Author Archives: Donncha

Well, I was in for a pleasant surprise when I tried to use a scanner at home last night!
Thank you Mel for the lend of the scanner, I plugged it into the usb port, navigated to the “Scanning Program” in the Graphics menu which fired up Xsane (the first time I’ve used it). It automatically detected the scanner and I had a preview within a few minutes. All without installing extra software, rebooting, fiddling, etc!
Next I went into the GIMP, as I remembered the “Acquire image” menu. That brought me back to Xsane, but after I scanned in the image it was “converted” into a GIMP image where I could dabble with it to my heart’s content!

Fedora Linux also comes with the Gnome Bluetooth Subsystem which did need a bit of fiddling around. From reading the above website I discovered the admin interface which let me scan for my phone. Unfortunately, I couldn’t pair with my phone even though both asked me for PIN numbers. I’ll stick with it as it looks neat when I can bring up my phone in Nautilaus through the “bluetooth:///” interface! 🙂

Ironically prompted by my meeting with MandrakeSoft yesterday, I burned and installed Fedora last night and I’m mildly impressed with it. It looks much the same as RedHat 9, but it feels a lot faster. OpenOffice 1.1 loads a lot quicker, which could be down to some “pre-loading” mechanism I read about a few days ago. Unfortunately Nautilaus crashes more often but it is improved over the version shipped with RedHat 9. I tried KDE last night but I was half asleep so I don’t have any impression that it has improved in the months since the last release.
I noticed that xmms still doesn’t play mp3 files(for patent reasons), and you need to go get a plugin for it.
I downloaded the new version of apt too, and in the process of doing an “update” of that db right now.
Burning DVD+RW disks might be easier as the dvd+rw tools are shipped with Fedora (they’re simple to install anyway). Is there any GUI tool for burning that format? The only way I’ve burned a DVD so far is by using dvdrecord (command line tool) or a Windows app, and they were DVD-R disks.

I think I’ll take a look at Mandrake 9.2 during the week to compare!

I was invited to a breakfast meeting this morning with members of MandrakeSoft Ireland who are just now launching here! Along with Adam Beecher I met Francois Bancilhon, CEO of Mandrake Soft in France who had some interesting things to say about future products, ideas about their delivery mechanisms, business and Free Software philosophy.
I wish MandrakeSoft good luck in their expansion into Ireland, and hope we hear more from them in the Irish Linux Community!