"A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects." (Robert A. Heinlein)

Saturday 23 October 2010

Blog-Birthday Two

Time seems to fly (when you hare having fun) by the way my second year of blogging just ended and the third is going to start. Many thanks to who visited my blog during this year and let me know if I can improve in any way. We're here to learn after all.

Wednesday 20 October 2010

Upgrading to Xubuntu 10.10

As soon as the new release of XFCE4 based Ubuntu (Xubuntu) has been made available I decided to upgrade my desktop computer (Sempron 2400).

The upgrade process (Where my “upgrade invitation” is?)

As soon as I saw the new release available on Xubuntu home page I launched the update-manager program in order to upgrade but … I couldn't see usual upgrade to a new release button. After some time I discovered that, being current version a LTS, Xubuntu's upgrade manager was configured to only notify new LTS releases. After disabling that option I eventually got my release upgrade button.

Tuesday 12 October 2010

Test drive: Ubuntu 10.10 Live on the EEEPC 900


The long awaited Ubuntu “Upgrade Sunday” has finally arrived, I decided so to download the netbook edition and test it, in live mode, booting from a SD card. After the deluding results of the beta version test I was really eager to see how the final release was. 

Boot from SD card

I prepared a bootable SD card, as usual, with the utility provided by Ubuntu itself and restarted the EEEPC and let it boot from the SD card. The boot process has been quite long, about five minutes, with the usual mid-boot stop to ask for install or live boot. Of course this boot time is not an absolute value since it depends from the SD card speed and, probably, from the live boot choice but is still considerably longer than how much the previous (10.04) version took to start.

Friday 1 October 2010

Installing Nokia QT SDK on Ubuntu Linux


QT (pronounced as in “cute”) is a C++ multi-platform application framework and integrated development environment actually maintained by Nokia. QT is in the development scene since about 1991 but I got news about it only recently from a Ghabuntu's tweet. Since it promised a rapid multi-platform application development even for Nokia Symbian phones I decided give it a look.
 
Downloading: QT SDK or Nokia QT SDK?

QT is available for download in two version: QT SDK is in some way a “plain” version for desktop applications development while Nokia QT SDK is a version specifically studied for developing and deploying on Nokia devices. I downloaded Nokia QT SDK since I'm more interested in experimenting in mobile development. After some searching on QT forum it came out that Nokia devices compiling is not entirely supported in Linux version. In order to compile on Nokia devices one must download the “offline” version of Nokia QT SDK and then activate the “remote compiler” option, a service, held at Nokia forum which provides compilation of sent sources.

Installation

Once downloaded QT installation file I made it executable and launched as usual
chmod +x Nokia_Qt_SDK_Lin32_offline_v1_0_1_en.run
sudo ./Nokia_Qt_SDK_Lin32_offline_v1_0_1_en.run
the installation wizard started, after agreeing with license I selected the “custom” installation option in order to enable the “remote compiler”