I caved. Having lived with (and loved) the KDE 4 series from 4.0, I came across one too many Gnome 3 previews to not try it myself. Below is a screencast of how I’m finding it…

Pro’s

• Pretty stable! (which is excellent as Gnome 3 is due in September UPDATE: Gnome 3 delayed – March 2011 http://ff.im/-oq3ev)
• After 20 minutes, I found the UI very intuitive
• Gnome panels no more! I always found icon layout in the panels a little clunky
• Smooth effects. Ignore the video glitches, the 3D effects are very elegant
• Responsive. I am told to expect all Gnome apps using Gnome 3 libraries to run considerably quicker than those using the 2.** libraries
• Brings parity between the Gnome vs KDE argument once again. It was my feeling that the KDE 4.3+ series had elevated KDE as the king of desktop environments

Con’s

• It is quite different from all previous Gnome UI’s. So any casual users, or novices might take longer than 20 minutes to adjust to the Gnome shell
• It took me slightly be surprise when I click on an application icon when that software was already running. Just like in MacOSX, it just brings the existing software instance to the front of the screen. So, remember to right click the icon and “New Window”
• The UI isn’t very configurable. e.g. I could not find a way to change the colour of the top bar. However, this may change before it “stable” release in September
• Lacking some eye candy. I’ve used wobbly windows with kwin for a long time, and with compiz before that. There’s just something intuitive about wobbly windows. Maybe that’ll land before September, too?
• So as far as I can tell, the only way to launch software with your mouse is to the “Activity Layout” (mouse to top left corner). In the past, there were simple right click options “add to desktop” and “add to panel”. I’m yet to decide if I prefer the new method, though it may well be true that I do indeed prefer it

If you’re wanting to use the nvidia proprietary driver, rather than the nouveau driver provided by default in Fedora 13, then do the following:

1. Add this to the end of the kernel line (without quotes) in /etc/grub.conf -> “rdblacklist=nouveau vga=0×318″

2. Command:  su -c “rpm -Uvh http://download1.rpmfusion.org/free/fedora/rpmfusion-free-release-stable.noarch.rpm http://download1.rpmfusion.org/nonfree/fedora/rpmfusion-nonfree-release-stable.noarch.rpm”

3. Command: yum update

4. For 64bit Users, Command: yum install kmod-nvidia xorg-x11-drv-nvidia-libs.i686 xorg-x11-drv-nvidia-libs.x86_64

5. A) For 32bit Users, Command: yum install kmod-nvidia xorg-x11-drv-nvidia-libs.i686
5. B) For 32bit Users using the PAE kernel, Command: yum install kmod-nvidia-PAE.i686 xorg-x11-drv-nvidia-libs.i686

6. Reboot, and you’re done !

Note: If this doesn’t seem to work for you, in step one, instead of “rdblacklist=nouveau”, try “nouveau.modeset=0″

The folks over at Hemisphere have ported their creation, Osmos, to the Linux platform.

View on Vimeo.

It’s a great game, and they have blogged about their experiences of the porting process here.

They need your help, to make the Linux version a success. It’s really easy – go download the game !!

http://www.hemispheregames.com/osmos/

(There’s even a demo release to tempt you…)

Today I installed Ubuntu 10.04 for a friend. I am a loyal Fedora user, since the days of Fedora Core 6. I enjoy reading the feature lists in the build up to each Fedora release. But… I have to say, installing Ubuntu 10.04 was an absolute joy. It was intuitive, fool proof, and so simple. The last time I installed Ubuntu was 8.04. I can, without question say that the installation procedure for 10.04 is light years ahead of previous releases.

Read the rest of this entry »

All you have to do is insert a twitter username, preceded by an @ character, which may be obvious to some people.

Here’s an example (my twitter account). Hover over the text and watch the magic happen !!

@thewonderer57

And if you like that…. then go to dev.twitter.com/anywhere and sign up. So simple !

I can’t quite believe I’m seeing this… An officially endorsed Windows magazine, and on the front cover of April 2010 edition it proclaims:

Revitalise your PC in One Hour !

Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve published my results and findings for a project I’ve been working on for the last 7 months:

Comparative Study of High Level Data Query Languages: Pig, Hive, and JAQL

[CLICK TO DOWNLOAD]

Looking at:

• Scalability – [scale up; scale out]
• Runtime
• Ease of Programming
• Computational Power

I hope you find it useful. Can I ask that, if you have any direct questions, please email me using my University email address, which you will find in the download link above.

….(Courtesy of GIMP’s editing abilities).  A fantastic gesture from the Shepherd Neame Brewery , and I find myself with the worlds most legendary Ale pump clip….

For those who have never tried it – Next time you’re in an English pub that sells Spitfire Ale, you just have to buy a pint!

Two pretty important things in my life...

I love the new array of KDE apps that were introduced with the birth of KDE4. My favourite is the awesome Dolphin File Browser. I also really liked Gwenview – it was quite reminiscent of a typical MacOSX look and feel. Anway… I’ve been checking out the Fedora 13 artwork, by the amazing Mairin Duffy, and I was pleasantly surprised with a few of the plugins I found in Gwenview….

Read the rest of this entry »

He is one of the Free Software Foundation’s biggest advocates. This video is dated September 2008, which was to mark the 25th Birthday of the GNU project. A good overview of Linux, Despite the apparent irony of having an Apple Mac sat in front of him (??).

Read the rest of this entry »