Michael Dell on Supporting Linux

Michael Dell, chairman of Dell Inc. — and Richard Kind's long lost twin brother ;-) — on selling and offering support for Linux:

We love Linux, and we're doing our best to support the Linux community. We see lots of opportunity there. If the Linux desktops could converge at their cores, such a common platform would make it easier to support. Or, if there was a leading or highly preferred version that a majority of users would want, we'd preload it.

Mr. Dell opens up about Desktop Linux, DesktopLinux.com, March 7, 02006

Fedora's New Logo

About a month ago, Matt Munoz introduced the work of the Red Hat design team to create a logo for Fedora. Matt's writeup described the development of that logo's concept and the choice of a visual vocabulary to express that concept.

While I like the direction the design team took for the Fedora logo I have to admit that I find the final result a bit too stiff. The “f”—for “Fedora” and “freedom”—looks tentatively italic but stands straight and feels oddly symmetrical. The infinity sign “behind” it, by virtue of being so geometrical, absorbs too much of the “f”'s shape and makes it harder to read.

So I tried reusing the design team's concept to create a similar but softer logo to show my ideas for an improved version. The logo on the left is Red Hat's; the one on the right is mine.

My logo has its own problems of course: 1) it does not match the Fedora word mark as closely as the design team's; 2) it weakens the smart geometrical interplay between the overall shape of the logo and the negative space of the “f + infinity” sign. It could also use some fine-tuning, especially in some its curves.

Asus WL-330g and Ubuntu Linux PPC

A week ago I bought this gizmo: the Asus WL-330g Wireless Access Point and Ethernet Adapter, to use “my” iBook anywhere there's a wireless connection with the least amount of messing with configuration and drivers. The iBook is running Ubuntu Hoary Hedgehog and I'm happy to report that everything is working well. Since the WL-330g acts as an Ethernet adapter there's really no messing with anything at all; I just used the “Network Settings” dialog to set the iBook's network interface for DHCP.

One very strange thing happened on which I wasted nearly an entire afternoon. The device comes with a USB power adapter so that it can be used anywhere with a laptop. So far, so good. But it took me hours to figure out that I can't use just any of the iBook's two USB ports to power it. Only the 1st port seems to work. When the device is plugged in to the 2nd one, it connects and reboots 2 or 3 times before giving up entirely. Very strange!

The WL-330g comes with a Windows configuration utility which I couldn't use for obvious reasons. There is also a web configuration interface which is quite poor but usable — not the good kind of “usable” though. The documentation is virtually inexistent since it consists of screenshots of both configuration systems with little explanation about how the device really works.

Getting Rid of Web Ads

I recently found out about John LoVerso's Proxy Auto Configuration ad-busting trick and tested it. It's quite efficient and integrates very easily with the GNOME desktop. By using John's file and GNOME's Network Proxy Preferences dialog you could be browsing the web free of annoying ad banners.

In the System menu, choose Preferences, then Network Proxy. Select the Proxy Configuration tab, pick Automatic proxy configuration and enter the path to the "no-ads.pac" file you'll have downloaded from the page referenced above.

If you're using Epiphany, that's it; you're done. If you're using Firefox, you'll need to change your connection settings to Auto-detect proxy settings for this network.

On a different and very anectodic note, if you happen to watch "Me and You and Everyone We Know" — and you should — the kids are using Gaim to chat.

Ubuntu GNOME vs. Kubuntu

Ubuntu is a fantastic Linux distribution focusing on desktop users and their needs. Because of this focus, it picked GNOME has its desktop environment and several GNOME developers now work for Canonical, the company responsible for Ubuntu.

In a recent visit to ubuntulinux.org however, I noticed that GNOME's name did not appear there much at all. It is in fact eclipsed by a large link to Kubuntu, a project to bring KDE to Ubuntu. While geeks won't really mind — GNOME and KDE have lived side by side for a while — it seemed like a lost opportunity for GNOME at a time when Ubuntu is drawing a lot of attention.

One tiny mention towards the bottom of the page... ;-(