A good moment for a backup

-

After doing a full backup of my trusty Ubuntu 6.06 system at home I decided to give it a shot to the new Ubuntu 7.04 (aka Feisty Fawn). I just decided not to be on the cutting edge and I did the install only after other users were reporting successful installs. So far I've updated a couple of my systems, the first one, an ASUS pundit worked like a charm and the graphics card was detected ok. The second system, with an ASROCK mobo with an ATI Xpress 200 graphics card was not so lucky and though the install worked I needed to do some black magic to get the graphics working at the right resolution and, more important, to get 3D acceleration.

Why is 3D needed now? Well, it is not really needed but after so many comments about all the "experimental" graphic features nicely included in the last Ubuntu I decided it will be nice to try it out (don't worry I am not posting any video to youtube).

The bottom line is that the new 7.04 feels a better Ubuntu than ever before, with a simple installation even if you are a beginner and the eye candy with transparency, windows that wobble when you move them and the (compiz) rotating cube thing make it funnier too. I particularly like the effect by means of which a window you are dragging to the edge of the current viewport forces the desktop to rotate to the next virtual desktop. It is a cool metaphor to help you organize your desktop windows.

As with 6.06, you can get free Ubuntu 7.04 CD-ROMs delivered to your home (for free). It comes with OpenOffice 2.2, the GIMP and many other programs but, this time playing multimedia files, like mp3 or divx, while not out of the box, will work after you download some additional codecs the first time you try to play that type of files. It is done nice and easy. The other thing I that looked better but I failed to get working at first sight was Flash plug-in (the automated install triggered by my first visit to youtube failed). I needed to use synaptic to install the flashplugin-nonfree package.

My advice is that you should give this new Ubuntu a try (you can use the Live version of the install CD), I like it a lot, and many of the tools I use like Inkscape or Texmacs are now in their latest release in this distro.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

VFD control with Arduino using RS485 link

-
Image
Variable Frequency Drives ( VFD ) allow the control of spindles so speed can accurately be controlled and a detailed acceleration profile for the spindle and reverse rotation can all be handled. In essence a VFD is an three phase inverter for three-phase AC motor. I am using a popular (I mean cheap) Chinese VFD and though the reference manual is not great, I could see there is a built-in RS-485 port. I usually control the start, stop and speed selection using the keyboard on the unit but I thought it will be more useful if I could control everything from the same Arduino is doing our CNC table control. Some cheap RS-485 off eBay and some lines of code later, I can start, stop and change the speed from an Arduino. What a cool thing to have! Some configuration of your VFD are needed before you can use it like that.  You need to set PD163=1 (I am using address 1 in the code). PD=164=1 (for setting serial to 9600bps) and PD165=0 (for using ASCII and 8N1 character format)
Read more

How to get sinusoidal s-curve for a stepper motor

-
Image
After some experimentation, and delving a bit into the math of motion, I realized there can be a significant difference on the motion of a machine by just making small changes. A common and popular approach to smooth one axis of motion is to use a trapezoidal speed pattern, where acceleration and deceleration are uniformly accelerated movements (aka constant acceleration motion) separated by a portion happening at cruising speed. The problem comes with the fact that, while that approach is simple to understand and to code, it does contain sudden changes in the acceleration, that show as spikes on the acceleration derivative, called jerk. These sudden changes in the acceleration translate into undesired vibration in our machines. Most of that can be eliminated by selecting a motion pattern that does not contain sudden changes of acceleration. If we chose a mathematical function for our speed whose second derivative is continuous, then we reduce system vibration quite a lot. One ma
Read more

Importing OpenSCAD designs into Onshape

-
Image
After using Onshape CAD software for a while I am really fond of it. So one natural thing to do, specially once they have released the Instructor's kit is to start using it in the classroom too. But one thing I was not so sure how to do was to use old designs I made using OpenSCAD. It does not mean I am completely quitting using OpenSCAD but suddenly I can see I can do assemblies in Onshape that will look quite nice for showing and documentation purposes if only I could easily import from OpenSCAD. I am glad to report that the route OpenSCAD --> FreeCAD --> Onshape worked brilliantly. Even more when a few tricks were applied. While some people suggest to import CSG files from OpenSCAD to FreeCAD, I have had more success by directly importing SCAD files into FreeCAD. One trick that worked well for me was to get rid of $fn references, so now circles become real circles (or cylinders) in FreeCAD. If a part keeps some $fn references then your cylinders or circles wi
Read more