It’s been very quiet here lately. Unfortunately family, work and health are occupying a lot of my time at the moment.

I am working on updates to my tutorials and further developments which I hope to publish before Christmas.

Hopefully I’ll see you soon.

Debian 6.0 was released today February 6th, 2011. The release included many major changes, described in their press release and the Release Notes.

To obtain and install Debian, see the installation information page and the Installation Guide. To upgrade from an older Debian release, see the instructions in the Release Notes.

On a side note I’ve been using Squeeze on my Viglen MPC-L for quite some time now and it’s proven to be a very light and stable release. At least they still support i586 hardware. I’ve just inherited an old Packard Bell EasyNote laptop (K6-2 550MHz with 256Mb RAM) so I guess I’ll be Debianising that this weekend.

Many thanks again to all the guys and girls who’ve made Debian 6.0 a reality.

I recently updated my Nokia 5800 XpressMusic to firmware v40.0.005 (also worked perfectly on v50.0.005) and my netbook to Lucid Alpha 3 which reminded me I hadn’t tried using my Nokia with Ubuntu. A friend of mine has a HTC Tattoo which he tethers with Ubuntu 9.10 to connect to the internet anytime, anywhere. My contract with Virgin Mobile includes “Unlimited Internet” so I wondered if I could tether my Nokia 5800 to my Samsung NC10 too.

In short … Yes.

It turned out to be incredibly simple to tether a Nokia 5800 to Ubuntu 10.04

1. Make sure Modem Manager is installed (sudo apt-get install modemmanager)
2. Connect the phone via USB to the PC.
3. Set the Nokia to “PC Suite” mode.
4. Left click on the Network Manager icon and choose “New Mobile Broadband Connection”.
5. I then chose the recommended values in the wizard.
6. Success. I can now choose the “Virgin” entry and I’m online via 3G.

Yet another example of how simple computing with Linux, especially Ubuntu, has become. In fact this post was written and published via the 3G connection as a “proof of concept” use.

As a side note I also recently wiped my netbook clean, I had it dual booting Windows 7 and Ubuntu 9.10, to being an Ubuntu only install, I usually wait until the Beta is released before upgrading but I wanted to experience firsthand the re-branding everyone has been talking about on the Planets. I have to say I love it. Fresh. Clean. Professional. It’s certainly come a long way since Breezy.

Update: Added a step to ensure Modem Manager is installed courtesy of info provided by Ralf Hildebrandt below.

As everyone and their dog knows Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala) was released today. I’ve been running Karmic on my Samsung NC10 Netbook since Alpha 2 and, with the exception of the small hiccup with Network Manager (Bug 427400) I’ve not had a single issue. It’s been rock solid now for over 4 months. Quite simply this is the best release to date. It’s the little things which make it feel a more mature release. Simple things like including the GTK2 version of PuTTY, the new wallpapers, the new GDM and the more polished look-and-feel of GNOME in general.

Also during this release I’ve been trying out KDE as a serious desktop for the first time ever. I never like the 3.5 series and when version 4 came out I thought it looked brilliant but defaulted to non-aliased fonts and had a few too many crashes for my liking but 4.3.0 in Kubuntu 9.10 looks and feels awesome. Kudos to the guys and gals on the Kubuntu Team and KDE Upstream. I’ve installed it on my main desktop and plan on using it there as my main desktop until Lucid to try to decide whether I prefer GNOME or KDE. Time will tell…

WARNING: Personal opinions abound …

After all the furor about Microsoft contributing 20,000 lines of code to Linux and Microsoft’s “Community Promise” regarding C#, a language I use professionally, I recently read this article and I have to agree with Linus, in particular “I may make jokes about Microsoft at times, but at the same time, I think the Microsoft hatred is a disease. I believe in open development, and that very much involves not just making the source open, but also not shutting other people and companies out.”

Open Development were everyone is welcome, no matter who you are or who you work for, is the main reason I love the open source world. As a professional programmer I’m bound by “Trade Secrets”, NDAs, and closed source software. I realise there is a business need for such things yet even still we can deploy Linux servers and rely on the open source world to help us provide the best we can for our customers.

I’m not going to make any judgements as to whether Microsoft’s intentions are good or bad, I will say this being able to write C# at work on Windows XP and come home and continue to write it on my Ubuntu PCs is brilliant, that is the true beauty of open source. I personally prefer Ubuntu to any of Microsoft’s Operating Systems, even Windows 7, and  keeping my professional skills up to scratch is a priority.

So, until such time where all the nay-sayers triumph, please enough with the Microsoft bashing and the Mono slating, it’s not clever and not very productive. Open source lets many people, like myself, work freely and professionally on the Operating System of their choice.