Refer: Randell’s Blog

The fix is just to run:

$> restorecon -R ~/.config

This problem has been bugging me for quite sometime. I did want to try file a bug report to Fedora Core developers, but after a few Google search, it seems no one is facing a similar problem like me. This let me to rethink about the problem I had. Since I did a full installation by running yum install evolution-*, this mean, I would have install a lot more from the standard installation. I decided to check through the plugins that I had installed and one-by-one disable them to check for any effect. I finally find out which plugin is causing the problem.

The problem would happen whenever Evolution RSS plugin is enable.

Did a few Google search, I finally found others share the same problem as I am:

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/evolution-rss/+bug/452874

It seems this problem was not fixed in Fedora 15.

• Run dconf-editor
• Go to: desktop -> gnome-> shell- > windows
• From your right side options double click on “buttons_layouts”. Erase it’s current text (which should be = :close ) and enter the below code instead:

Source for this tip.

2) Adding “Shutdown/Power Off” and “Restart/Reboot” options into the menu.

The strange thing about GNOME 3 or Fedora Core 15, there is no “Shutdown” or “Power Off” and”Restart” options in the menu. It only provides “Suspend”.  Don’t ask me why, I am not even sure this is decided by GNOME 3 developers or the Fedora Core developers.

However, there is a way to add the options back. Just run the following command at the command prompt in root:

Source here.

3) Samsung CLX 3160 (all-in-one) Printer

Just follow the instructions from the link: foo2qpdl:a linux printer driver for QPDL protocol

However, there is a way to add the options back. Just run the following command at the command prompt in root:

Source here.

Linux desktop is indeed getting better. I still remember the good old days, where writing your own fvwmrc is the way to go. FVWM is still around, but I really enjoy a full desktop environment like GNOME.

Ubuntu decided to switch Unity desktop. I used it for couple of months, and I really don’t find that fun to use, in fact, it feels rather backward. I don’t think there is a need for me go in details of why I don’t like it, there are already a lot of debates on this issue one can find them from Google search. However, I do like to echo certain “features” of Unity which, I notice, others have voiced their dissatisfaction…

First, one major turn off to me is the way how I need to find a specific application. In the old days, the applications are all arrange in a logical and easily find manner from the GNOME Application menu, but I would need to jump a few steps in order to find it now in Unity. For example, if I need to find Firefox, I just click Application Menu->Internet->Firefox, now I would need to go “Launcher”, either “Search Applications” directly or I need to find “Internet” category from “All Applications”, and may need to click “view more” if not shown immediately. I can always add application into the panel, but you can’t be expecting me to add every application into it. There should be a more logical and efficient way for me to find the application. GNOME 3 did it better, Click on Activities, it shows me “Windows” and “Applications”. If I click “Applications”, on the right hand side, it would list all the categories available.

Second, the idea of do it similar to Mac OS global menu is not right for Linux. Yes, if every application open only 1 window and in full screen, we may get along this idea. But not all application in Linux follow this structure. Take for example GIMP, when launch, it usually would open itself with 2 or 3 windows:  The image/canvas, toolbox and layers. In order for me to navigate around various setting, I need to frequently click on different windows and move up to select the option from global menu. Things would get even more confusing, If I have multiple applications run at the same time. There are times, I get confused on which application’s menu is on the global menu. It is even more troublesome, if I use focus-follows-mouse/sloppy focus.

Looking at the Unity and GNOME 3, I can’t help notice that these 2 desktop are heading for more touch screen friendly interface. I guess, this is expected.

Anyway, I am now using Fedora Core 15 with GNOME 3. Not too bad, but I still missed the old or classic way of doing things…

Hello!!! There is a delete key on every keyboard. It says “D-E-L-E-T-E”, it means delete, why on earth I need to use another key to delete?

From one of those weird things about Gnome 3…

Thank goodness there is a work around to this “feature”:

1. Run dconf-editor, and open: org -> gnome -> desktop -> interface
2. Enable “can-change-accels”.
3. Open nautilus, select any file/directory, then click “Edit” from menubar, and hover on “Move to Trash” menuitem.
4. While hovering, click on your delete key. The accel should change from “cntrl+del” to “del”.

NOTE:

• Make sure you have selected a file, else the “Move to Trash” menuitem will be greyed out.
• Do remember to disable “can-change-accels” afterwards, so won’t accidental change it.
• If dconf-editor is not install, just install it by running yum install dconf-editor

On why this “feature” is there in Gnome3, just follow the link below:
http://gilest.ro/2011/patches-for-nautilus-move-to-trash-bug

EDIT: After reading the link above and trying out my girlfriend MacBook Air, I decide to give this new feature a try. I had set  it back to Ctrl-Delete.

From The Burning Platform:

The battle of devices (smartphone and mobile devices) has now become a war of ecosystems, where ecosystems include not only the hardware and software of the device, but developers, applications, ecommerce, advertising, search, social applications, location-based services, unified communications and many other things. Our competitors aren’t taking our market share with devices; they are taking our market share with an entire ecosystem. This means we’re going to have to decide how we either build, catalyse or join an ecosystem.

– Stephen Elop, CEO, Nokia

(Emphasis mine.)

I think the new CEO has a good grasp of the current state of mobile world. We are no longer converging into a single dominate platform. When Symbian was supported by major mobile phone makers, there was a belief that the convergence of mobile platform would be based on it. However this did not happen, instead mobile world is now in a stage of multiple platforms. At this time, major platforms are Android, Blackberry and iPhone. It is very clear, Nokia has to make choice and it choose to enter an alliance with Microsoft to develop WP7 phones.

This is simply amazing and if we put ourselves a few years back, looking at this event, no one would have imagine this could happen. I personally think, history will view this as one of those moment where a once seemingly mighty and invincible company, had decided to desperately alliance itself with an external party to find a new future. However, what is truly amazing, after details of alliance is known, Nokia, the once held largest market share of smart phone in world had decided to drop their own mobile platform and embrace Microsoft WP7 completely.

Unbelievable!

I always believe, for a company to grow, it should continue the proven strategies, learned the mistakes from itself and others, and finally the willingness to copy or emulate others successful strategies.

Symbian mobile smart phone ‘ecosystem’ is indeed declining in its market share, but it is still has a large market share. Looking at their latest flagship Nokia N8, I find Symbian UI has improved quite a lot, once we compare it with older version of Symbian UI. If they continue this direction, I believe they should be able to find new success and rejuvenate the platform. Nokia made great phones, in fact, I even wrote a little entry in my blog detailing why I had chosen Nokia E71 instead of iPhone. Even to this day, the basic requirement for me to buy a phone have not changed, and I still don’t own an iPhone.

My point is, there were successes in Symbian phones. Nokia should find out why it was successful, and at the same time, learned from the mistakes they made. N8 is direction I really likes. It is, in my opinion, unfortunately, Nokia decided to throw all these away. What about MeeGo? Well, to me it is not a proven platform as Symbian. I was looking forward to try out MeeGo phones, once it ready, but I guess this won’t be happening now.

Mobile phones has evolved from a pure communicating device on the move, to a social network device hub. It is true, we are in a multiple platforms or ecosystems, but if we view from a higher level, all these ecosystems are mainly develop around a social network device hub. This mean, instead of just making phone calls and texting short messages, we are using it more for social networking among friends and strangers. We are now using our phones to share info, pictures, videos and files. We use it to surf net, gossips among friends, give comments on current affairs and play network games. A friend once told me, it is more trendy to add a friend inside Facebook than to ask for contact number. Nokia made phones with a lot of features, but those features did not enhance the social hubbing experience, if we compare with its competitors. A few years of lagging behind competitors caused Nokia to lose a whole generation of users.

Mobile phones are getting more powerful and have more resources. There maybe a future where our phone would replace our desktop and laptop, and starts new generation PC experience. This won’t happen solely on a single ecosystem or platform. It will be a world of multiple platforms and power by unify backend services. Hence, depending entirely on a single platform, may not be a good strategy for the future.

If we look at other phone makers, what they have shown us, it is possible to support multiple platforms and continue with their own in house platform. For example, Samsung has phones power by Android and WP7, it also has its own phone power by Samsung Wave, Bada OS platform. Samsung are not just surviving from it, they are profiting from such strategy.

Nokia is the only major phone makers that (besides Apple and RIM) choose to stay their own, and I believe, this is a mistake. Their market share is shrinking, so they should not continue to behave like a monolithic company. They should branch out and expand to other platforms. The objective is not to be dominating, but to ride the wave and brings in the necessary profits, and increase its visibility among mobile phone users. This will help them to gain more time to build up and improve Symbian or complete MeeGo. Otherwise, If one of the platforms they enter prove to be a real success, they would be in a position to let go old or legacy Symbian systems, follow by an orderly migration to that platform.

The last thing they should be doing now, is to shrink their market share more by announcing the abandonment of their current platform. Who in their right mind would want to buy a Nokia’s Symbian phone, if they know, they are buying a “transition” phone? I can’t imagine how the existing Symbian developers would be feeling right now and would they be willing to jump into WP7 development? This move would simply give its competitors more opportunities to capture or win over existing or potential Nokia users, as it would take times for Nokia to start selling phones base on WP7.

Nokia should have kept its exiting core product and continue to improve it, while at the same time join in the development of both WP7 and Android. Nokia was in a crossroad. They could have chosen a strategy that has lower risk and safer bet, instead, they have chosen a path that be more turbulent and higher risk. It is unbelievable that a company is willing to dump their existing and working product, and start from scratch. They had chosen to abandon previously acquired and core expertise, and embrace into something that is alien to the organisation. Such move is risky, if the migration or the transition fails there would be no fall back to their old (and working) product to survive. Such move would also alienate all existing alliances that it made all these years. It is again unbelievable, a product based company would want to entirely relies their core product to an external party. This would make this company entirely at the mercy of that external party. If the business relationship turn soar, it would have direct impact of its core business.

Common sense tell us, don’t place all your eggs into one basket. A successful strategy always has a plan B. There is no plan B here. This is not a good sign.

End note: I am now using Android phones – To cut the story short, my last Symbian phone was Nokia N97, and it was very disappointing to me. A friend introduce me to Android, and after playing a few Android phones, I ordered Nexus One and not long later, I bought Samsung Galaxy S. To be honest, it is quite fun to play Android phones. I may write an article about my Android experience.

The stats helper monkeys at WordPress.com mulled over how this blog did in 2010, and here’s a high level summary of its overall blog health:

The Blog-Health-o-Meter™ reads This blog is doing awesome!.

Crunchy numbers

A Boeing 747-400 passenger jet can hold 416 passengers. This blog was viewed about 8,900 times in 2010. That’s about 21 full 747s.

In 2010, there was 1 new post, growing the total archive of this blog to 41 posts.

The busiest day of the year was January 4th with 62 views. The most popular post that day was IDE vs SCSI Emulation of VMware in Linux.

Where did they come from?

The top referring sites in 2010 were wiki.mhcsoftware.de, wiki.debian.org, facebook.com, vmware-forum.de, and communities.vmware.com.

Some visitors came searching, mostly for mptscsih: ioc0: attempting task abort!, nokia e71 linux, mptscsih: ioc0: task abort: success, mptscsi: ioc0: attempting task abort!, and vmware software raid.

Attractions in 2010

These are the posts and pages that got the most views in 2010.

IDE vs SCSI Emulation of VMware in Linux January 2008
15 comments

Linux Software Raid + VMware February 2008
11 comments

I got myself a Nokia E71 September 2008
12 comments

VMware Server 1.0.6 and Linux kernel 2.6.26.x August 2008
10 comments

VMware Server 1.0.5 and Kernel 2.6.25 April 2008
42 comments

Until I need to install Ubuntu into this laptop.

Below is the hardware specification of Ideapad U460:

• CPU: Intel Core i5-450M Processor ( 2.40GHz 1066MHz 3MB )
• Memory: 4GB PC3-8500 DDR3 SDRAM 1066MHz
• Graphic: NVIDIA GeForce 305M, Intel Graphics Media Accelerator HM55 HD
• Sound: Intel Corporation 5 Series/3400 Series Chipset High Definition Audio, nVidia Corporation High Definition Audio Controller
• Display: 14.0-inch HD LED Glare 1366×768
• Hard Disk: 500GB 5400RPM (Western Digital)
• Webcamera: Yes
• Wireles: Intel Wireless Wi-Fi Link 1000
• Bluetooth: Bluetooth Version 2.1 + EDR
• Input/Output Port: 2 x USB, 1 x eSATA/USB, 1 x VGA, 1 x HDMI, 1 x LAN, 1 x Ethernet, 1 x Mic-In, 1 x Headphone
• Expansion Slots: 5-in-1 Card Reader
• Battery: 8 Cell Lithium-Ion Battery

Downloading the CD installer from Ubuntu is easy, and is very fast if done it via bitTorrent network. Formatting and installing of Ubuntu to the laptop is very very easy. Everything seems to work fine straight from default installation. The problem starts to appear when I attempt to setup the graphic and sound of the laptop.

Basically, 2 problems:

• 1) The graphic would go blank screen after enabling the proprietary NVIDIA graphic driver.
• 2) No sound in the headphone audio out.

Solution:

• 1) Ubuntu would correctly detect and install the proprietary NVIDIA graphic driver, but upon reboot, the system would go into blank screen. The solution to solve this problem is boot into bios (press F2 while system boot up), under: “Configuration” -> “Graphic Device”, select “Discrete Graphic” instead of “Switchable Graphics”.
• 2) Just install the latest ALSA driver version 1.0.23. Follow the guide found here: Upgrade Alsa (1.0.23) on Ubuntu Lucid Lynx 10.04

Things I did not try:

• 1) the finger print login. Not important to me, I would rather remember password.
• 2) multi-touch touch pad. Why on earth I would need a multi-touch when I have keyboard and mouse/mousepad?
• 3) HDMI video out.

Note:

• There are complains found over the internet about screen brightness problem, which I did not encounter. I suspect, the update and fixes download from Ubuntu after the installation may have resolved the issue.

So far, the system is very stable, no unusual reboot or hardware incompatible issue.

Nokia is broadening its legal fight with Apple , saying almost all of the company’s products violate its patents, not just the iPhone.

Somehow, I feel, Nokia is in a desperate situation. Suing/throwing whatever they can find to stop the rise of Apple into the smart phone market. So basically, this is a case of, if you can’t win them by making better smart phone, sue them for stupid patent violation.