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Ubuntu 10.04 on Acer Aspire 5741G

Gerrit — Thu, 17 Jun 2010 11:07:56 +0000

Recently I’ve purchased an Acer Aspire 5741G. It ships with Windows 7 pre-installed. Nowadays most manufacturers consider it a good idea to equip their notebooks with an extra partition which holds all data necessary to recover your Windows installation. So if your installation is screwed up (think of a virus or something) you can put your notebook back into factory default. Of course the operating system of my choice is Ubuntu rather than Windows 7. However, I wished to keep a functional Windows partition and recovery partition just in case I plan to sell the notebook in a few years. Thus I wanted my Windows partition to be repartitioned in order to install Ubuntu alongside Windows. Ubuntu’s installation guide explains here that this could be done as part of the installation procedure. And indeed this was dead easy. I just needed to to configure via a slider how big I wished the Windows partition to be. Installation succeeded without any problems.

After booting Ubuntu the Hardware Drivers application asked me if it should install and activate drivers for the Wifi card and the graphics card. Of course I accepted and within seconds my graphics card was configured and access to my WLAN was set up. A quick test of the keyboards function keys and he SD-card reader (I expected both to be problematic) revealed that everything works fine.

Office 2010 & SharePoint 2010 available

Gerrit — Thu, 20 May 2010 19:36:09 +0000

Office 2010 and SharePoint 2010 have been released. If you live in Germany you can try your luck in Microsoft’s lottery and win a Nokia E72 smartphone. Browse to http://www.microsoft.com/de/de/dynamicit/microsoft-virtual-launch-event-gewinnspiel.aspx and read how to participate.

Tools for Windows developers

Gerrit — Mon, 03 May 2010 19:33:15 +0000

This is more a hint for Windows developers coming originally from UNIX systems. If you’re missing tools like ps, top, pstree or strace you should have a look at the website www.sysinternals.com which offers a suite of advanced system utilities.

CoApp

Gerrit — Sun, 11 Apr 2010 10:01:50 +0000

I’ve just came across the article Microsoft Aims to Bring apt/rpm-like Tools to Windows. It describes how difficult it is to compile and install open source software on Windows. Microsoft developer Garrett Serack hast started the community-driven project Common Opensource Application Publishing Platform (CoApp for short) which

aims to create a vibrant Open Source ecosystem on Windows by providing the technologies needed to build a complete community-driven Package Management System, along with tools to enable developers to take advantage of features of the Windows platform.