Cool! Zonbu & the Firefox Showcase Plug-in

I discovered this by accident.

If you have multiple tabs open in Firefox, hit the F12 key and you will see a “Showcase” view that shows you large thumbnails of all the open windows…

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CD/DVD Burner not appearing in Xfburn

I have had my machine on for a day or so and I decided to download the latest Damn Small Linux RC ISO and try it out on the Zonbu hardware.

I connected the Zonbu external USB CD/DVD drive, and the blank CD icon appeared on the desktop.

I launched the CD/DVD burning application, selected the ISO source file and went to burn it when I noticed there was no “device” appearing in the target drop-down…

Pout for me, Baby!

Our friend Dave J is quite a good photographer.

He spent a few hours with his beautiful new Zonbu yelling “Pout for me, baby! Pout for me!” (At least I think that’s what he said, my Dutch is kind of rusty…)

The results of his work can be seen on flickr.

-Mr. Zonbu

Zonbu Storage Update & Response To Zonbu questions

I wrote yesterday about my experience with the Zonbu S3 online storage model.

A member of the Zonbu team read the post and provided a lengthy response, asking a number of questions to help determine if there is an issue.

I’m going to formally respond here so the relevant items are outlined and updated…

Of mice and men; Zonbu atop my Desktop

I successfully had my Zonbu on for 14 hours today.

According to my Kill-a-watt as I was shutting down, 14 wall clock hours generated .16 KWH of electricity use.

However, the USB media card reader problem I mentioned in another post has forced me in to Windows.

That’s ok, it means you get a little bit of eye candy.

And what Internet user doesn’t like eye candy?

Another MIME-type observation: .sh files

Just a quick one for the MIME-type file.

I clicked on a shell script, in this case on http://oss.zonbu.com/ and instead of offering to open it in the text editor, it suggested the appropriate application was `less`, the command line utility for “paging” text. (If you don’t know it, it’s a cousin of “more”).

I’m thinking that the included ‘notepad’ application is probaby more appropriate.

-Mr. Zonbu

Musings after 8 hours of continuous use

[EDIT: If you’re interested in this post, you probably want to go back and read my initial post after using the desktop in my simulator as well.]

I happened to be in a terminal window recently so I grabbed a quick screen shot when I realized I’d been using the machine for almost 8 hours straight.

(By the way, PCoR stands for “PC on Rails”, I assume an early name for the project)

So what do I think after 8 hours without any material problems?

Google Maps on the Zonbu

I had a request to check the performance of Google Maps on the Zonbu.

I’m not an expert in Google Maps, so I did a few look-ups, navigated around, turned on and off various markers and then played with some of the fancier options…

System monitors not displaying in color

I swear, I never worked formally in a QA department.

I’m not trying to be picky.

I’m not hunting for problems, only making observations as I go about day-to-day life with my Zonbu.

I found another strange bug.

I don’t know if this a version issue (as I’m now on 5.789 and I started out on 5.783) but I have lost the color coding on the CPU/Mem/Swap monitors on my panel. CPU should be blue, Mem green and Swap yellow. As you can see below, they have all decided to be blue.

I’ve mentioned before that the stock XFCE audio mixer needs improvement as well.

In addition to being blue, like the CPU monitor (assuming the other problem is fixed) it also -looks- like a monitor. It really needs a slider and that big speaker icon could probably be shrunken and integrated with the slider like it is in windows.

Can someone else check and see if their monitors show up in color?

-Mr. Zonbu

“I don’t have installed bug buddy.”

I just had a Borat moment.

I was learning about some of the features of the screenshot tool, when the tool itself crashed on me.

The error message, which sports broken english, told me that the application had crashed and that the Gnome error reporting tool “bug-buddy” is not installed.

This strikes me as something that perhaps could/should be installed on the Zonbu?

As the Zonbu depends on the continued development and refinement of the applications in its stack, I would think sending feedback to the original developers of applications, when they crash, is probably a good idea.

-Mr. Zonbu