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In a previous post, I explained how to set up a launcher on your desktop allowing you to burn DVD .iso images just by dragging them onto it.
You can do that with CD .iso images too. Here’s how.
1) Open text editor and paste in this:
#!/bin/sh
/usr/bin/wodim -v gracetime=2 dev=/dev/scd0 speed=48 -dao driveropts=burnfree -eject -overburn -data "$1"
(Note: the /usr/bin/wodim command is all one line, regardless of whether you see it word-wrapped above. Copying and pasting it should bring it in as a single line.)
If your optical drive is not /dev/scd0, substitute /dev/cdrom or whatever is appropriate for your system. If the drive is not capable of 48x CD burning, or you just want it to burn slower, substitute a lower number for speed=48.
2) Save to your home directory as burncd.sh (or whatever you want to name it)
3) Set it executable (right-click and choose Properties>Permissions, or use chmod).
4) Create a desktop launcher that points to it (right-click on desktop and choose Create Launcher, using type “Application in Terminal”).
That’s it. To burn a CD .iso file, all you have to do is drag it over the launcher and let it go. The disc will eject when done.
This should work with most versions of Ubuntu, or any other version of Linux using the Gnome desktop with wodim installed.
User GwydionDd commented on my previous anti-Vista rant post:
My daughter’s PC had Windows XP on it and as a teenage girl she likes to use the PC as an extension of her personal life (facebook, skype IM, etc, etc) and also as her media centre for music and DVD’s as well as her photo booth. Just your avarage typical home user. … I had enough of wiping Windows and I installed Pardus 2008 on the PC, setup her WiFi … imported her music and photo collection and sorted out the DVD codecs. Now here I am 6 months later, the PC hasn’t slowed down, she used her PC for revision for her exams, she is running driving lesson software via WINE and she has replaced her phone about 4 times. Pardus has not once complained, crashed or slowed down. Everything has worked, even the mobile phones. I have one happy teenage daughter (OK, so far as her IT requirements are concerned) and I have one less job to do.
This reminds me of something I’ve observed in the past. Young people don’t think of computers the way we older people do. They don’t care about platform; they care about functionality. They are no more interested in why their computer works than you are in how your toaster works; they just want it to work when they push the button. And they are scary good at pushing the button, having grown up with computers all around them. I’ve seen grownups have serious problems adjusting to desktop Linux from Windows.
I’ve never seen a child have that problem, though.
Case in point. My ladyfriend’s computer is an Ubuntu box. Her daughter (26) comes over from time to time and uses it, and always complains bitterly that it’s not Windows, she can’t get things to run on it, yada-yada. Actually none of her problems are insurmountable, but she doesn’t care to solve them; she just wants Windows. Her kids, though, are just fine with it. They are 7 and 5 years old and they absolutely have no problem; they just sit down and use the computer and they don’t care a fig that it’s different from the one they have at home. The 5-year-old is autistic, and even he has no issues adapting.
This makes me think that perhaps younger users are the great hope of desktop Linux. As time goes on, we’ll see this generation grow up flexible enough to use any platform and not caring which one it is. This situation can’t help but favor desktop Linux, because it bypasses Microsoft’s primary lock on the market: legacy skills and inertia. Without that advantage, Windows has to compete on technical merit, which is very bad news for Microsoft.
Regular readers will remember quite a few posts in which Your Humble Narrator complains about this, that, or the other flaw in desktop Linux in general or an Ubuntu distribution in particular. (New visitors arriving here from tuxmachines.org can view past whines by browsing the Linux category, to your right.)
Well, I take it all back.
For the last two days I have had the dubious pleasure of working on a pair of Acer laptops, belonging to the two college-age daughters of an acquaintance. I rashly agreed to see what I could do to optimize their performance. (The laptops, not the daughters. I’d probably not be complaining otherwise.) Of course these laptops run Vista. Vista Home Premium, to be precise.
I have avoided Vista with almost complete success up until now. I still remember how to get under the hood of XP, though, and I figured, how much different can it be? And the answer turns out to be, not all that different, and very different. Depends on how you look at it.
These machines were both running dog slow with horrendous amounts of disk activity. I start with the first one out of the bag, at random, and watch it grind and grind away, disk light constantly on, CPU up, taking two minutes to open a simple Explorer window. What’s it doing? Who knows? Task Manager tells me what tasks are running, but no clue what’s using so much disk. Two guesses present themselves, both plausible: antivirus, and swap. Antivirus looks like a candidate because you can see that McAfee is looking at file after file after file, but on the other hand these are all system files or close to it, so they could be files being opened by the system as part of normal operation. Swap seems like a possibility because the system’s constantly riding up near 80% of physical memory. Why? Oh yeah, it’s Vista. Now, these are not speed demon machines, in the big picture, but they’re not antiques either; 2GHz Core Duos with 1GB RAM. With any modern Linux distro these machines would both be swimming in CPU and memory headroom, but with Vista they’re barely adequate.
Trying to free up resources on this box was an exercise in frustration. The machine was loaded with crapware, much of which starts as system tasks or tray tasks. Why do you need a tray task to launch video settings? Who uses the manufacturer hotkeys, and why do they need three (possibly four) tasks running to control them? Are QuickTime and Adobe Reader so desperately important that they need to run quick launchers as startup tasks and stay in memory? I prune out a lot of junk from the Run sections of the registry and a few more pieces of junk from the startup folder. Then I get rid of McAfee, pig that it is, in favor of AVG Free and ZoneAlarm. (This is the part where everybody chimes in to tell me to use Avast and Condor, or whatever. Please consider it said, ok?) ZoneAlarm tells me it can’t install. Why not? Because it requires Service Pack 1.
Service Pack 1?
You mean that this machine, connected to a university network with Windows Update enabled and set to automatic, has never automatically installed a service pack? Unbelievable. So I download SP1 and SP2 from Microsoft and run the SP1 installer. It tells me the process “might take an hour or more” and the machine “may have to reboot several times” to complete the update. In my head, I compare this to Ubuntu version updates, which are more complete, take less time, require one reboot, and usually let you keep working on the machine while it’s happening. In practice the SP1 update winds up taking about 90 minutes and does in fact require several reboots. So did the SP2. (And yes, you have to run them both.) At the end of it I have a system that won’t recognize that virus protection is actually running. This sends me off googling, and I eventually discover that this is the result of a problem between Windows Security Center and User Account Control. The fix is to disable UAC, reboot, enable UAC, and reboot again. All this rebooting wouldn’t be so annoying if it didn’t take So. Damn. Long. Each. Time. And the whole exercise wouldn’t be so annoying if I didn’t know that antivirus is just there slowing things down so it can plug a gaping design hole that Microsoft still hasn’t fixed after what, 20 years now? You design an OS so that any old random app can install itself into system directories and play tiddlywinks with the core files, and then your solution to the problems this brings is to run another program that’s supposed to act like a bouncer standing in the middle of a freeway trying to read license plates to see who gets to drive. And when that doesn’t go to plan, along comes User Account Control, which is kind of like the high-school dropouts who man airport security checkpoints. Or the little Dutch boy with his finger in the dike, except with flashy colors.
Anyway. I cleaned it up as much as possible, made some decent performance gains, but I was reminded of the old adage about not being able to polish a turd. But then I realized, that is exactly what Microsoft did. Vista is pretty, but under the skin it’s like someone took all the worst things about XP and gave them a scoop of Miracle-Gro. It’s same-old same-old but with a prettier face.
You hear these stories on the odd news blogs, about people who shoot their computers or throw them out of windows. If I had to deal with this crap all the time, I’d be wanting to shoot a computer or two myself. My complaints about Linux and Ubuntu are usually pretty specific; this one thing doesn’t work the way I want it to, or this other thing isn’t right. Discrete, pinpoint issues. Vista, by contrast, just feels systemically messy, inefficient, wasteful, undisciplined. It’s not bad in this or that specific way; it’s just generally a mess.
It frustrates me no end to know that there are people all over the world going through the same kind of useless, pointless struggle I’ve had to have with these simple consumer level laptops, trying to clean them up and optimize them manually to avoid a complete OS reinstall (another thing you generally never have to do with Linux). All that wasted time, wasted effort, frustration. Millions upon millions of hours, and it galls me that this is all done pointlessly when there is clearly a better alternative.
All this makes me glad to be a Linux user. It also makes my earlier complaints seem kind of petty and stupid. For all the minor issues I’ve had with Linux and Ubuntu, today I’m glad that I threw Windows out of my computers, instead of the other way around.
Used to be, in Ubuntu, you could right-click on a DVD .iso image and choose Write To Disc, and it would use a fairly straightforward utility to do it - Nautilus Burner. In Ubuntu Jaunty, that choice brings up Brasero, which I don’t particularly like, not least which because its elapsed and remaining time estimates are so bad.
So I took the opportunity to make things easier on myself by creating a drag and drop launcher link on my desktop to burn DVD images. This is quicker and easier than either Nautilus Burner or Brasero, because it takes less clicking; I just drag the image onto the launcher, and it burns it and ejects it.
Here’s how:
1) Open text editor and paste in this:
#!/bin/sh
growisofs -Z /dev/dvd="$1"
eject /dev/dvd
(If your DVD drive is not /dev/dvd, substitute /dev/cdrom or whatever is appropriate for your system.)
2) Save to your home directory as burndvd.sh (or whatever you want to name it)
3) Set it executable (right-click and choose Properties>Permissions, or use chmod).
4) Create a desktop launcher that points to it (right-click on desktop and choose Create Launcher, using type “Application in Terminal”).
That’s it. To burn a DVD .iso file, all you have to do is drag it over the launcher and let it go. You’ll get a terminal window with text showing the burn progress and the disc will eject when done.
This should work with most versions of Ubuntu, or any other version of Linux using the Gnome desktop with growisofs installed.
Having recently defended the auto bailout in comparison to the coddling of the entertainment business, it’s now time for me to turn on the auto industry.
If you keep up on the unfolding news about the US auto industry, you’ll have seen that GM and Chrysler are both shutting down a lot of dealers to become leaner companies. Since the dealers are independent franchisees, this takes the form of voiding the franchise agreements to those dealers as part of their bankruptcy and restructuring arrangements.
The dumped dealers are protesting. Some of them are filing lawsuits aimed at blocking the restructuring so that they can retain their franchises.
Show of hands, please. Who reading this has not been screwed over by a car dealer at some point in your life?
I find tremendous amusement in the media portrayal of the poor, innocent dealers, who slaved their lives away earnestly selling cars for GM and Chrysler and are now in tears on witness stands. Last time I looked, car dealers were at the bottom of the list of trustworthy occupations, and with good reason. The whole business is corrupt and devious, and has had that reputation for generations. Even the good ones need to be watched when you deal with them, or they’ll rob you blind with things like useless paint protection, extended warranty plans, sucker-deal financing, lowball trade-in values, and psychological trickery.
Once, at a dealership, I overheard a conversation between a young couple and a salesman. The couple told the salesman about the deal they had been offered at another dealership. The salesman replied, “Okay, you’re being lied to,” and proceeded to rebut the other dealer’s offer with a series of statements that were, in fact, lies. He told them he was lying, but in such a way that they were meant to think he was calling the other dealer a liar. What else can you say about an industry that runs like this?
So call me heartless, but I have little sympathy for the dealers that are facing loss of their franchises. This is a business that traditionally operates by swindling customers any time they can get away with it. I can’t muster up any sense of outrage for dealers who complain of feeling swindled by a deal that turned out to not be what they were led to believe it was. Now you know how your customers feel.
Payback’s a bitch, isn’t it?
Hi gang. Sorry for the long delay between posts, but I’ve had a lot to do and very little to say. A couple of people checked in to see if I was okay, and that’s actually kind of cool, or touching, or something. Anyway, I appreciated it, so thanks. 
As everyone knows, the US auto industry is circling the drain. This is one of the core industries upon which modern America, or at least its economy, has traditionally depended. So of course the government is hard at work giving additional protection to… the entertainment conglomerates. As it has been for decades now. So let’s all give rousing cheers for our government in action. Are you with me? Here we go: Gimme a W! Gimme a T! Gimme an F!
On second thought, don’t gimme a W. That’s part of the problem right there.
To get a perspective on how firm a grasp the entertainment industry has on the testicles of our elected representatives, let’s imagine what the American auto industry would look like if it had had the same level of control and influence over the past 20 years or so.
Now, I’m not a big fan of the government bailouts of the auto industry. I understand what they’re trying to do, and why, and what they’re trying to avoid. I even see how some of it could be necessary, though I don’t have to like it. But nevertheless it grates on me to see the auto industry begging for its life while the entertainment industry, which is not in anywhere near as bad a condition, is promised a free ride and gets its historical profitability guaranteed by government. This by dint of eviscerating the original we-the-people balance between copyright and public domain, replacing those with a system designed to provide eternal ownership and revenue for the corporate anointed, complete with government-sponsored propaganda campaigns to convince us that an endless stream of income for Disney and Sony was always what the framers of the Constitution had in mind.
Not that the auto industry wouldn’t like this kind of featherbedding, if they had the clout. They’ve even made a few tentative steps onto the legislative coattails of the entertainment behemoth, patenting the interfaces to vehicles’ onboard diagnostic systems and then filing DMCA actions against third-party repair and service tool manufacturers for “illegally” reverse engineering their “copy-protected content.” There is a bill going through Congress right now that would carve out an exception to the DMCA for the perfectly reasonable desire to simply fix a car without being held to ransom by the maker. Apparently it is evident to at least some people in Washington that corporate interests, in these cases, need to be balanced against the good of the people. Interesting, huh? Says something about the unfairness of the DMCA in general. But don’t hold your breath for anyone out there to realize the larger implications of it any time soon. Letting GM control the auto repair industry is A Bad Thing, apparently, but it’s okay to let Hollywood control the internet.
What was that cheer again?
Dear Orleans Homebuilders,
Last week I came home to find a flyer from you on my door, offering to pay me $10,000 for referring you a new customer (as well as $5,000 to the customer if they buy).
I would be happy to talk to any potential buyer about my Orleans Homebuilder experience since 2006. I’ll gladly tell them:
I’m sure other things will come to mind. As I’ve said, I will be glad to talk to your potential buyers about all these aspects of my Orleans Homebuilders experience; they can even come to the house and see some of it.
After that, if you still want to give me $10,000, I’d appreciate a cashier’s check. I want something I can trust.
For once.
I see that some of my recent Linux posts have been the subject of some comment elsewhere on the net. “Netflix loves/hates Linux” got over 500 diggs, and the one about AT&T was the subject of a heated flame war reproduced in Google Groups, PCReviews.co.uk, and vistaheads.com (I don’t know which of those places was the original source).
It’s interesting to discover a whole trove of criticism by people who are not speaking to you directly; talking about you rather than to you. I was called a “doofus” (by someone who more or less agrees with me, oddly) and a “looser” (as opposed to “tighter,” no doubt). I was also accused of misusing the word “ironic.” For the record, when I say I find something ironic, I usually mean it in the dictionary sense of “poignantly contrary to what was expected or intended.”
One thread that emerged from this criticism is that, as a Linux user, I apparently have no right to want, say, Netflix to use an open standard for distributing watch-on-demand movies, or AT&T to provide configuration information without an argument. To do so makes me a “whiner” and a “looser” (sic). The logic, such as it can be understood, is that I should know that minorities get ignored, so I should join the majority and just run Windows.
Well, NO.
Linux is simply a better operating system in so many respects that it doesn’t make sense to change. I am not going to trade the stability and security of Linux for the bug and virus world of Windows just so I can watch Netflix on demand. I think the logic of the naysayers is that this means I should just accept the situation as it stands. I see where they’re coming from, but that’s absolutely the wrong attitude, especially coming from other Linux or BSD users. Desktop Linux users are still a minority, sure; but what’s keeping it that way? Lack of support and compatibility is a big part of the reason; hardware, software, and service vendors locked in to Microsoft standards because they don’t see any reason not to be. And unless we stand up and demand to be counted, there will never be much reason for them to change.
I want to use the better OS, and I want to be acknowledged as an equal customer. If there is something you want from your business relationship that you’re not getting, you should ask for it. Maybe Netflix or AT&T might still decide not to offer it, but they will never offer it if they don’t know anyone wants it. So we should speak up.
I can only speculate on the motives of people who would prefer that we keep quiet, and thereby keep Linux under the radar. Why do you want it to remain a minority choice? Are you worried about sullying our elitist culture with an influx of the great unwashed, migrating over from Windows in droves the moment it gets easy enough to do? I see that attitude growing recently, and most of the animus is directed at Ubuntu - calling it “unoobtu,” referring to the Ubuntu Forums as “a dumbass factory,” and the like. That’s unfortunate. I don’t know how closely correlated these attitudes are with each other, but either way I think working to keep Linux marginalized helps no one - except maybe Microsoft.
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