In the tutorials to install Kubuntu on a Macbook Air we created what are known as chroot environments. As you will soon discover chroot environments can be used for more than fixing the grub. What is a chroot environment? The root directory of your system is the top directory. On Linux the directory is self-explanatorily set to / creating a chroot environment is merely the act of changing the apparent root directory of a process, hence Change root. This creates a sandboxed environment, your chroot session can’t access your regular root directory and therefore it can’t access your home folder either. To… Continue Reading

Let me start the same way I started the last article, by stating I support many of Google’s efforts, it has pushed open source into the consumer space in many ways. Maybe you don’t think competition to Android from close source alternatives such as Windows Phone or iOS is healthy. But be careful: anti-competitive behaviour also keeps other open source projects out. Also make no mistake about Android: The base system is open source, the ecosystem is completely closed. If the choice is between an Android monopoly, an Apple monopoly or a Microsoft monopoly, probably all of us reading this would… Continue Reading

Let me start by saying I support many of Google’s efforts, it has pushed open source into the consumer space in many ways. But that shouldn’t fool you, we need market competition even in markets now dominated by open source software. Maybe you don’t think competition from Microsoft or Apple or Amazon is healthy if it reduces the share of open source products in a given market, but what about the inability of other open source projects to enter the picture? Anti-competitive behaviour not only keeps closed sourced alternatives out, it keeps open source alternatives out of the equation just… Continue Reading

A bit of bakground Let’s turn back the clock to simpler times, when there were laptops and BlackBerries, most PC OEMs were making a ton of money from their Netbook division and many rumours of an impeding Netbook from Apple were at the order of the day. Apple shut down every rumor at the time, as Steve Jobs once said that he didn’t know how to build a computer for less than $1,000 that didn’t suck. The first Macbook Air was released on January 2008: Instead of introducing its own Netbook Apple look the other way and made an incredibly expensive… Continue Reading

At the end of our last tutorial I recommended readers to use rEFIt and avoid more complex solutions, but I offered to write another how to if any reader was interested on using Kubuntu without rEFIt. Reader “Kashi” asked for a way to do so, the drawback of having to press Alt every time he wants to boot into Linux was not a problem: He’s installing Linux to an external hard drive (It’s worth noting that this guide should work equally well if you want to install Kubuntu into an internal partition.). So let’s get to it. Setting up the partitions Last… Continue Reading

Apple’s ubiquitous Macbook Air line has become synonymous with lightweight, portable and yet relatively powerful computer, the latest version is Apple’s attempt at making it a synonym of all day battery life. Thanks to Intel’s amazing new Haswell architecture achieving over 9 hours of battery life is feasible on laptops. The 11.6″ Macbook Air is in my opinion a very interesting proposition: Is not a lot bigger than an iPad, but is way more functional, has a proper keyboard, and the battery life is actually better than it is on the tablets if you limit yourself to iPad-like tasks. The… Continue Reading

The new version of Kubuntu has arrived right on time. Since is probably the most popular distribution out there after Ubuntu, it’s the vehicle in which most newcomers get to experience KDE. Unlike some previous releases 13.10 doesn’t make many user facing changes, most of them are pretty small, yet is always wise to remember that tiny changes add up over time. Whats’ new? Revamped Network Manager This is perhaps the first thing users upgrading from Kubuntu 13.04 will notice. The old interface was a bit clunky, it showed information most users don’t care for and wasted quite a bit of… Continue Reading

Installing Linux on most Windows PCs is a fairly straightforward process, you just insert the disk or plug in the USB stick and you follow the on-screen instructions, on Macs things are a little bit more complicated. The reason is most PC models from most manufacturers use BIOS, machines using UEFI are more and more common everyday, but for the most part they don’t pose too much of a hassle, things are a little different with Apple and is very custom EFI that doesn’t comply with the official specification. Installing versions of any distribution prior to Linux 3.11 will result… Continue Reading