Kevin Cuzner's Personal Blog
Electronics, Embedded Systems, and Software are my breakfast, lunch, and dinner.
Ubuntu Netbook Remix & MS Office
I just got my Aspire One back from Acer Repair (finally) and they managed to fix it this time (third time). I promptly installed ubuntu 8.10 on it to try out Netbook Remix and so far I have to say that I really like it. My screen seems spacious (except for a few programs) and it is easy to see even if light is shining on the screen because of the high contrast of the theme. I don't quite agree with this reviewer with his "fecal brown" statement about the theme. It is more black than the traditional ubuntu orange and the orange that is there is more of a bright orange than a fecal brown.
Netbook Remix with MS Office
Awesome things:
The netbook launcher is probably the best part of this entire package. It works well, looks nice, and doesn't use very many cpu cycles. The framework they used on this (clutter) really has potential in my opinion and if they keep developing applications for gnome with this framework it will probably become the desktop of choice for ease of use alone.
The app switcher with maximus is probably the second best part simply because it takes advantage of the smaller screen resolution. I originally thought that it would be annoying to have just the icon to tell me what the program was, but it really isn't nearly as bad as I thought it would be. It is pretty easy to remember where the icon for the particular window is. Another plus is the fact that the titlebars will take up as much space as possible. Even with long window names (movies on Tudou...looong names) I have not yet managed to get the ... to show up in the title bar.
Not so awesome things:
There isn't very many things I can really see wrong with this except for one bug in the netbook-remix launcher. Whenever something changes in the menus the launcher will close and not reopen until I restart it using alt-f2. However, since the last update this hasn't happened so they might have fixed it.
Microsoft Office:
The screenshot above shows my Microsoft Office installation. This took two-ish days to get working. For the longest time I was trying to use WINE to install it, but to no avail. The rpcrt4 dll would never replace properly and the whole thing would hang up on pipe_wait status with a fatal dll error. I eventually decided to use crossover linux and install it that way. It installed on the first try within 45 minutes. So far the only problem I am having with it is microsoft word crashing when it starts up. This isn't too much of a problem because I only plan on using OneNote on Ubuntu and switching into windows to write papers and stuff if I need to on this computer (I would prefer to use my larger computer for those).
Not so temporary...
Well I have decided to place my actual website on this server. My home server has failed due to router issues and I will probably be redesigning the entire website in the near future anyway since it uses outdated layout techniques. This server is basically the smith-marsden.org website that I work on for my dad's side of the family. I plan on downloading the contents of my server to here over the weekend so that I can try to clean things up a bit and hopefully get this site back on the map.
I will probably post progress on the new smith-marsden site here since that is currently my main development challenge.
Additional features of the new smith-marsden site:
- Ability to invite other users given to everyone
- RSS feeds on letter submissions
- More information stored so that it is all in one place that is private rather than facebook or somethwere else which could be quite public
- New state of the art layout techniques enhance the website
- AJAX allows pages to submit forms without reloading, making page load times faster and looks really cool.
- The entire thing is made using CakePHP, a robust framework.
- More to come as I think of them and make them...
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