Tom Russell's Blog (6)

In my volunteer work refurbishing older computers with Ubuntu for the Digital Divide, clients often have a printer that someone gave them. As long as the printer works, clients want to save the expense of $50 to purchase a new one, so I get the job of seeing if I can make them work on Ubuntu. In this case, the client had a Brother MFC-3420C Multi Function Printer and was to far away for a visit, so the job entailed sending them detailed newbie instructions. A visit to the Brother site gave me s… Continue

Depending of the feedback, I shall add more chapters to this blog subject.

So if you want more, you have to say so.

The Tools
As a Linux Power User, I know how to use the shell and its tools to perform just about any task I can think of, and when I can't find a shell tool to do what I want, I can always google an appli

… Continue

This is for anyone who is not a programmer and wants to develop their own stuff on Ubuntu that works on any platform. Programmers and professional scripters can use it too, but I'm for user power.

Any professional who tries this application will see how easy it is for ordinary users to at least prototype their own ideas to see if they will work, saving the professional a lot of time and energy and give the user a lot of needed input into the solution.

There is a new beta of Run… Continue

A Bit Of History
When I and my fellow clerks started using UNIX as a desktop system back in the early 80s, the terminal interface was the norm and the "learn" program, the System 3 user documentation, and a permuted index of shell commands was our introduction to using it as an application. Vi was first, basic shell second, the index third, either awk or troff or refer was next depending on our focus, then some advanced shell scripting and vi use.

During this learning of the basic… Continue

A friend asked me why I used Ubuntu and not windows. This was my answer.
I use Ubuntu for several things.
As a secure desktop for operations like word processing, browsing, and email.
As a development environment for creating programs using Runtime Revolution for the GUI front end and the shell tools for the information processing bits. Definitely something I can't do on Windows.
As a VirtualBox host for other distros I want to look at.
To build a self contained and portable… Continue

Some friends and I set up an organization to refurbish older computers, that are donated to us when companies upgrade, with Linux, so we can give them away to the needy in our area.

We are quite a small organization with usually 2 to 6 volunteer workers who come to a refurbishing workshop once a fortnight, but we manage to donate about 500 systems a year.

We have a sponsor not for profit organization who let us use some of their space and resources for a workshop and storage. W… Continue