Last week in Serbia was marked by the green week initiative (SR), and this one is marked by freedom, it’s Creative Commons’ 6th birthday. This gave me an idea for this post. Use Linux to go green.

And how will Linux help you? By cutting your energy bills and lowering your e-waste production.

Few tests concluded that both Linux desktops and servers consume less power than Windows-powered machines.

Desktops: “When the Lenovo ThinkPad T60 was idling with Ubuntu 8.04 LTS “Hardy Heron” it had quite an advantage over Windows Vista Ultimate. Ubuntu was consuming five less Watts, which equates to more than 10% less power, over Microsoft Windows Vista. In our first server power consumption test, Vista Ultimate had consumed less power but it was just two Watts and both of these systems were consuming in excess of 170 Watts.”

Servers: “In most cases when sitting idle, Windows Server 2008 drew slightly more power than either Linux did on the same server. The exception was when Windows Server 2008 was running in power savings mode on the Dell server, where it drew on average 3% less power.”

Although, these results may be dependant on the actual test hardware, still it’s a good indication. Check out Intel’s LessWatts initiative, which aims to help you to lower your computer’s energy consumption if you use Linux. Also, there are tools that will help you make your Linux-powered computer consume less energy.

Another way it can help is by reducing your e-waste production. UK government conducted a study which showed that the typical hardware refresh period for Linux systems was 6-8 years, while Windows systems’ hardware refresh period was 3-4 years. Why is that? Consider that minimum requirements for Ubuntu, which is a fairly modern Linux distribution, are 64 MB of RAM, 4GB of HDD space and 300 MHz x86 processor. That configuration wouldn’t be able to run all the nice graphic effects, but you would have a ready-to-use system. For nice graphic effects, consider installing it on at least 700 MHz CPU with 256 or 384 MB of RAM. And there are also distributions which can work on even older configurations, like DSL or Puppy Linux. If you have an old computer which you don’t use, install one of those on it. It will serve nicely to surf the Internet, or to work on your documents.

So, go ahead and try it, if you’re not using it already. Go green .

The article in IT PRO states that Microsoft will be implementing ODF (OpenDocument format) support in its Office suite:

Microsoft has no date for implementing OOXML on its own platform, but has agreed to implement the rival ODF format on Microsoft Office. Microsoft has given its blessings to ODF by joining the OASIS committees, and to cap it all, a senior Microsoft spokesman has conceded that “ODF has clearly won”.

Microsoft has even volunteered to opt into the ongoing ODF development process which, not without reason, has aroused the suspicions of ODF proponents.

I’m a bit suspicious of Microsoft’s move and if Microsoft has some hidden intentions. But I think it won’t be able to “close” ODF .

Here’s a blog post on MSDN which says ODF will be supported in MS Office 2007 Service Pack 2.

And why is this important to me? Most of my friends and professors still use MS Office. I use OpenOffice.org. If I need to send them a document (which needs to be editable, so PDF is not an option), I could do “Here’s the document in ODT (OpenDocument text), play with it”, but that wouldn’t be very nice. I don’t want to force anybody to use something they don’t wish to. So, I convert it to DOC, and then send it to them. But I don’t want to use DOC. And it seems like I’m not going to as soon as MS implements this ODF support. Let’s hope it will release plug-ins for previous MS Offices, too… or that people will switch to OpenOffice.org .

In the end, I think this is a good thing for ODF. Whether we like it or not, MS Office has the biggest market share, and by this more people will be able to use ODF for their documents.

Flock 1.0 is out. For those who haven’t heard about it, it is “a social web browser” that integrates services from the social sites, making them easier to use. So far, it is going well. Last time I checked it out it was in some alpha or beta phase. Also, I wasn’t a big user of social sites, so it was not attractive to me. This morning I read on TechCrunch that Flock 1.0 is out, so I decided to give it a try. Here’s my report .

Right after the first start it asked me if I want it to import bookmarks, passwords and settings from Firefox. It went fine – just select what you want to import and move on.

You are greeted with My World – a portal which presents your Favorite Pages, Feeds and Media. It is nice and clean, but I think there are some other sites that gives much better experience. In my opinion, My World is not planned as a big feature in Flock. Ok, let’s move on…

I like how they put the buttons for sidebars next to the Bookmarks toolbar. And they don’t take up much space, which is a plus. The People sidebar will give you updates from your accounts: Twitter, Facebook… The Media bar is a nice feature. You can search and then view the results from various media sites (obviously) inside the bar. I also like the Favorites bar. You can choose where you want to save your bookmarks – on your computer, online favorites site, or both. The thing that I like the most is the blog writer. Just start it, setup your account and write a post. There are links all around Flock that say “Blog this”, so it is easy to blog about something immediately. I still haven’t checked out the Web clipboard, so I don’t know how useful is it.

If you want to use Flock to its max, you should allow it to remember your accounts. It will do that automatically when you log in on those sites. Though, I have encountered one problem – it wasn’t able to remember my WordPress account. This is a known bug and there is a workaround: launch blog writer, skip the setup part and then do it manually (Edit -> Configure blog accounts).

So far, I have to say that I like it. I would like to see support for Google’s Picasa and Last.fm. Also, it would be nice if the Flock dev team could support upload and management of files to WordPress accounts.
In conclusion: if you are a social sites user, you will like it. Otherwise, I think that you won’t find too much use for its features.

*update* Great… I have just found out that it didn’t set the tags for this post, even though I wrote them.
*update#2* Oh, it did set the tags, but not the WordPress’.

*update after few days* Well, I have looked a bit and found out that everything I needed from Flock is already there for Firefox. The only thing that is missing is the Media bar.

Blogged with Flock

Tags: flock, internet, social, browser, software, review

I don’t know how and why I got the idea to do this little test, but I got it. Oh, I was bored at the moment, I guess that’s it . So, here’s what I did:

• get a company/product name
• check if there’s a <name>sucks.com site

Among Windows’, Mac’s, Red Hat’s and other *sucks.com sites, I tried what happens in case of Ubuntu and Canonical.

• canonicalsucks.com leads to Ubuntu’s page.

• ubuntusucks.com takes you to Launchpad’s bug page for Ubuntu.

I was most surprised by the last one. See… At Ubuntu, they care for their users :sweetface:.