AT&T Connect to Cell System Review

This is a post written by me on behalf of Advanced American Telephones. All opinions are 100% mine.My wife and I moved into a new townhouse a few months ago and our current cell phone provider (T-Mobile) does not get the best service in our new home. We have found a few spots in the house that get reception, but the rest of it is a giant dead zone. The basement is absolutely out of the question for reception, which I believe is likely an issue...

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eAndora - Pandora Internet Radio Client - 1.0 Release

At the start of this year I posted about eAndora, a Pandora Internet Radio client I was working on that is written in Python and Elementary. Today I'm happy to announce that eAndora is finally feature complete enough for me to stamp something as a "1.0" release.You will always be able to find the latest eAndora source release on source forge here. If developmental code is more your preference you can always find my latest work on github here.I've...

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HOWTO: Watch Netflix on Bodhi Linux

Not being able to utilize the Netflix video streaming service has been an issue on the Linux desktop for the past few years. This is due to the fact that Netflix utilizes Microsoft's Silverlight technology for video playback.For the last few months though we have been able to watch Netflix in our native browsers on Linux using a Wine pluggin wrapper called Pipelight. Today I would like to walk you through the short process of using Pipelight...

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HOWTO: Test E18, EFL 1.8.0, and Terminology 0.4.0 on Bodhi Linux

As of this past weekend the testing builds of the Enlightenment window manager DR18 (E18 for short) are in the Bodhi Linux testing repository. The following are the steps you need to take if you would like to install and help test the future of the Enlightenment desktop on your Bodhi Linux install.Step 1 - Add the testing RepositoryFirst we need to add the testing repository to our software sources. Open our sources.list with sudo using the following command:gksudo leafpad /etc/apt/sources.listTowards the bottom of the file you will find a line...

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Bodhi Linux 2.4.0 Released

It has been close to six months since our last Bodhi Linux release - far too long! This is just our normal update release - meaning if you are already a Bodhi user and have been running your system updates then you already have all these additions running on your system!To cut right to the chase - you can find direct downloads of the ISO images on Source Forge here. You can obtain torrent downloads for the ISO images later today.Before I talk about...

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Python - Sorting Lists inside of Lists

In some recent python code I was playing with I had the need to sort a bunch of lists based on elements within their elements. Thankfully python's built in sort function is plenty powerful and allows us to do this in a fairly easy manner. So for example if we have a list all of whose elements are also lists: mylist = [["derp", 1, 7], ["bleh", 2, 0], ["merp", 0, 3]]By default when we call the sort function on this list it will sort the sublists based on their first element in lexicographic order. For example: mylist.sort()print mylist[['bleh',...

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Dated Hardware, Waiting for Hardware and the Nokia N900 in 2013

The Nokia N900 was released in November of 2009 - three and a half years ago. When I bought my first N900 in January of 2010 it was a huge upgrade for me in terms of both speed and software freedom (coming from a Blackberry). The idea of having a computer - a true computer - that was also a phone was amazing. The same device I used to send text messages, I also installed applications on using apt-get. True multitasking - my applications stayed open until I closed them, not until the operating system decided it wanted to kill them. I didn't...

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Samsung ARM Chromebook Review

The Samsung ARM Chromebook is one of a few ARM devices that I prepare Bodhi Linux images for. As such I've owned the hardware for almost six months now and during this time I've used it a fair amount. The goal of this post is to provide a comprehensive review of the product to see if it is something that could be useful to you.Cost - Lets start with one of the first draws - the price point. The Chromebook comes in at under 300 USD....

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Bodhi Linux 2.3.0 Released

After almost exactly three months since our Bodhi 2.2.0 release the Bodhi team and I are happy to announce the next update release for our 2.x.y series - Bodhi Linux 2.3.0. Again because this is a minor update release people who are already using our 2.x.y branch can simply upgrade to this release via their package manager. Something else I would like to mention is that next month our 1.x.y series release will be reaching its end of life next...

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Mir, Wayland and the Future of Bodhi Linux

Things have been a little quiet around my blog of the late. At the beginning of last month I started a full time position doing some IT related tasks for a major insurance company where I live in central IL. Between the new job, playing Magic, spending time keeping Bodhi things up to date, and preparing to get married in less than a month - I haven’t had time to post as much as I’d like to on here.Today I would like to take a moment to discuss a topic that has received much attention on Linux blogs/news sites in recent weeks – Ubuntu’s concept...

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A Fat Stack of Bodhi Linux

When I first started preparing Bodhi ISO images almost two and a half years ago I set out with the goal of providing a clutter free operating system powered by the latest Enlightenment desktop. We call what we do "minimalist" meaning it doesn't come with a whole lot by default. This ideology isn't for everyone, though. Thankfully, the power of choice is something that greatly empowers free software development.Today, I would like...

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Comparison of Linux Desktops OpenGL Performance

With Steam officially being released for Linux I took some time out this evening to run a few benchmarks on my Ubuntu 12.04 based Bodhi system to see how a few of the different modern Linux desktops compare in terms of OpenGL performance with the source engine. Please do not take my numbers to be anything super scientific or precise. I simply recorded a short demo using Team Fortress 2, loaded TF2 from Steam under each of the Linux desktops...

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Tutorial 2: ELM Images, File Selector and Popups

This is the second post in my series on developing GUI applications in Elementary using Python. Today we are going to continue building on the Hello Elementary example I started in the first tutorial. In today's post I will only be covering the code that is different from our previous examples, so if you haven't looked that one over yet please take a moment to do so now.You can find the full source code for all of today's examples here.Example...

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New E17 Stable Snapshot and the First of E18

You read that title right folks. The first showing of Enlightenment DR18 (or E18 for short) has become a reality. Sure, it is nowhere near what the final product is going to look like - but it is a start. If you would like to follow the life cycle of E18 as it develops there is a new release manager blog that can be found here.For those who like to stay on the more "stable" side of things also new today is a bug fix snapshot for the E17 stable release...

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Tutorial 1: Hello Elementary

This post is the first in a series I am going to be publishing about using elementary and python to develop applications. The source code for all of the examples I am providing can be found in a GitHub repository here. Looking to get help with development? - We have started a programming focused section of the Bodhi Linux forums here. Other great resources for getting help are the Enlightenment devel mailing list as well as #e on freenode IRC. I've...

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Bodhi on MK802 and other ARM Updates

MK802:Today I am happy to announce our first public Bodhi images for the MK802 Android stick:This image comes with a 3.0 kernel and it has OpenGL support for MK802 GPU enabled out of the box. You can find a download link for the MK802 on the ARMHF page of the Bodhi website. The default user name is armhf and the password is bodhilinux. This default user has sudo enabled for installing software and ssh is on by default.To use this release...

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Some Yummy Elementary Applications

For those who aren't aware Elementary is the top level building block for the Enlightenment Foundation Libraries (EFL). The EFLs reached their first stable release almost a year ago, but aside from E17 there haven't been very many applications written using these libraries to date. Today I would like to highlight a few applications that are being developed using Python and Elementary that have reached a usable state.Epour - Torrent Client:Epour...

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Nexus 7 jams with Bodhi Linux

After a few weeks of working on other things I've gotten back around to doing some more work on our Bodhi for Nexus 7 image. I've just uploaded a new Bodhi rootfs.img (which can be gotten from our source forge page here). This image brings a few improvements, most notably:Menu/Buttons have been made slightly larger to make things more "finger friendly"Suspend now works and pressing the "power" button on the device now suspends Bodhi by defaultAudio...

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Bodhi Linux 2.2.0 Released

The Bodhi Team and I are very happy to present to you our 2.2.0 release - the first Bodhi images to feature the stable E17 desktop. As with all minor Bodhi release existing users can simply upgrade their existing installs of Bodhi 2.x.y This release is exciting for a number of reasons. To start with, we are introducing a few new things with this update release.With this release, we will now be maintaining two 32bit install discs: One that is PAE...

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Bodhi is ARMing up for a new Year

The mainline Bodhi desktop repositories recently received the gift of stable E17 packages and this same present isn't far off for our ARMHF branch. In the mean time however I have prepared and shared new ARMHF images for the Raspberry PI and Samsung Chromebook.For the Raspberry PI image, in addition to sporting the shiny new E17 packages - it now comes with the much requested WICD network manager by default. This means those of you...

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Introducing eAndora - Pandora Client

A good deal of the work I do with the Bodhi project is packaging software/releases and managing things. One of my goals for this new year is to spend some time doing some actual development work with the Enlightenment Foundation Libraries and, more specifically, Elementary. I have a good bit of background with python programming, so my first leap into this field is writing a few small GUI applications in python and elementary.I finally have...

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