Well at least if there’s some sunlight lying around you at least because the notebook runs on solar energy. The Andrea Ponti concept solar notebook is simply gorgeous and I hope it would see the light of day and become a reality in my lifetime. Imagine, not having to ever need to charge a notebook from an electrical outlet ever again — that would really be cool and awesome.

I know it has something to do with the Pulseaudio system on my Ubuntu set up but was a bit lazy to google for a solution. Anyway my sound was quite fine under Ubuntu so I didn’t mind it at all.

Then a couple of days back, I found this very useful tip from my email on how to remove the Pulseaudio drivers and replace it with esound. I decided to try the procedure. After removing/disabling the pulseaudio drivers and installing the esound system I never experienced the problem with Virtualbox again.

So if you’re having the same problem with Virtualbox, here’s how I remove pulseaudio and install esound on my Ubuntu Intrepid:

sudo -s

apt-get remove pulseaudio

apt-get install esound

rm /etc/X11/Xsession.d/70pulseaudio

Go to System -> Preferences -> Sessions

Deselected or Remove the Pulseaudio Manager

cd ~

cp .asound* yourfilename

rm .asound*

You can read the full procedure from the ubuntugeek web site from here. Removing pulseaudio and replacing it with esound really did the job.

Virtualbox 2.2.0 is now available from the Virtualbox web site but I still haven’t tried it yet but esound should still work even with the updated Virtualbox version.

Cheers.

It’s very easy to use and can handle multiple accounts so I’d probably try out identi.ca now that I use Gwibber. One of the things I like about Gwibber is that it lets you have your own customized theme. If you know basic HTML and CSS, it’s actually easy to customize.

The easiest way to make a custom Gwibber theme is to actually copy an existing theme into the ~/.local/share/gwibber/ui/theme directory of your home directory. You can find several examples of Gwibber themes under the /usr/share/gwibber/ui/themes/ directory.

For example you can copy the default Gwibber theme to a theme called “mytheme” by doing:

cp -av /usr/share/gwibber/ui/themes/default ~/.local/share/gwibber/ui/theme/

After copying the files, what you need to edit is the theme.html file in your newly created mytheme directory. Here’s a sample content of the file:

The look and feel of your tweets are controlled by the CSS settings inside the file. Here’s several familiar tags to help you get started on customizing your Gwibber theme:

body – controls the whole window client screen under gwibber. You can change things such as backgound, even setup your own background image, even the color and size of your fonts.

a – the a tags control the links. In twitter twits, these can be those tinyurl links you find in the messages.

.message – controls the way the actually messages will be rendered

.time / .time a – for the time tags in your twits

.title – is for the title text for your twits.

.imgbox – for the photos/images. You can even put some fancy stuff like reflections because gwibber uses the Webkit engine to render the theme

Here’s the gwibber theme I did for myself. You can download it from here.

Here’s a copy of the Press Release from the Linux Foundation regarding Linux.com.

The recent news of a big deployment of Linux in schools got me back into thinking just how near the reality of my concept is actually unfolding. One thing caught my attention though, the deployment will use virtual Linux desktops using a CPU sharing scheme. The scheme that uses a single computer connected with several monitors is not something new but I wondered if it’s still feasible in this day and age.

After some checking and comparing alternative solutions and schemes, here’s what I found out — electronic “pocketbooks” are in.

The Costs

Cost will always be an issue when deploying computers in campuses. This is why I believe using Linux is such a natural fit for school computer systems. Most of the software needed in schools are already available in freely available open source projects so the other thing to take a look at is hardware.

An option to deploying computers in the classroom has always been the use of a CPU sharing scheme. With this option, the students get to share the resources of a single CPU / computer by attaching several monitors and keyboards to the computer. Things have actually evolved because nowadays you can now even attach a separate speaker/mouse/microphone to each “virtual computer”. But the concept remains the same. The CPU is shared instead of having a dedicated CPU for each student. This is made possible by providing a special software to allow the single computer to have multiple keyboards and monitors which sharing the CPU resources. Below is a drawing of how it is usually setup.

The other option is to provide a student with his/her own dedicated CPU complete with its own monitor,keyboard,sound,mouse … The dedicated CPU solution can be in the form of a full blown computer that allows each student/user to perform tasks own it’s own. It can also be a “thin client” computer which has limited functionality — usually to connect to a central computer / server to be able to perform tasks. Connections between these dedicated computers is usually via a network (wireless or wired). The cost has always been the primary demarcation between “thin client” and “full blown” computers. With the reducing costs it’s almost neglible in terms of hardware what defines a thin client and a full blown unit from a point of view of a student user. I will call this the “pocketbook” scheme and won’t distinguish between a full feature or thin client unit.

I made a spreadsheet (the values are in USD) of how the two solutions compare with each other. Comparison is between two setups of 10 workstations each. I found some very interesting revelations that made me think that the “pocketbook” scheme has come of age.

Some noteworthy points about the cost

The Computer / Server cost used in the CPU sharing scheme is underpriced at 500 dollars. I think it may very well be bigger (cost and size) since it needs to have more memory and slots for the video cards. But putting the server and the teacher’s computer (in the “pocketbook”) scheme at equal footing makes it easy to compare the workstations or student computers.

The major costs for the CPU Sharing scheme are the “server/computer”, sharing device and the graphics card. The multi-headed graphics card and the needed extra slots on the CPU Sharing computer is drives the costs up. Since such setups isn’t currently mainstream, such “specialized” requirements has a increased effect. Also, since multi-headed graphics cards are focused towards gaming, it is costing more to use them in a classroom environment.

I have pegged the monitor at only 100 USD since whatever the value it will be on equal impact for both schemes anyway.

On the “pocketbook” scheme, major cost is attributable to the workstation CPU for each student. The workstation cost is based on building a desktop unit that uses an Atom mini-itx motherboard product of Intel. I came up with 140 dollar per workstation cost using the following assumptions:

• US $65 – 1 unit of Intel’s mini-itx Atom board
• US $10 – 1GB RAM memory
• US $15 – 8GB flash memory
• US $30 – CPU casing, power supply, cable and connectors
• US $20 – Assembly cost per unit

Now to the interesting part. The per unit cost for the CPU Sharing Scheme is at US$ 299 while the “pocketbook” scheme is lesser at US $250. What’s interesting is that the $250 is also the cost of a single unit of Dell’s Mini 9 with Ubuntu Linux installed (update 2/27/09: Dell Mini 9 is now just $199). So Dell, shouldn’t you be installing those Mini 9′s in those schools?

The Pros and Cons of the two solutions

The only advantage I see with the CPU Sharing scheme right now is if technologies like DisplayLink that uses the USB for attaching multiple displays can be used. This will drive the cost down. But with the current speed of USB at 480Mbps, I’m a bit not convinced that it can handle 10 displays connected to one CPU.

I think that using an “intelligent” workstation for the student is a better approach. As “pocketbook” prices continue to go down. It can really allow for a more realistic “One Pocketbook per Child” scenario. Getting an electronic pocketbook into the hand of each student will allow him/her to use it for other things besides inside the classroom.

What the future holds

It’s also interesting to see the replacement of the classroom boards with those electronic whiteboards with touch-based features.

I think that as touch based and small high resolution colored screens gets in to mainstream, we will be seeing “better than Kindle 2″ like features into “pocketbook” devices that will ultimately replace paper based textbooks. I think we’d also have to provide alternative means (besides having to carry all those books) of exercise to our children once this happens.

What’s very interesting about Amber’s series of posts is that it gives some very good points on how well Ubuntu (Linux) has moved forward in terms of usability on the desktop. And some very good points which may very well help the community identify some improvement areas in terms of usability. Although I wouldn’t rate her as the average typical Mom, she has pretty much written things that provides some insight to how an average user might react to Ubuntu.

One of the things that struck me is that, most Ubuntu/Linux users have gotten used to command line methods to get things done even in a GUI environment simply because it’s faster and we know how to do it. But the typical user (who is probably 90% of the total user base) aren’t used to “sudo”.

An idea that I think would really help a lot of users came up on my mind. People who have been using Ubuntu for a while may already be familiar with the Synaptic Package Manager and one of it’s features “Mark Packages by Task”. I think that it would really help a lot in terms of usability to put something similar on the Applications menu together with the “Add / Remove …” feature. Something like “Add/Remove/Install by Task“. What do you think?

As I was reading the series, I suddenly realized that she is now getting aggregated into ubuntuweblogs.org so I would assume that you guys are also reading her posts by now.

Hi Amber, welcome to Ubuntu!

What’s cool about blueman is that in addition to better bluetooth management under Ubuntu, it is also able to manage wireless broadband (GPRS/EDGE/3G) connections hand in hand with Ubuntu’s Network Manager. I’ve tried it on my Motorola RAZR mobile phone and it is able to setup HAL so that I can easily connect / disconnect to the Internet using Network Manager.

The last time I tried if my cell phone is supported by the Network Manager, I had to use the mobile phone’s cable to be able to connect to the Internet. If I wanted to connect to the Internet via bluetooth on my cell phone, I had to setup ppp manually. With Blueman, it’s done automatically for you. Great!

One thing though, it seems that when I connect to the Internet via bluetooth I only get a GPRS connection instead of HSDPA (which is what I get using a cable setup on the cell phone) but this might be probably more of a tethering feature of the limitation of the cell phone. Would be nice if HSDPA is also available via bluetooth. Any ideas?

Other features of the Blueman bluetooth manager software include:

• Connecting to/Creating bluetooth networks
• Connecting to input devices
• Connecting to audio devices
• Sending/Receiving/Browsing files via OBEX
• Pairing

You can setup blueman via launchpad by adding the following line to your aptitude software sources:

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/blueman/ppa/ubuntu intrepid main

And then install blueman using the following command from a terminal session:

sudo apt-get install blueman

You can find their public key here.

Visit the launchpad project site of Blueman for more info.

Here’s a list of what has been fixed or added on VirtualBox 2.1.4. Download Virtualbox.

So far I’ve tried the following GPRS/3G/HSDPA mobile phones and they work under Ubuntu Intrepid.

Current list of supported cell phones in Ubuntu Intrepid’s mobile broadband automatic connection feature:

• Motorola RAZR (3G/HSPDA works with Network Manager using a cable)
• Sony Ericsson 810i (3G works with Network Manager using a cable)
• Nokia N80ie (3G works with Network Manager using a cable)
• Nokia N95 ( will try out this week 3G/HSDPA works with Network Manager using a cable)

If you have made your mobile phone to work on Ubuntu Intrepid, please leave a comment so I can try and make a list of supported handsets. Thanks.

• Makers of such things would rather concentrate on Windows which has a big user base
• It’s harder to create such things on Linux

What do you think?