It’s that time of the week again. Yep that’s right, the time of the week where I bore you to death with the events of my life. As week’s go this one’s been a fairly quiet for me, but only in comparison to all the crazy weeks that went before. I do have plenty of stories to relate though, so let’s get to it.

On Monday I drove back from Wolverhampton with Fab and just got the hire car returned in time not to be charged. It was touch and go, but some creative driving helped me out and also the bloke at the hire place was really cool. We didn’t do a live show that night because we were so tired and we’d done one at Oggcamp the day before.  That recording has been released now in all it’s uncut glory, with swearing and everything. How rock and roll of us. We just  need to throw a telly out of a hotel window now to really seal our mythical status. I have 3 problems with that plan though: 1) I can’t afford a telly, 2) I can’t afford a window and 3) I can’t afford the law suit when it lands on someone and kills them. I’ll have to keep working on an alternative plan I guess. On Monday night I did still manage to edit a new episode of the Software Freedom Law Show and ship it over to Bradley, no rest for the wicked. On Tuesday I wrote an overdue blog update. We also interviewed Alan Pope of the Ubuntu UK Podcast in the evening. You’ll be able to hear that in the next Linux Outlaws.

On to Wednesday, where we loaded my little Nissan Micra up with PA gear and headed out to my mate’s house to drop it off. I find it mildly ironic that the PA actually loaded into my car much easier than it had loaded into the big executive car we’d hired for the weekend. It’s amazing what you can fit in a hatchback I suppose. I dropped Fab off at the airport for his flight home later and then finally delivered some microphones to another friend before hitting home. On Thursday I started to feel a bit rough after all the exertion of the weeked and tried to take it a bit easier. I also missed the Chester LUG meeting in the evening sadly, I’ll have to make it up to them in future. I did manage to do a lot of work on my mammoth Ubuntu Karmic review, which worked out well because it was actually released on Thursday. It’s been really well received and sent the blog stats crazy. I’ll have to remember that for big distro releases in future. Get an article out on the release day and ride the wave of publicity. On Friday I wrote about Oggcamp for our Linux Outlaws blog. I also did some general admin work, caught up with my bank accounts, had a cry (after seeing my credit card bill) and then headed off to Manchester in the car. It was the Ubuntu Release Party at the Pitcher & Piano in Deansgate and I was really pleased to catch up with some good friends again. I chatted to many people, saw a couple of fellow LivLUG members and generally had a great time. There was some drama on the way when my car stereo went off, then began to emit a very loud beeping noise as I drove along. I switched it off and managed to kill the beeping, but I wasn’t sure what it actually meant. I couldn’t see any obvious warning lights on the dashboard so I just hoped it wasn’t anything serious and kept driving. Stiff upper lip and all that, the British approach. Ignore the problem as long as you possibly can and only deal with it when you have no other choice. The car kept driving fine which was a relief, especially as I was doing 70mph on the M62 at the time. I drove home with the radio off again and the car seemed ok. I’ve since established that it’s the security lock on my radio, it must have been triggered somehow. I need to enter a key code to unlock it and guess what? I don’t know the code, so I’ll have to keep trying to track it down. I think there’s something odd going on with the electrics in the car to be honest, it’ll have to be serviced ASAP.

That brings us neatly to the weekend. Yesterday I edited our interview with Popey, did some other bits of web admin and then went out to see Eddie Izzard at the Liverpool Echo Arena. It was an amazing show and I enjoyed it a lot. The first time I’ve ever seen Eddie live in person and not on DVD or whatever. He was really funny in his usual rambling manner. I can’t really explain all the jokes but just for the benefit of anyone else who happens to see him on this current tour I will say 2 words… jazz chicken. That will mean absolutely nothing to 99% of you, but hopefully somewhere there’s one person chuckling. After a long wait stuck in the car park at the arena I headed for the Everyman and stopped in to visit some of my writer friends. The gang I did Script Frenzy with are doing a new challenge to write a novel in a month, crazy people. It runs for the whole of November and it’s called Nano Wrimo. It looks like an interesting challenge but the way things have been going for me lately I didn’t feel I could commit to it this month. I will try and show my support for the others though of course. I did that by wandering around generally distracting them from their work and feeling rather smug. I’m sure they appreciated that. Today I’ve been preparing for Rathole Radio most of the time. I have the set list sorted now, I’ve got a “words of wisdom” clip and I’ve even practiced the live songs, twice! So I’m feeling pretty good about that.

Upcoming:

Next week we have a Linux Outlaws live show at 7pm UK on Monday. We’ll include our interview with Popey and no doubt find plenty else to talk about too. I’ll also aim to process and release this episode of Rathole Radio from tonight during the afternoon. On Wednesday it’s Liverpool LUG again and we’ll be starting to plan our 5th birthday party. That’s going to be epic. I’m not sure what else I have planned right now but I know there’s definitely other stuff. I’ll report back on all that next week. Till then, take care of yourselves and be good, or if you can’t do that at least hide the evidence

See ya,

Dan

Ubuntu 9.04

It’s an unscheduled stop today on my never ending distro tour. I had planned to look at Chakra Project next as regular readers will know, but due to a strange series of events I ended up sidestepping onto the recently released Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty Jackalope. So, it would seem odd of me not to take a decent look and see what improvements have been made in the last 6 months. The last time I looked at Ubuntu in depth was actually 12 months ago with the 8.04 release. I found it to be a solid enough but somehow lacking a little in ambition. Would Jaunty jump forward with new features? I decided to find out…

Vital Stats:
Distro base – Debian
Packaging – .deb (Managed by the mighty Apt)
Linux Kernel – 2.6.28-11-generic
Default Desktop – Gnome 2.26.1 Read the rest of this entry »

The Weekly Rewind

Weekly Rewind number 12 already, the Dirty Dozen; I’m half expecting Lee Marvin and Telly Savalas to burst through the window at any moment. It’s been an eventful and emotional week, all kicked off as usual by Linux Outlaws on Monday night. Unusually though for us we actually started the live show on time. I don’t know how it happend or if it will ever happen again but at least we can say we did it once right? If you’d like to listen to the live show and get involved in IRC, head to linuxoutlaws.com/live and join in the fun. Read the rest of this entry »

Some Ubuntu Stuff

Hey folks, I’m going to break the habit of a life time here and actually tell you about an event in enough time to make plans for it. Usually I’m a failmeister and only announce these things at the very last minute but I’m trying to fix that, so here goes. Next month there will be a release party for the new version of Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty Jackalope, terrible name if you ask me) at the BBC in Manchester (UK), Friday 24th April at 7pm. I’ll be attending, barring any natural disasters and if you’re within easy traveling distance we’d love to see you there too. Perhaps even if you’re not within easy traveling distance but are ridiculously committed you could also come, don’t put yourself out too much though. Read the rest of this entry »

The Dell Logo

Most of you probably saw my earlier rant at Dell for removing Linux laptops from their UK website last week. The post caused quite a bit of interest it seems which is always nice and I’m grateful people read and enjoyed it. There’s still quite an active discussion going on in the comments which you’re quite welcome to join in with if you like. My reason for posting this quick follow up article is to address a couple of points that came out of the discussion.

Firstly, a lot of people said I should be supporting smaller companies like System76 who really promote Linux rather then large corporations like Dell who just pay lip service to open source. This is a fair point and I do try to support smaller companies whenever I can, I’ve said many times over the last 18 months or so that I’d love a System76 machine but they don’t ship to the UK. They make really stylish computers and fully support Linux, so if you do live in the US I’d urge you to give them a look before purchasing from Dell. There’s also other US sellers like Emperor Linux who do a great job. It seems as though there are far more options available to Linux fans in America than this side of the pond and I hope people check them out rather than just going to the big boys first. In the UK we only have a couple of companies I know of who specialise in Linux hardware, Efficient PC and the Linux Emporium. I met Dale from Efficient PC at LugRadio Live 08 and he’s a lovely guy who works really hard, however there aren’t any laptops on the company’s website at the moment so I don’t know what the situation is. They do still sell great netbooks with Ubuntu installed and MythTV boxes with multimedia remotes that make great PVR solutions out of the box. Well worth a look I’d say. The Linux Emporium has a nice range of Linux laptops and netbooks, I’ve just been having a look through their site and the range seems to have expanded dramatically since I bought this Dell machine. The last time I properly looked at them must have been Christmas 2007 so I was well out of touch. I’ll be sure to rectify this situation and recommend the company to any other UK Linux lovers I know, if you’re in the UK check them out!

The other thing I wanted to mention was a change to the Dell UK website since my original post, the Ubuntu m1330n laptop has reappeared! Thanks to eagle eyed reader Grant for his comment informing me of this, I hadn’t noticed. I’m observant as ever so it’s a good job there’s somebody around to point these things out to me. It looks as though the Ubuntu Mini 12 has had to make way to accommodate the change though. This is what you can see on the Linux section (and I hesitate to call it a section) of the Dell UK site:

Dell UK Offerings Feb 12th 09

I thought I should let everyone know the machine was available again in the interests of fairness but according to many people who’ve written to me in the wake of the first article, the actual Linux models for sale at Dell UK change more often than a set of hyperactive traffic lights. It makes me wonder if they only list the machines they have in stock prebuilt and installed with Ubuntu already? This goes against the company’s business model as far as I understood it, they always promote themselves as bespoke PC builders. I’ll see what I can find out but for now I just wanted to let everyone know the Ubuntu m1330 is back, for how long though I can’t say. This is correct as of 12/02/09

Thanks to everyone who read and commented on the first article and also everyone who emailed me, your input is always greatly valued

No Laptops In Sight

Ok most of you who know me will know that I’m usually an easy going guy, I like to get along with people and have a laugh, I don’t often get mad but a few people have brought something to my attention lately which has caused me to furrow my brow and considerably raised my blood pressure. It concerns the availability of Linux laptops from Dell UK, or should I say the lack thereof. Last year I bought an m1330n from Dell with Ubuntu pre-installed because I wanted to help support both consumer Linux and a company prepared to try out something new in standing up against Microsoft. Despite a few very minor gripes over the lack of a media remote in the Ubuntu model I’ve been nothing but happy with this machine, I’m typing on it right now. For almost a year it’s rarely left my side and it’s never let me down. Someone posted recently on the Linux Outlaws forums that they were looking for a new Linux laptop in the UK so I directed them to the Dell website. It turned out through the discussion that there are no longer any Linux laptops for sale on Dell’s UK website. There’s only 3 options, 1 desktop and 2 Ubuntu netbooks, the Mini 9 and Mini 12. They’re all nice machines but they used to also sell the m1330 and Studio 15 laptops with Ubuntu. So my question for Dell is this, what’s happened to them?!

I was even told by another forum user they were given short shrift on the phone to Dell UK when trying to order one of the XPS laptops with Ubuntu. Apparently the sales representative told them they no longer sold any XPS laptops with Ubuntu in the UK. When the customer persevered and asked if they could just order the hardware with no OS they were flatly told no. An American friend checked the US website for us and confirmed the Ubuntu options there still include 3 decent spec laptops: XPS M1530n, XPS M1330n and Studio 15n. This is on top of the Mini 9 netbook and a desktop pc. The netbooks are very nice and do their job well but I’m talking about proper desktop replacements here.

Hardly At Front Of The Shop

Now, I know some people will think this is just another ungrateful Linux hippie not understanding commerce but I know exactly how the world works and that Dell exists to make money. I appreciated their efforts in supplying a top of the range laptop like the m1330 with Linux and I still do. I’ve been very positive about Dell to everyone I know in the last year or so because of this and while I’ve been upset to see the Linux machines buried in some dusty corner of the website I’ve kept it to myself, well no more. Forgive my French but this is bullshit!! Pure and simple. If it’s just a matter of not enough sales in the UK to justify offering the machines any more then fine, I’d be disappointed but I’d accept it. I understand they’re not a charity but honestly how much extra work is it to install Ubuntu on a machine instead of Winblows Vista? Ok so there’s training of staff and so on, I can see that. We’re not even asking them to go that far, just shipping the machine with no OS and letting Linux users install their own software wouldn’t be any extra work at all as far as I can see. It’s not like we were getting any discount for the Windows license, the machines were the same price as their Vista counterparts and I never complained about this, I just put my money where my mouth was and bought one. A lot of people will say “just buy the Vista model if it’s the same price and wipe it” but for me this is missing the fundamental point. Why should I pay Microsoft for software I neither want nor need and subsidize their business? “Oh you failed again, never mind, here’s some more money for nothing”. You can decline the EULA and try to force Dell to give you a refund if you like but that’s far from easy. I want to support Linux and not be treated like a 2nd class citizen for doing so, my money is as good as anyone else’s, especially in a time of apparent economic crisis.

Ok I’ll take a breath now, I apologise for venting this in public but it had to go somewhere. It’s possible that they’ve removed the old offerings while they work on new ones which will appear soon and I sincerely hope this is the case. If it is I will hold my hands up and applogise to Dell 1000 times over but for now I simply want to know… what’s up??