Dell’s Shipping Options

As per my recent post, I recently got my self some new hardware. The total cost of that hardware was somewhere around expensive and filthy expensive, and the shipping costs were addon on were just above filthy expensive. Also, it took Dell 2 working days to prepare it for shipping, where my only alteration on the laptop was changing it to a SSD over a conventional hard disk. Not a huge change. When it was finally shipped, I got no email notification about it right away, in fact, I only got an email from them 4 days after it had shipped with the invoice and they were even assuming it was already delivered (which it was not).

Getting back into Linux

So it has been a while since I ran Linux. Mostly because I had spent such an amount of money into my home computer, and felt it was a shame that I was not using it to full effect. So I started playing games using Crossover Office, but I constantly felt the games were not as good as they could be. I was dealing with bugs not allowing me to configure better graphics, random freezes etc. In the end, I concluded that Wine or Crossover is not the future, it is much better to live with Windows and use it for what you need.

But recently I was watching a video on Youtube and saw an ad for Intel 2 in 1. I was intrigued, and did some more Googling and ended up buying a Dell XPS 12, on a whim.

Ubuntu 13.10 on XPS 12

I recently got my laptop, after over 2 weeks of waiting. Immediately I removed Windows 8 in favour of Ubuntu 13.10. As the XPS 12 does not have a built in CD drive, I had to make a live USB and in that process I bricked 2 USB sticks which I luckily had gotten for free. Anyway for installation there were a few minor annoyances. I had to turn off SafeBoot in BIOS and for good measure I turned off UEFI as well. I never did try to boot in UEFI mode, but the BIOS never recognized my live USB as a UEFI disk, so I figured it was just as well not doing it that way.

Why I dislike Windows users

Been a while since I last post, as I have (and I am a bit ashamed of it) reverted to using Windows on my home computer. The reason is very simple, I’ve started gaming on my PC, and Linux just doesn’t cut it, IMO, at least not for the titles I have played. Anyway, I have gone through a few issues, and as an avid linux user I pretty much know that each problem is just a short Google away…

Using Chrome, BankID and IcedTea

The reason why Sun / Oracle java is pivotal for me, is my banking service. They require a god awful java plugin to run, which is not cross platform (they developed it on a cross platform platform, but failed to be cross platform), it is also terrible unstable in Chrome. It simply fails to run, and continuously tells me to install Sun Java.

Anyway, there is a plugin for a specific implementation of BankID of one bank available in the Chrome app store (just click here), which apparently forces the plugin to trigger. I have not tried this at all, cause right now I have Firefox, and using a ppa for Oracle Java, but it is definitely worth taking a note of, as Oracle is continuing to mangle and strangle Java, and as I understand it, any redistributing of it right now is fairly complicated. I know Ubuntu is (have) removing it all together due to license changes, pretty sure other major distributions will do the same, and really, nothing will make me happier not having to remove and replace less applications on a new install. In other news, Minecraft runs on OpenJDK, which is my number two reason for having Java installed.

Things I did after installing Xubuntu 11.10

Yeah, I am riding the bandwagon on this one… However, this time around some things were a bit more hard this time around, primarily installing Sun java.

How to use conky and lm sensors (CPU temperature)

If you don’t know what conky it, be sure to check it out. Anyway, I have for a long time been using conky to monitor some critical temperatures on my computer, ever since I had a problem with my graphic cards overheating severly after building my computer. 

Why liveCD is bad for your weekend

Last weekend I was feeling a rush for a switch, so I went looking for a new distro. I ended up going for Chakra, cause I downloaded the liveCD just to take it for a spin. Problem is when you are feeling the itch, you are very excited for everything new, which in some cases make you forget why you dislike KDE in the first place.

This pretty much resulted in me spending half my saturday downloading different systems (Mageia GNOME Live and ZenWalk 7.0 Live), figuring out why they won’t work, then redownloading your original distro, having 3 botched installs due to incompatibilities between the dbus version, which result in you having to format your home partition to freaking solve it. Total time wasted: Saturday evening + sunday morning until afternoon. Be smart about it…

Why I want / won’t to jump to Sabayon

I have been using Xubuntu 10.10 recently, mostly because Arch Linux absolutely refuses to connect through wireless on install CD through cli. So I have been feeling the itch to switch it up, mostly because my wireless card is so unstable in Xubuntu right now (constant time outs is annoying). So I downloaded the live DVD of Sabayon XFCE, and gave it a spin. 

Spotify – An update

So, I have been away for work the past 3 weeks, so I have not been able to update much. However, a while ago Spotify was released in USA as well. Spotify is a music streaming service, which comes in both free (ad supported) and paid version. However, if you want the free version, you will need an invite. It so happens that I have a few invites laying about, so if you want one, give me a shout.

Also, Spotify works perfectly under Linux with Ubuntu / Debian or Fedora / Mandriva / OpenSuSE for now. Or you can always use Crossover or Wine. Check out http://www.spotify.com/no/download/previews/ for more details