The only thing that was not recognized was the wireless network card: a Realtek RTL8191SE. Here is how to install it. On the Toshiba website for (Windows) wireless drivers, it is always associated with the RTL8192SE model. So don’t be surprised if the driver downloaded from the Realtek website is a file with RTL8192 in its name although you clicked on the link for the RTL8191SE-VA2 model. Unpack this file. The LiveCD doesn’t come with some packges so you have to install them (via the System menu, Administration, Add/Remove software). These packages are: kernel-devel, gcc and make. Once it’s done, do a simple “make;make install” as root and reboot the laptop. Your wireless connection is now up and running!

If you want to have Flash on your 64-bits Linux, Adobe released version 10.1 of their Flash player with native 64 bits support. Download Flash player “Square”, unpack the archive and copy the (only) file “libflashplayer.so” in directory /home/yourusername/.mozilla/plugin, restart Firefox. You have now a Flash-enabled browser!

Finally, I must have done something wrong, somewhere but I kept having the first configuration screen after installation, even after subsequent reboots. After a quick search, I didn’t find anyone with the same issue. YMMV. In order to skip this screen (after you went through them a first time), just add the line “RUN_FIRSTBOOT=NO” in the file /etc/sysconfig/firstboot and voilà!

In conclusion, I’m very pleased with this laptop and Fedora. My Linux desktop was ready in just a few minutes. Let’s work, now!

On the SFD website, there isn’t a lot of events registered for Belgium. There is only one, in fact, in Oostende (LiLiT is doing an install party in Liege but I can’t see any reference to SFD; still, it’s a good initiative!). Well, a SFD on September 18th in Belgium might not have been a good idea if the goal is to increase awareness of Free Software: more than half of the population is celebrating the Walloon Region or preparing a Sunday without car in Brussels (while others are just looking for a government since April 2010!). So, at a personal level, I decided to give Ubuntu a try (10.04 LTS).

In terms of user experience, you can’t beat the installation process of Ubuntu (my comparison criteria are Fedora 13 and any version of Windows XP, Vista or 7 that are not on a PC-specific image disc). Seven configuration screen with rather simple questions and that’s it. There are choices you can’t make like the selection of software you want to be installed and available on the next reboot. But, most of the general software is there: a web browser, a word processor, some games, a rudimentary movie player and a music player. The “Software Center” is also readily visible so you can’t miss it and it seems to be an obvious choice if you want to install any other software.

The real test will now be if one can actually work with it. If I don’t post any furious comment against some features or if I don’t post anything about the installation of some software in the coming days / weeks, you’ll know I’m still working with this Linux flavour.

Briefly, the problem Twitter was facing was the deployment of updates to thousands of servers in a short amount of time and dealing with errors (broken servers, e.g.). A nice, simple, cool and free way of solving this issue was to use the Bittorrent protocol (via Python and a stack of other free software) to actually deploy updates. In summary, you go from a unique repository facing thousands requests approximately at the same time:

And you end up with a nice “distribution chain”:

The beautiful thing is that they now go 75 times faster than before!

And now, the video:

The Murder software is hosted on Github (Apache 2 license).

Why do I blog this? First, I like to see simple ideas no one had before implemented like this. I also wonder how other companies facing the same problems are doing (status.net for example ; I don’t think it could be useful for Forban). Finally, you see, Bittorrent is sometimes about good stuff too!

I wanted to see how it works. But since I’m temporarily stuck with a Windows laptop, I downloaded a free C++ compiler for Windows (wxDev-C++), imported all the files in a project and compiled. For those who want to try, here is the project file and the specific makefile in a zip file (2 kb). Just decompress the FluTE archive (I used version 1.15), copy the two files from the zip file above and launch the IDE. In the project options (Alt+P), specify the custom makefile (in the "Makefile" tab) as the one from the zip file above. Compile (Ctrl+F9). Done.

On my Intel Core2 Duo T5450 (2Gb RAM), it took 6 minutes to simulate the "two-dose" example.

Please note that I didn’t try to compile with OpenMPI. Maybe for next time.

Bye, bye, Adobe Acrobat Reader

But for me there is one important feature missing: the ability to read comments in PDF files. I sent PDF versions of draft documents to my PhD thesis promoters and they send them back with their comments. Open them in Evince: you’ll only get the balloons but no possibility to click on them (see Figure 1 below). Open them in Acrobat Reader and not only you can see that there are comments but you can also see their content (see Figure 2 below).

Figure 1: reading a PDF with comments in Evince

Figure 2: reading the same PDF with comments in Adobe Acrobat

It’s in the roadmap and Carlos García Campos already has an unstable release that includes annotations. So I’ll keep Acrobat Reader for the moment. As soon as Fedora packages Evince with annotations, I’ll not see any reasons to keep Acrobat Reader on my laptop

Btw, both Okular and KPDF also seem to miss this feature.

Now enters Ross Burton’s postr, a Flickr uploading tool for the GNOME desktop. It’s simple. It has all the functionalities you need when posting pictures: title, description, tag, sets, groups (and privacy) fields and settings. Voilà! And if you need more advanced features (like geotagging – which isn’t anyway in the Flash-based Flickr upload tool), the Organise tool from Flickr is still there.

Don’t be afraid by the fact it’s still in version 0.12.3 nor by the fact it wasn’t updated since December 2008: it’s fully working, already in your favourite Linux distribution (at least in Fedora), I adopt it

postr screenshot. The picture that will be uploaded is here.