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It’s a developer version. Not suitable for end user. A lot of things still cannot function properly as I wrote this. (Yes, I write this post thorugh Google Chrome).

Luckily for Debian based Linux distro, a .deb package is available for you to download and install. As usual, I ignore the warning that I should not be using it in my laptop.

The experience: Fast. Really fast. I don’t think I will get back to Firefox for pure web browsing.

Problems: I still cannot import my Firefox bookmarks and settings, although Chrome has put a setting button for it. Still buggy.

Flash not working, so no Youtube at this moment.

Font rendering very similar to IE, not Ubuntu.

Heck, it’s new. What should I expect.

I am now submitting bugs…

Get yourself a taste of Chrome in Linux here:

Chrome Dev Channel

Thanks to Harisfazillah. I now have better eye on my hard disk. I read his post about monitoring your hard disk health, before it dies premature death. My 4 years old ACER notebook came with a 30GB of hard disk, in which, I think it’s about time for it to deteriorate. So, I better monitor it closely…

smartmontools unfortunately for me is a command line program. Honestly, I don’t know how to use it optimally for my notebook. Luckily, GSmartControl simplify my life by giving me a GUI for smartmontools.

The results? I was really surprised to get ‘pre-failure’ and ‘old age’ in the SMART Attribute Data Structure! Although I have a very limited info on what the hell the table is, I know, I now have to closely monitor my hard disk!!!

At last… I found 2 other people who are interested in Linux in Kota Kinabalu. And I straightaway create a KK LUG today.

Hope to have more people from KK joining in and be a Linux evangelist. I know it is a long journey ahead, but still, it needs to start somewhere.

Interested in Linux and you are in KK? Join us here:

KK LUG

Visit this group

After 1 week in exclusive Ubuntu…

1. When pressing Ctrl+Alt+Delete did not show me task manager. After some time, I discovered that I could customize how my notebook will react when I did it in Ubuntu…
2. Waiting for daily schedule of antivirus update at 8.45am every morning. And get used to it.
3. Running Spybot Search & Destroy once in a while to detect spyware, malware and adaware, in which sometimes took more than half an hour of slow notebook.
4. Registry cleaning. Where should I clean my Ubuntu registry???
5. Pressing right mouse click and “Refresh” my LCD screen. Where the hell is my “Refresh” in Ubuntu???
6. Restart your computer every time after update& install new software. Why Ubuntu do not have to restart after apt-get?
7. No more trip to pirated software vendor at Center Point. Yes, they still running.
8. Blue screen of death.
9. Worry about any .exe file that I accidentally download from the net, thinking that it will install a good file.
10. Spending money for software…

BTW, I just found out the wonderful world of aptitude…

After 3 years of dual-booting (Windows-Xandros, Windows-PCLinuxOS, Windows-UbuntuME), I migrated fully to Ubuntu yesterday. I did it because a day before yesterday, my Windows XP was infected with some Trojan Horse and malware after downloading some files from the net. They disturbed my Windows Explorer - my desktop environment kept blinking on and off. I could run applications from the Task Manager, but accessing my folders and files were almost impossible.

I had to screen my computer with Spybot Search & Destroy, which found the culprit. As I saw it running in my memory, deleting the files manually will not eradicate the malware. I was surprised that my AntiVir did not able to detect it (I used free version).

So what I did was logged out, boot into my Ubuntu, and deleted the files from Ubuntu. As usual, the files were situated inside C:Windows\system32.

When I restart my Windows, Spybot did a good job by running a scan before the malware were loaded into the memory. Luckily, it did not found it anymore as I have deleted it from Ubuntu.

At about the same time, I found out about IEs4Linux, a Linux application that could run Internet Explorer in Linux using Wine. For your information, the only thing that avoided me from fully migrating to Ubuntu years earlier was because I still need to use IE to submit my patient’s claim through third party electronic medical service provider, in particular ING, FOMEMA, Metronics I-Care and Mediclinic.

I don’t know why, they all need me to use IE to submit my claims. But after getting more confidence with IEs4Linux, I just did it - I wiped out both partition in my notebook, Windows & UbuntuME - and installed Hardy Heron 8.04 LTS cleanly into it. I received Hardy Heron’s DVD with Linux For You magazine June 2008 edition.

I was really surprised when it automatically downloaded a driver for my wireless card, without the need of me to look for it. Now I have to admit that Ubuntu is the No.1 Linux distro for desktop user.

Oh, good bye XP…

It’s free. Get away from your Internet Explorer 7 and MS Office Suite. There is nothing for you to loose.

You even gain something by involving yourself in the projects to the community by testing and submitting bugs to the development teams.

I have been using both  - FF and OO - from their 1.x version donkey years back, and never regretted that I migrated. I think you should do the same also.

By the way, it’s a release candidate for FF and beta version for OO.  Get it now here:
http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/all-rc.html

http://download.openoffice.org/3.0beta/

I came across SmartExp, one of the new electronic medical records (EMR) management software, which runs on Windows. I decided to look into it further, and notice that Mike, the developer works alone in this quite new project.

I decided to give him a hand on bug tracking, after installing, and managed to chat with him. Apparently, he lives in Mexico, a software engineer who’s married with a kid.

I am planning to run this software in my clinic, and hopefully it could track all the patients’ database.

Any doctors who would like to give a hand on helping Mike with his SmartExp, you are invited to do so.

Who knows we could package it following Malaysian general clinic set up and share it with all the doctors in all part of Malaysia?

For Windows user, you can use Gas Mileage Tracker Software (a freeware) to be used with your PC.

Another handy tool for Palm OS user. Track your fuel expenses with this handy program. With pFuel, you could track your fuel mileage spending of your car (or cars) on the go. I own a 2001 Proton Wira Sedan, which I have been using for the past 7 years. I was not aware on how many km/L of its fuel consumption until I use this program (of course, I knew its rough estimation).

pFuel could even track your expenses for maintenance of your car like servicing, repair, wheel balancing and alignment, and almost anything that you could relate to your car.

For your info, my car currently runs around 13-15km/L of petrol, depending on the road and journey that I took. Not sure about the standard consumption of fuel for WIRA generally…

pFuel

pFuel is an enhanced version of the “FuelLog” program for the Palm that records fuel purchases and computes statistics and creates graphs related to the fuel consumption for each vehicle.You can also set alert for the maintenance of your car. pFuel works in Metric (Km/Litre) or Standard (Miles/Gallons).

Data from pFuel can also be easily exported to and imported from a memo pad record.

I felt some relief after securing my Ubuntu PC at home for my son from the exposure of porn at early age with OpenDNS. To get the PC to serve me on educating him on letters, numbers, colors, shapes, sizes and almost anything that he could get from Disney Channel, I installed GCompris - the free education software.

I must say that it is very intuitive, interactive and attractive to my son. The advantage of GCompris compared to Disney Channel is interactivity - while he could only watch and learn from Disney, with GCompris, he could interact using simple mouse gesture and sometime keyboard.

GCompris

GCompris is an educational software suite comprising of numerous activities for children aged 2 to 10. Some of the activities are game orientated, but nonetheless still educational. Below you can find a list of categories with some of the activities available in that category.

• computer discovery: keyboard, mouse, different mouse gesture, …
• algebra: table memory, enumeration, double entry table, mirror image, …
• science: the canal lock, the water cycle, the submarine, electric simulation …
• geography: place the country on the map
• games: chess, memory, connect 4, oware, sudoku …
• reading: reading practice
• other: learn to tell time, puzzle of famous paintings, vector drawing, cartoon making, …

Currently GCompris offers in excess of 100 activities and more are being developed. GCompris is free software, that means that you can adapt it to your own needs, improve it and, most importantly, share it with children everywhere.

And don’t worry. GCompris can be installed in almost any operating system (Linux, Mac & Windows) and has more than 40 language translation. Now give your child some good and free education!

The only way that you will know how important and FTP client for your computer is when you started your own website & blog. I personally knew FireFTP when I started mount-kinabalu-borneo.com, where I called Exabytes support on how to transfer my newly made HTML file to the server.

It was quite difficult at the beginning, and I decided to migrate to a stand-alone FTP client program just when I get use to transferring files to the server. I used FileZilla in my Windows for quite sometime, but it seems that the transfer time gets slower as time goes by. gFTP is used while I am in Ubuntu.

Because of FileZilla slowness (and I did find some bugs in their beta version), I decided to go back to FireFTP. It has been 6 months since I migrated to FireFTP, and the program has matured to give me the best service of transferring files to my servers. As it is also cross platform, I don’t have any problem while working in my Ubuntu.

What do you use?