Shop for Dell PCs featuring Ubuntu Linux
Last month Dell announced their partnership with Ubuntu, now finally the first batch of PCs featuring preloaded Ubuntu Linux is being sold at Dell’s Open site. So, let’s look at what they are offering? Currently they have 2 desktop PCs and 1 laptop. Desktop configurations as follows:
Dimension E520 N - $599
Intel® Core™2 Duo Processor E4300 (1.8GHz, 800 FSB)
Ubuntu Desktop Edition version 7.04
1GB Dual Channel DDR2 SDRAM at 667MHz- 2DIMMs
250GB Serial ATA Hard Drive (7200RPM) w/DataBurst Cache™
XPS 410 N - $849
Intel® Core™ 2 Duo Processor E4300 (2MB L2 Cache,1.8GHz,800FSB)
Ubuntu Desktop Edition version 7.04
1GB Dual Channel DDR2 SDRAM at 667MHz - 2 DIMMs
250GB Serial ATA 3Gb/s Hard Drive (7200RPM) w/DataBurst Cache™
and laptop configuration:
Inspiron E1505 N - $599
Intel® Pentium® dual-core proc T2080(1MB Cache/1.73GHz/533MHz FSB
Ubuntu Edition version 7.04
512MB Shared Dual Channel DDR2 SDRAM at 533MHz, 2 DIMM
80GB 5400rpm SATA Hard Drive
These prices are for the default configurations, if you opt you can go for additional upgrades.
I think for the home and office user the specs are quite reasonable. But for power users, developers and such these specs must be upgraded.
Linux software picks
I’d like to share my favorite softwares which I like to have installed right away if it doesn’t come with the distro.
- Tilda - If you have played Counter Strike or Quake, remember how console terminal is used? It will be hidden and if you press some keys it will show up. You press the keys again it will disappear. Nice thing to have if you use command line quite often.
- Liferea - RSS reader in Linux. It’s lightweight and does everything you expect from such application.
- Geany - Geany is a text editor using the GTK2 toolkit with basic features of an integrated development environment. It was developed to provide a small and fast IDE, which has only a few dependencies from other packages. I like that it loads fast, supports all the documents that I currently work with. The disadvantage is that its very new, so need to be patient.
- Graveman - This tool lets me handle almost every kind of CD/DVD burning. I say almost coz there are some minor problems with DVDs.
- Thunderbird - I have blogged that it’s my only E-Mail client. My lovely!
- Axel - console based download manager. Do you know flashget for windows? It’s sth like that, minus the ability to login to the downloading server. I’d love to see ubuntu integrating it into apt-get.
- screen - let’s you run stuff even if you lost/closed connection to the linux box.
More to come soon!
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- Split and merge video files
- Add filters and special effects
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- Create classy video postcards
You can have your videos transferred to your iPod, PSP, Zune, PDA or cellphone! Furthermore, it’s idiot proof! You don’t have to know anything about video editing whatsoever, all you need to know where you want to watch it and click Convert button.
We all know that DVDs don’t last long, be it scratches or accidental tea/coffee spills… You can easily back up your favourite DVD movies, you can rip them and keep them in your hard disk for more lifetime.
With a few clicks you can create awesome photo galleries with soundtracks at the background. You can podcast, share via E-Mail your galleries and videos.
It all costs you just $59.99!
Their website looks ok, though!
How to install Gentoo Linux inside Ubuntu 7.04
Last weekend I spent my day at synack’s office and he showed me the beauty of Gentoo once again. Looking at his awesome setup on his laptop I made up my mind to have Gentoo Linux 2007.o installed on my laptop. I had already installed dual boot - Windows XP and Ubuntu 7.04. I didn’t want to give up(yet) my previous setup because of the work I was working on.
So I said to myself let me try to install Gentoo Linux while I am working on my Ubuntu. After doing some googling I had enough of tips to help me. Just follow these steps to install Gentoo inside Ubuntu:
- You will need to install dchroot debootstrap packages, doing
sudo apt-get install dchroot debootstrap
will do the trick. - Have your partitions ready to host your Gentoo Linux. You would need at least 1 partition. Use fdisk, Gparted or any other disk management tools out there. After that format it with the file system you want.
- Create /mnt/gentoo, /mnt/gentoo/boot
- Mount the partitions, mount /dev/sdax /mnt/gentoo
- Download stage3 from the nearest local mirror
- Extract stage3 into /mnt/gentoo directory - sudo tar xvjpf stage3*.bz2
- Get the latest Portage file from the same mirror.
- Extract it - tar xvjf /mnt/gentoo/portage-<date>.tar.bz2 -C /mnt/gentoo/usr
- Make adjustments in your make file /mnt/gentoo/etc/make.conf
- Since you have already working networking you would need to copy the settings to your future Gentoo environment. Do sudo cp -L /etc/resolv.conf /mnt/gentoo/etc/resolv.conf
- Mount your proc - sudo mount -t proc none /mnt/gentoo/proc and dev mount -o bind /dev /mnt/gentoo/dev
- Now we have everything we need to get into the Gentoo environment. Do sudo chroot /mnt/gentoo /bin/bash
- Congrats! You are now in your working Gentoo Linux, however we’re not just yet done. Do /usr/sbin/env-update && source /etc/profile
- You might wanna do export PS1=”(chroot) $PS1″ so that you won’t by mistake close this terminal.
- Ok now have your stuff updated via emerge –sync or if you are behind a firewall emerge-webrsync
- emerge world -upvDN and go have some tea, it may take a while.
- Once you are done emerge gentoo-sources or emerge vanilla-sources
- Go to /usr/src/linux and make menuconfig prepare your kernel, then do make && make modules_install to compile your kernel.
- cp arch/i386/boot/bzImage /boot/kernel-2.6.21-gentoo-r8
- Now edit your existing grub menu.lst to add the Gentoo boot option.
I think I will stick to Gentoo Linux for now, I personally loved the bleeding-edge technologies they use. Everything is pretty much up to date with the latest releases. Emerge works just great, you can learn about Linux a lot while using Gentoo.
Know how to present
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About
Welcome to Arstan's personal blog. This blog includes tips on Linux, Apache, MySQL, Shell Scripts. Hardware/software and internet technologies reviews and updates.
