 10.04 64-bit.  After checking out the Ubuntu forums and doing some Google search it seems that it doesn’t work for 64-bit versions of Ubuntu.  The solution is to use gcolor2.  You can get it via the Ubuntu Software Center or via the command line with:

sudo aptitude install gcolor2

It’s a separate application that functions the same as ColorZilla, so you will have to switch from window to window to get the color picker.  Not really ideal but its a solution for me.

If anyone knows of any working color pickers for Firefox, please share.  Thanks.

A while ago, I attempted to start using Ubuntu, but failed to install it on an old gateway laptop that didn’t have any linux drivers for audio, visual and wifi devices. Or at least I couldn’t find any online for the laptop. Due to the failure in getting it to work, I stopped my Ubuntu journey. I wasn’t ready for it. Skip forward a year later and I found myself installing Ubuntu 10.04 on my newer HP laptop. Installation was a breeze and everything worked out of the box except for some issues with double fingers on the touchpad and the right/left click ares on it. I was impressed. Wifi, bluetooth, sound, video, and pretty much everything worked instantly with Ubuntu.

As soon as I started to use it for a few hours, I noticed they took a some of their UI from Apple’s OS X and Windows. It’s the best from both OSs combined into one. Workspaces is cool. I’ve never experienced that working on Windows. I find that very useful when multitasking. I also like the way alt-tab works when switching from one item to another.

The best part of it all is developing with Ubuntu, which is the main reason I switched. I was having a hard time dealing with Windows and developing with Ruby on Rails. On Ubuntu it was extremely fast for obvious reasons. I haven’t tried developing in PHP or Java yet, but will soon.

Ubuntu? I’m going to learn Ubuntu?

So I just installed Ubuntu on an old laptop I had.  I’m currently having video, sound and wireless issues.  That’s beacuse I dont have the proper linux drivers installed.  Also I have the latest Ubuntu (9.04) installed and apparently all the drivers aren’t up to date with the 9.04.y f

Anyways it’s pretty cool.  Very simple, pretty fast.

Anyone with a Gateway laptop (model mx3231) that successful installed Ubuntu with working video, sound and wireless, please let me know.  Thanks!