slimApps

HA! Well I didn’t think this would happen anytime soon. It’s been roughly 15 years since I’ve even touched a mac let alone it’s operating system.  So after installing OSX Leopard on my Dell Mini 9 I began exploring and giving the OS its fair shot. And surprisingly enough, it turned out to be extremely cool at first glance. After continued use for a night I was getting into it .

Using it for a night it bacame aparentt I was really beginning to feel more productive in my workspace. However, I was being held back by the minis mini 9 inch display! Especially when I installed and began working with the iPhone SDK did I realize I couldn’t really work well with that small of a screen.  SOOOO after realizing I have my other Dell to sell, I began contiplating the purchase of a MacBook. THe next day I was introduced to BootCamp by a co-worker…it seemed that this was truely the nail in the coffin of any doubt of the purchase.

Well I picked it up yesterday and now I’m beginning my adventures of Pc to Mac! I’ll keep you all posted!

o2 Slim osx, tech

So even though I’ve yapped about my bad run in with with the guys from the maxosx irc chan. But even though I’m still going to attempt and give leopard a try. I’m quite curious to see how far the max os has come in 15 years! No kidding it’s been that long .

o2 Slim Uncategorized

So today I was chatting with a good friend of mine about developing on the iphone. I’m curious to get into this area so we were taking a look at options for developing and it turns out the only way to go is through a mac or mac osx operating system. Well the Dell Mini9 just so happens to run OSX with a little coaxing on the install process. So I began investigating the process. In my hunt I stumbled into #osx on freenode where a reminder of my disconnection with macs was refreshed.

I being by asking if anyone is running OSX on a netbook (specifically a dell mini9) to which I get the response:

[14:19] <o2Slim> Hi all! Haven’t used a mac in years! I’m thinking of picking up a copy of Leopard tonight and giving it a shot on my mini9, anyone here running that enjoy it?
[14:20] <@krunk-> o2Slim: that would be osx86, which is not acceptable topic here
[14:20] <@krunk-> o2Slim: only non-hacked osx here
[14:21] <@krunk-> thus the ‘mac’ in #macosx
[14:21] <o2Slim> Ohh I’m not planning on hacking anything Just isntalling from disc
[14:21] <@krunk-> o2Slim: you can’t without hacking, osx only installs onto mac hardware without hacking

(Don’t you love elitist asshats who think they know everything about their worshipped OS?)

[14:22] <o2Slim> Well hacking for me is going as far as running a boot loader, no changes to OSX this is a straight retail box I’m purchasing

So at this point he’s pretty much ignoring me and others are starting to be curious as to why he’s acting so hostile towards me (as my scentences above are direct logs) so I throw this out:

[14:26] <o2Slim> So I’m guessing no one running on any netbooks in here that can give me a rundown of how it runs?
[14:26] <@krunk-> o2Slim: as stated, no discussion of pirating here
[14:26] <@krunk-> o2Slim: if you want to use osx and wish to get an accurate assessment of the full experience you should buy a mac
[14:26] <o2Slim> I just told ya lol I’m not pirating anything I’ll  have a shrink wrapped box from Bestbuy sitting nexst to me

That’s when the reminder kicks in

[14:27] <@krunk-> o2Slim: read the EULA, running on none mac hardware is against the terms. so it’s off topic here.
[14:27] <@krunk-> next person to mention hackintosh or link to it gets kicked

That’s why I end with:

[14:28] <o2Slim> Wahh now I know why I stuck away from macs lol elitist asshats
Session Close: Fri May 01 14:28:42 2009

And that’s where I end my trip down reminder lane It amazes me how some people think the best way to welcome new people to the crowd is by criticizing them for the way they want to get into the crowd lol. I mean for christs sake I could have been like “WTF Buy a mac?!? Are you nutts and pay a mac tax out the ass” But No I didn’t, I was nice about it and made it clear I intended to purchase OSX this evening from Bestbuy and install it with out the l33t h4×0r skills breaking up his beloved operating system. The bottom line is you essentially just pissed me off at the mac community, what could have been another mac purchaser in the coming months (I”m always looking at new laptops) you have essentially turned me into someone who will not look at a macbook ever, and not only that I’m sure I’m not wasting my time to purchase and install leopard now, I guess I’ll wait until I stumble upon a copy somewhere along the line.

-o2

o2 Slim osx, tech

So after checking out this post on Digg I thought I would give the Ubuntu netbook edition a try. Apparently it’s the first run of this edition, and so far it’s pretty cool, but of course has its drawbacks.

The Good:

So to start with I’m quite impressed with memory usage, as I always am when it comes to linux. This has always been an important area for me when it comes to netbooks due to their limited memory campacity. After initial boot and run I’m sitting at only 17% usage of physical vs a 57% usage in Win7!

The initial desktop layout for the netbook edition is quite cool. You control groups located on the left hand side of the screen which contain all shortcuts and programs which you control as well in the main desktop area. So clicking through various groups will show various shortcuts and icons, etc. THis allows for a major amount of accessability in quick fashion, assuming you take the time to customize it.

Install capabilities turned out to be quite simple to what I’m used to on a netbook. The netbook edition download included links to an app that allows you to image a usb thumb drive as a boot and install device. Once booting from that device the setup and install process was setup very well and ran smoothly for this tiny piece of hardware!

The Eh

I still feel like Linux is lacking in a lot of respects for end-user friendliness. What I mean is if you run into any problems or issues or want to do something that’s off the beaten path be prepared for a headache if you’re not familiar with Linux. I’ll get more into that at some other point!

The Bad is Still Bad

Like always, I like to bitch a bit about linux. (Like that sentence?) After the bliss of install and initial mem usage I was off to install some after install applications. Things were going well until…….the damn thing ran out of harddrive space. Now of course I would normally kick my own ass for this BUT the install (which I was so happy with) defaulted to allocating only 2.5 gigs for itself by default. THis doesn’t allow a lot! So what happend? Of course I got an eronious error message. Upon investigation of a bunch of log spew (remember not end-user friendly) I was able to figure out the lack of space being the problem. Well this is simple I thought right? Not so fast, it’s not that simple! I wanted to go uninstall some applications that I installed already to make room for a parition manager, in hopes of resolving the problem. Go figure… can’t uninstall the apps. WHy? “No Space Available” WTF?!?! TO UNINSTALL SOMETHING?!?!? THis is getting a bit nutts. So I try a few other odds and ends to no avail. Eventually I just jump directly into the filesystem in a desperately frustrated attempt at manually deleting junk. Whatdya know, the same problem. “Not Enough Space for File operation”. So let me get this straight, I don’t even have enough space to delete files to free up space. At this point I figured I has slipped into a paradox and was eargerly awaiting the implosion of the universe. Wel you’re still reading this so that didnt’ happen now did it? Anyways…. I attempted a reboot in recovery mode and ran the “Try to Free Up Space” option (yes I’m not joking that’s the option). It didnt’ seem to do anythign so I jumped back into a normal reboot to find it had actually freed up a whopping 4.8 megs. At this point I figure I can go back into the software package manager and try again. At this point though the software package manager is throwing a “major” error and won’t start anymore, again, no reason given. However, it was kind enough to give me some console commands to run in an attempt to fix the problem (end user damnit, end user!! WHy can’t the dialog error run this command?).

A couple more steps here and there and a few more details that I left out cause I frankly didn’t feel like ranting and writing that much detail, but in the end I gave up and reinstalled the netbook edition. But on the install I made sure to do a much larger parition

-o2

o2 Slim linux, reviews, tech

o2 Slim Uncategorized

Hi all! So I’m beginning to work on BeadHelper v1.0 which will end Bead Helper production for a little while, mainly due to the fact that there’s not much else I can add to the app except bug fixes . The two new features I’ll likely be adding for v1.0 are Bead Inventory manager, and integrated ordering (I need to contact some suppliers on this one, message me if you are one so we can see about possibly setting something up!). 

If all goes well I might have something by the beginning of next week! At that point I’m going to also submit to download.com and a few other sites which should boost visibility on the app!  

-o2

o2 Slim Bead Helper

Decided the old theme was a bit too bandwidth intensive, even after scaling the images back a bit it still turned out to be a bit much. I’m thinking this is a good layout? What do you think?

o2 Slim Site

You know, I realize that I may stir up one hell of a beehive on this issue but I just don’t care. As a matter of fact I think I don’t care so much that I’m going to start doing youtube videos on this subject to demonstrate my point.

What I’m talking about here is linux and it’s jump through x amount of hoops to do somehting simple. Seriously, there’s no arguing here linux fans it’s plain and simple to see the issue I’m ranting about. For example I updated to Ubuntu 9.04 last night, what did I get for my troubles? A nice new install of linux and and everything else was okay I guess (Thought I was going to swing that different eh?) Anyways… The problems began when I went to re-enable desktop effects. A simple non-needed feature I know but that’s not the point or the problem. What began as a simple switch on of a feature turned into a long drawn out thorn in the ass. let’s begin…

So I attempt to turn on desktop effects. The message I get instead is “Cannot Enable Desktop Effects”…. …    …   …   . hmm okie dokie. Well that’s a helpful message. So after some poking I realize that I need to install the nVidia display driver (not sure why I never had to before, but I suppose I do now).  Okay simple enough right? Let’s download the driver. Okay downloaded. So instead of just running the .run file like an EXE on windows you have to run it as a script in the terminal (cause it is a script). For those who don’t know the terminal program is a the command line interface. SOOO I go out to the command line and run the various commands to navigate to the directory where the driver install is stored, then I run the command to begin the script. Almost done right? Well not so fast I get an error telling me I have a graphical interface running which needs to be shut down, this would be my desktop enviornment, Gnome. Well I’ll be damned if I can figure out how to shut Gnome down and there doesn’t seem to be any help or docs to tell me how to! So it’s off to the interwebs. After some good amount of searching through elitest ass remarks and comments about how easy this is and I hsould just “know how” (another problem with linux here) I found a post informing me of some command line options to help me out. Ready for this?

1. su (Change to root)
2. /etc/init.d/gdm stop
3. sh nvidiadriver.run
4. /etc/init.d/gdm restart

Although that seems simple if you’re an end user who’s not looking to be a linux guru then you would have zero, and I mean 0, nadda, zip, ideas on how to do that.

All of that to install a simple driver. And yet I still see a selling point from linux fan boys of “linux doesn’t need drivers” Well I’ll be damned….

o2 Slim random

Turns out Heatmap Studio is crawling its way across the web quicker than I expected! I’m happy so many are enjoying it! Please keep me up to date on any problems you may have or features you may want and I’ll see what I can work out!

o2 Slim heatmap studio

The first beta release of heatmap studio is up for your enjoyment! Let me know how it works for you! Keep in mind this is the first beta release, some features may have bugs and / or not work all-together. Please help out and report any bugs you may find while using the app!

Go to the page!

o2 Slim Projects, heatmap studio