Livestation – Video Streaming for Mac, Windows and Linux

I’ve got another application screencast for you this weekend.  This time I talk about a handy little video-streaming program called Livestation.  It lets you get news (and other TV channels from around the world) delivered right to your desktop.  Thanks for watching, as always. =)

Dropbox : The Video

I wrote a post some time ago about Dropbox.  It’s an awesome online storage solution for backup, syncing and sharing your files.  Despite having written about it I was still inclined to do a video showing how the whole thing works, so that’s exactly what I did.  I even compared it to Live Mesh a bit so that’s a bit of a bonus.  Thanks for watching!

Dropbox

Now Playing:
The Tossers – The Sheep In The Boots
Saints Row 2, Resistance 2 (multiplayer beta)

Asus breaks the code

Lately there’s been a lot of talk about Asus’ ultra-small laptop called the Eee PC.  Eee stands for Easy to learn, Easy to work, Easy to play.  I think it should have a fourth E which would stand for Easy to lose because the thing is tiny but that’s beside the point.  It’s not exactly a powerhouse of a machine but the Eee PC is a great business portable that lets you do some basic things like word processing, internet browsing, and make Skype calls.  This is all done from a homebrew of the Xandros linux distribution, but drivers for Windows XP are included (so you can install XP on it).  The best part about it is that it’s only $400, which shows that these UMPC’s are finally getting into a reasonable price range.  I think paying $2,000 for a limited-function machine that you’ll use sparingly isn’t a great investment, but if the prices continue to drop these things could catch on quick.  The Eee PC has a 7" display, a 900mhz processor, 512 megabytes of ram and a 4 gigabyte flash drive.  These specs seem pretty miniscule but remember this is not a machine you’re going to be doing any serious gaming or development with.  If you want to learn more check the un-boxing video below, I thought it was pretty interesting.

So now that you know all about the Eee PC I must tell you Asus has gotten into trouble because of it.  I said above that the Eee PC runs a distribution of linux similar to Xandros, and if you’re familiar with linux and how it’s developed you know that it’s all open source.  Because of this, developers adhere to a license called the General Public License (GPL) which basically states that the source code for your project must be distributed freely.  Asus must have forgotten about this bit because, though they claim to offer the project’s source code on their website, people are having trouble using it to modify the Eee PC’s operating system.  This has caused some turmoil in the community as everyone’s assuming that the code offered is not really the whole project.   You can bet that Asus will either explain how to circumvent their laptop’s software or just release the full bit of source code fairly soon.

Now Playing:
MC Chris – Check the Ring, Yo
Call of Duty 4, Thief: Deadly Shadows

Gutsy.

I’ve been using Gutsy Gibbon a bit, the newest release of Ubuntu, and I have to say it’s pretty good.  There are a lot of new features some of which are pretty cool and others of which I can’t get to work.  Let’s start with the good things.  First off there’s a new Deskbar app that lets you quickly perform common actions that you use.  For example, say you find yourself constantly launching Firefox to check Gmail.  You can set up a Deskbar action that lets you quickly do this without having to individually launch Firefox and then type in the address.  It can also be used as a desktop search, allowing you to find files on your machine.  If you’ve ever used Quicksilver for OS X then you’ll be pretty comfortable with Deskbar.

There’s also a nice fast-user switching option which lets you get into a different account without having to shut down individual user sessions.  This has been in Windows for a while, starting with XP I think, so I’m glad they finally got that in there.  I’m the only one who uses the machine that I have Ubuntu installed on however, so that isn’t a big deal for me.  Out of all of these new things (I’m sure I’m leaving out a bunch, I haven’t had a whole lot of time with Gutsy yet) the one I was most excited for was the default integration of Compiz.  If you don’t know what Compiz is or what it does, it basically adds a bunch of visual effects to your desktop.  Think Vista Aero Glass only cooler.  This is the one area where Gutsy seems to really have stepped it up – with display improvement and tweaks like the graphical configuration tool – but unfortunately I can’t use any of it.  That is to say I can’t use Compiz.

I run Ubuntu under VM on my macbook and it has never liked Compiz.  Before Gutsy you could install it separately but I could never get it to work right.  Now, with Gutsy, it still doesn’t work.  I’m kind of bummed about it (if anyone has a solution please post a comment),  but I have seen it in action and it’s pretty slick even if it’s a bit buggy.  I’ve been trying to use Ubuntu more and more lately, especially because I need it in a couple of my classes, so apps like these that are somewhat exclusive to Ubuntu really catch my eye.   If only all of my games were supported natively and it ran Visual Studio I might be able to make the complete switch!  I don’t know if that will ever happen though, I sort of like being comfortable with as many platforms as possible.

Currently Listening To: Christy Moore & Shane MacGowan – Spancil Hill
Currently Playing: Project Gotham Racing 4, Orange Box

Three operating systems, one machine.

I’ve been running 3 operating systems on my black Macbook for a while now, (yes, I paid the extra money for a black version of the Macbook) but just recently I installed a 100% working edition of Ubuntu 7.04 Feisty Fawn via virtualization. Before getting this particular version of Ubuntu running I had an older 6.06 Dapper Drake installed via Parallels. It worked well enough but I figured it was just about time to upgrade since a lot of what I wanted to use Ubuntu for was making 6.06 seem very legacy.

Before I get too deep into that though, let me first give a brief explanation about what it means to run a virtual operating system and why it’s useful. OS virtualization is the process of running a complete operating system via software. This means that you can use your current hardware and software setup to support a second OS via emulation. You set up a separate hard drive image and all of your current hardware is taken over by this application to control the separate OS. In effect, it seems just like you installed whatever it is you’re running (in my case Ubuntu linux) directly on the hard drive and are running it natively, when in fact you’re running it on top of another system. This is useful for a few reasons. First, you don’t have to commit an entire machine to just one operating system. It’s great if you just want to try something out and don’t want to monkey around with dual booting. Second, it allows for easy management. For instance, if you were to get a virus on a virtualized version of Windows vista you wouldn’t have to worry about it infecting your system as a whole. All you’d have to do is delete the files that make up the virtual system from your hard drive and start over, simple as that.

So I set out to install Feisty Fawn on my Mac. My initial thought was to just go ahead and use Parallels just as I had for Dapper Drake. I ran into problems during the installation though, a well documented hang when Ubuntu starts to load system devices (the installer gets stuck trying to load the Intel processor ‘piix’ and must abort). I tried everything I could think of to get around this error but eventually I just decided to give in and try a different method.

The next thing I tried was downloading Q Emulator, a free piece of virtualization software for OS X. I hated the UI right off the bat though, and decided to axe that from my machine. Finally, I found a handy application called VirtualBox that runs exactly the same as Parallels and VMware and is also free. I read that a lot of people had success getting Feisty Fawn up and running so I went ahead and gave it a shot. The installation went fine, the only problem was the resolution of my Macbook. Ubuntu’s default resolutions only went as high as 1024×768 but because of the widescreen Macbook monitor (1280×800) I was getting black bars on both the right and left sides of the window when I was running Ubuntu in full-screen mode. This isn’t a huge problem, just an annoyance. I ran into the same problem with Parallels but in order to fix it with VirtualBox there were a few extra steps involved, including installing VirtualBox’s “Guest Applications.” Once I had that installed (as well as my particular resolution added to xorg.conf located in /etc/x11) everything was right as rain.

Now I’m writing this in WriteRoom for OS X while Synaptic is installing some applications in another minimized window for Ubuntu. It’s really cool to have every OS at the tip of your fingers. Though Ubuntu is the only virtual OS I’m running (OS X and Windows XP are both installed physically on the hard drive via bootcamp) it gets a lot of use. It’s really the best candidate for a virtual setup since the resources required to run Ubuntu are relatively low, allowing me to have OS X as well as its apps running at the same time as Ubuntu and its apps run without the system performance suffering. I’d definitely recommend giving OS emulation a try, especially because there are free tools out there like VirtualBox so you don’t have to spend money to test it out.