Telstra has revealed the addition of almost one million new mobile services in the six months to December 2011, but Sensis revenues plummeted 24 percent in 12 months.
I have been dying to say goodbye to Microsoft Windows for a number of years. I am fed up with the unceasing number of bugs, inexplicable system freezes, persistent gaping flaws that hackers can drive a truck through and empty promises of improvements with each new release. I'm ready to give Linux another try but is Linux ready for me?
Having tried a few major Linux distros including
Ubuntu, Fedora and Suse about 12 months ago, I found the the closest to
what I needed was Ubuntu. Aside from a fundamental error I made in
burning a downloaded disk image to CD (for which the Ubuntu crowd
tarred and feathered me) it was a quick and relatively painless install.
The Gnome interface was very functional, even if to be quite blunt the
color scheme was awful and resembled a washed out sepia photograph.
However, nearly everything I needed was there - Open Office and
Evolution for desktop office productivity and email and Firefox for the
web. With a little manual tweaking, I could even get Ubuntu to work
with my wireless network.
What finished it for me back then, however, was that I couldn't find a
driver for my Canon laser printer. In fact, I did find a driver hack
but there was no obvious simple way to download it. I'm sure that if I
had persisted, I would have easily solved the problem.
However, at the time I felt that something as fundamental as being able
to easily download a driver from the net or detecting and logging in to
a new wireless network without having to enter IP addresses manually
were mandatory requirements for me.
So, even though I had an Ubuntu screen sitting on my desk next to my
Windows screen running continually for about two months without
requiring a single reboot, for reasons best known to my subconscious, I
eventually opted to stick with my clunky, unstable Windows machine.
That machine gradually deteriorated and eventually fell apart and its
replacement, a new Windows XP SP2 box powered by a Core 2 Duo processor
with 2GB of RAM, requires a restart practically every other day.
Apparently Ubuntu has come a long way in the past year and I'm ready to
give it another try. According to the Ubuntu site, version 6.10 sports
many improvements and is faster and has less bugs than its
predecessors. I may also give Kubuntu a try to compare the KDE and
Gnome GUIs. As far as the printer driver is concerned, well I need a
new printer and scanner anyway.
I have some free time over Easter so maybe the holidays will be the
beginning of a new and enduring relationship, as well as the
finalization of a long overdue divorce.
David Bass
| For the fourth year in a row, IDC has placed content security provider Websense (NASDAQ: WBSN) at the top of the IDC Worldwide Web Security 2011 –…
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