Musings of a Babylon Lurker

Ebooks – Self Made

Sunday, September 18th, 2011 | linux, technology, writing | No Comments

I have written some articles for a Danish science fiction magazine.

Since I have an e-reader I would like to have those available to bring with me.
For an article the process is very simple :
I take the text version of the file and add some headline tags (Simple HTML), make some paragraph markups .
Things come up very readable, and I used a neat text editor for the Mac called “TextWrangler” The editor “understands” Regular Expressions, a hairy Unix way of doing text editing, but I just had to learn a bit of it to do this.

Neat to get my own stuff on the e-reader. I may put more of my stuff on it.

Tags: ebooks, linux, technology

Bloated Linux

Saturday, November 29th, 2008 | linux, technology | 2 Comments

I have been using the standard Ubuntu Linux with the GNOME interface for a while with my small eeeBox.

The Atom processor got exhausted rather fast just running a browser, chat client and satellite tracking program.

Switch the desktop from Gnome to XFce, a lightweight desktop environment, and bingo, things run faster and the processor does not run into the 100% barrier. Looks like I will configure the XFce a bit, but that is a small price to pay for some speed.

Of course – it does not look as sleek as the other desktop, but I want functionality, not eye candy.

Tags: lightweight, linux

The “Blessings” of a Linux distribution.

Thursday, November 27th, 2008 | linux, technology | No Comments

Or rather – “why does a package not work as it is supposed to be ?”

Today I tried to install a text mode satellite tracking program under Ubuntu. It installs fine and starts up, asking for some initial data (“this is the first time….”). I enter the data, the program exits. Sounds ok. The screen (window) looks strange, I restart the program : “this is the first time …”

I do not know what is wrong, something is incompatible. Probably the modifications used by the distribution.

When I get time I will look into it, for now that will have to wait. But it is annoying.

Tags: linux trouble

Setting up a “new” system with Linux

Saturday, November 8th, 2008 | linux, technology | No Comments

This week end I am going to re-establish a somewhat faster Linux machine than the one I am writing this post on (1GHz Pentium 3 gets rather sluggish when Flash is running in the browser).

At some stage I installed Arch Linux on that machine with a Sempron processor – it worked fine for a while, then apparently due to the “rolling update” something went wrong, and I lost the graphical setup.

Now, I am no Linux guru, so decided to do it the old fashined “Windows- way” – reinstalling. Oops. with a mixture of parallel and serial ATA the “#&/”/&¤% thing could not boot. What I plan to do ? install only serial ATA disks, install OS , transfer data from the PATA disks via USB – and that should do it.

I am planning on using Ubuntu.

Tags: linux, pc, personal