gary's web sofa
technology, internet oddities & other random stuff
bendunne.com seems to be a no-show
Oct 19th
Ben Dunne has bought hours of radio air-time on Newstalk over the last month telling everyone about his new website that would revolutionise buying of stuff and doing of things that was coming on the 19th of October. It caught my eye because nobody does a hard launch on the Internet. The accepted wisdom is to soft launch/beta the website first to iron out the kinks and build up some content and then put out the ads. Out of curiosity I took a look at his site today and it’s an empty page for some reason, so that marketing investment is largely wasted. More >
How to dual boot Moblin and Ubuntu
Aug 11th
The secret is in where you put grub for each OS. Moblin, being cute ‘n friendly assumes that it’ll be the only OS on the disk so slaps it in /dev/sda (or whatever your hard disk is). Ubuntu Network Remix defaults to doing the same. What you need to do is install Moblin first but use a custom partitioning scheme (to leave room for Ubuntu). I created a 2GB /dev/sda1 root partition and a small swap partition. I then installed Ubuntu on /dev/sda3, again using a custom partition layout, but I clicked the “advanced” button to put grub on /dev/sda3 More >
Moblin Linux
Aug 11th
The new Moblin 2 distro looks like a very strong contender for an OS for your netbook. Ubuntu Netbook Remix is great if you want to do heavy work (for a netbook anyway), but there are times when all you want to do is check something quickly on Wikipedia or watch a video. At those times the 60 second+ boot time of a netbook is a PITA and Moblin’s 10 second boot time is great. Now all I need to do is get dual-boot working…
How can you tell if someone went to Trinity College?
Jul 23rd
They’ll tell you! Boom boom!
It’s an old joke, but frequently true. The Irish Internet Association are electing a new board at the moment and each of the nominees get a quick paragraph about themselves on the site. There are twelve nominees but only Trinity College alumni Clare Dillon and Catrina Sheridan see fit to tell everyone about their degrees and diplomas.
New toy – Acer Aspire One
Jul 5th
I was in PC World the other day and I picked up an Acer Aspire One A110 on sale. It’s getting a bit long in the tooth now, so they were selling the 1GB RAM/16GB SSD/Linux ones for €200. It’ll do the job for web & email when I’m out ‘n about.
The factory installed Linpus distro is OK-ish, but it doesn’t get upgraded as new versions of the component software gets released, so still includes Firefox 2, rather than 3. Also, it tries to simplify things too much.
I tried installing XP Home, which isn’t as easy as you’d think because there’s no More >
