Time to upgrade Ubuntu on my home boxes

Today I've decided that the time to upgrade Ubuntu Linux on my home PCs has come. Yesterday I received Ubuntu 7.04 and Kubuntu 7.04 CDs from Canonical.

I have two PCs at home: old AMD K6-2/350 MHz with 40 Gb dying primary hard disk (Windows 2000 is installed on it :)) and 6 Gb secondary drive, where Ubuntu 5.10 was installed, and newer Athlon XP 1800 with Ubuntu 6.10 on it.

It's a pity that you can not use live/install Ubuntu cd for upgrades :(

So I've decided to do dist-upgrade on newer PC and completely reinstall system on older. I've chosen Kubuntu for old box, because it includes Konqueror, which is more lightweight than Firefox.

Several hours ago I've back-upped all important data from my older pc and started installation of Kubuntu. I've already met several problems:

• I need to write acpi=force in the boot options of live-cd, because BIOS was released before the year 2000.


• Installer was unable to format partition into XFS because of some unknown error (possibly connected with dying primary drive), so I had to create partitions by hand using QParted.


• May be I'd better to write hda=noprobe boot option to prevent errors from accessing dying primary drive, but I haven't done it

Now the installation process is 94% complete.


And almost half of required packages have been downloaded on my newer PC through my slow 200 kbit ADSL connection.
So keep on touch with me, I will report the progress and problems!

Update 1:
The installation of Kubuntu is finished, now it is time to test the system and install additional packages.
I plan to install:

• LaTeX


• maxima


• developer's tools


• java


• Mp3 and dvd playback


• Open SSH

Update 2:
Installation of mp3 playback was really easy - I tried to play mp3 file and Amarok asked me to install mp3 support, I answered yes and in couple of minutes it started to play.
There were no problems with OpenSSH server too: sudo apt-get install openssh-server
But Adept apt front-end is really slow :(
Well, I installed almost everything I wanted, only couple of packages left.
And download of packages for upgrade on newer PC has not finished yet.

Update 3(next day):
All updates and installations are finished, and now I'm happy with two up-to-date systems.
Rhythmbox on my newer PC now plays last.fm. I'm also happy with kopete LaTeX plugin

On educational system

I've just read this blog entry about crisis in British higher education, created by lowering of standards and payments and introduction of modularity and lecturers audits.

The author of this article works in area of Computer Science, but the tendency seems to be universal both in UK and US. (You can look, for example, through this post)

So why we in Russia should be interested in problems of far richer countries?
Our educational system is in decline because of enormous and long-lasting lack of money. But modern reformation efforts introduce new dangers.

Today we are accepting participation in so called "Bologna process", which will inject to our education some problems of British system, mentioned in the first article. The most obvious one is modularity, which allows students to choose courses to learn. It leads to lack of interest in harder core courses, and I can feel it myself. Today I have passed in two of four courses which were given in our department (of QFT), and I have no need to pass the tests on other two, which are far harder.

Nevertheless, "Bologna process" is a minor threat comparing with government educational policy.

By the way, our problems will inflict western education too, since it is supported by immigration from our country.

The only hope is academic emigration from China and other developing countries.

Draft of the article

I've written an article on reading on PDA. It gives some ideas how to read books, articles from arxiv and so on.
This is only first draft, so I will be happy to get your opinions and corrections, especially on my poor English.

This articles is intended to an advertisement of my project Fit2PDA :)

Fit2PDA

I've finally chosen the name for my program.
So it is now called Fit2PDA.

I think that the name is apt to the program :)

I've done some additional improvements in GUI, so now you can see (rather accurate:) progress bars during conversion and you can convert not only PDF/PostScript, but also Djvu.

Big number of free scanned ebooks can be found in Kolhoz library and eDonkey2000 p2p-network.

By the way, there are 2 good compatible clients for eDonkey: eMule for Windows and aMule for Linux. So, if you use both operation systems, you can continue your emule downloads in amule. You just need to select the same working directory!

The book "Innovator's Dilemma"

Couple of days ago I've finished the book "Innovator's Dilemma" by Clayton M. Christensen.
I read several times that it is "the best business book ever written" an so on.
Well, I don't know is it true, I haven't read a lot of business books.
The book is really interesting, but the main idea of the book, that there are so called "disruptive technologies", which can't be handled by existing businesses seems rather natural.
Why else new businesses would appear after all?

I was able to download this book for free from Internet shop bizbook.ru, because they give 20 pages preview of the book for free (in very poor quality images).
So I've used number of anonymous proxies and downloaded the whole book.
I had to do it because I was unable to find the book in usual warez sources and p2p networks.
It a pity that I had to do such a thing myself, because it means that we don't have access to all the books worth to read even through pirate's networks.

By the way, I used my program Fit2PDA to convert this book, and it worked perfectly :)

First "public" version of "qtsplitter"

Finally first public alpha is out!
First completely working build for Windows is here
Simply download and extract archive, then run converter3.exe , choose pdf-files to convert, select correct screen width of your PDA and convenient resolution and press on button with red point. Then take a cup of coffee and wait while your papers or books are converted.
You will get iSilo-friendly html files, which could be easily converted to Palm-powered with iSiloX, or viewed with Pocket IE on PocketPC.
So I will be happy with any feedback from you!

Also I will be happy to get help with UI design and Linux package creation.


And the final question: do you think that "FitToPDA" is a good name?