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Users of Internet Explorer or Maxthon These are the most useless browsers know to man on the internet. Download a GOOD one NOW!
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Debian (Lenny) Linux – Beta2 is now my desktop OS
Well anyone who read my review of Lenny last month will probably have expected this, but I’ve dumped my 64bit installation of Ubuntu Hardy in favor of Debian 5.0 (Lenny). I couldn’t be happier in all honesty, it runs faster (Even though it’s only x86/32 bit as opposed to 64 bit like Ubuntu was), it looks nicer, it does what I tell it to (Sort of) and I feel like a grown up again instead of a newbie using an easy OS. No offense to newbies but you are who Ubuntu is designed for to be fair.
Debian (Lenny) FF3 Installed - Screenshot.
You can see in the screenshot to the right that I’ve managed to install FF3 instead of being forced to use IceWeasle, which I’m sorry I don’t care who you are or how much you tell me it’s the same, it isn’t ok so shutup! lol. Anyway the point being that Lenny does have it’s downfalls when it comes to installing some programs and drivers that are very easy on Ubuntu/Kubuntu Hardy. For example, when you install Kubuntu Hardy and you have an Nvidia card, Ubuntu pops up and says “I see you have an Nvidia card, would you like to install the drivers for it?” You click yes and you’re on your way, with Lenny however you log into your system and there’s no such pop-up, so you say, “Lenny, I have an Nvidia card and I’d like to install it please”, to which Lenny promptly replies, “Well drop to console and work for it bitch!” Obviously you understand Lenny isn’t a real person and it doesn’t actually talk to you in voice by default, but I had to do it that way for the joke to work. 
I’ve installed all my usual programs, like Yakuake (Screenshot below, which also includes my dual screen spanning desktop just for good measure), Filezilla, Thunderbird, aMSN, Opera, Netscape, Flock and a host of other simpler but neccessity applications for me like, Flash player, VLC, MPlayer, Audacity etc.
Lenny Yakuake - Screenshot.
This last few weeks has seen lots of change in the world, our own fair New Zealand has taken a new government, America elected a new saviour, sorry I mean president, I mean, well you get the point, so I decided it was time for the Symsys-Kubuntu-804 machine to become Symsys-Lenny instead. Change is good!
After installing my applications and installing the wonderful “Breathless” Icon theme, I changed a couple of fonts, uninstalled Open Office 2.4 and installed 3.0 from debs I already had, then decided I’d blog about how great it was.
Lenny 'K' Menu - Screenshot
So the long and short of this installation is that Nvidia drivers are not yet very easy to install in Lenny, unless you install them immediately after installing your system, unfortunately if you do that you’ll need to re-install them once you update to the 2.6.26 kernel, which will have been compiled from gcc-4.1 and if you’ve updated your kernel you’ve most likely upgraded gcc to gcc-4.3 or higher and the compilation of the Nvidia Kernel module will fail because of that very fact, so just a quick tip for those others out there googling this problem (And I found a few myself during the process as I had other errors too), make sure to download the absolute latest drivers from the Nvidia site, now you won’t be able to do that easily either, their site is now entirely flash/java and doesn’t tend to work well with Konqueror, Opera, Firefox or Netscape until the Nvidia drivers are actually installed (Dumb right?), anyway, visit http://www.nvidia.com/downloads and you’ll get what you need. Once you’ve got the latest drivers from Nvidias site, drop to console (Closing the GUI all together I mean here not just bring up Konsole or dropping to Ctrl Alt F4) make sure you have the correct linux-sources and build-essential installs, then type apt-get install gcc-4.1 then export CC=”gcc-4.1″ then immediately after that cd /usr/src && sh ./NVIDIA*.run agree to the license, say no to downloading a pre-compiled kernel and say ok (No other option) to compiling a new kernel, hopefully all should be well. Obviously don’t take this as a guide to installing Nvidia drivers by default because you may find that they install just fine for you if you have a newer release of Lenny, or a .deb package to install them with etc.
I might actually write a blog about the nvidia drivers installation with a few hints and tips on troubleshooting as well for those who get lost. Have a look for it in the menu on the right, if you can’t find it in there I haven’t written it yet so just stick a comment below here to give me a jab to do it.
I’m really really really impressed with Lenny and I couldn’t be happier to get rid of Kubuntu 64bit, now that’s something I never thought I’d say, Ubuntu/Kubuntu has always been so easy to install and easy to maintain but lately I’ve just been feeling frustrated, it’s so much harder to do “power user stuff” in Ubuntu now BECAUSE it’s so much easier to do the easy stuff. Now that Debian have given us Lenny with a fantastic installer, a brilliant package of programs out of the box and you still have the genious that is aptitude and synaptic if you want to install it, then I think I can now safely say that Debian is well and truly the Ubuntu for professionals and power users, although some may take offense at that so let’s say Ubuntu is the Debian for newbies, but no wait other people will be offended at that, hmmmmmmmmmm, well I like both, I prefer Debian for my pro stuff and Ubuntu for my clients that aren’t so technically minded, yeah that works .
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Symsys Fleet Car Livery - Front/Side
In line with Symsys’ continually bright and cheerful identity, our vehicles are very distinctive.
If you see one of us driving around I think that you would find us extremely hard to miss. Of course, once you are driving something like this, the days of any ‘fun’ in the car goes, 
but the pride we have in the design and the company we run is reward enough.
The car shown in the images, already stood out but we thought we would go the ‘whole hog’ just like we love to do for our customers.
Symsys Vehicle Livery - Rear/Side
All the design work, mock up vehicle images etc. were done in-house by Symsys, using very high quality digital images along with some intricate vector graphics.
If you are looking for design for Corporate identity, Graphic Design or advertising in any format, or for any purpose, then contact Symsys on 09 813 0043. Find out more about us via our main website www.symsysit.com. We are based in West Auckland NZ but also very accustomed to working remotely on projects to serve you wherever you are.
Hopefully you should see us driving around Auckland and the surrounding areas and like the title of the post says, their’s no mistaking us and hopefully there’s no missing us either.
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PUBLIC NOTICE
In regards to lawful use of registered trademarks.
Relations in regard to our registered trademark ‘Symsys’ with particular reference to ‘Information Technology (IT) Services’.
Trademark SYMbol
Symsys Ltd. is a legitimately registered Company with the NZ Companies Office and has been since 2007.
Our registered trademark ‘Symsys’ is registered with IPONZ (Intellectual property office New Zealand) since January 2008.
This gives Symsys Ltd exclusive rights therein to ‘Symsys’. To para-phrase legislation:
Symsys Ltd. is entitled to prevent all third parties not having our consent from using our trademark in the given course of trade.
In order to help avoid any public confusion, Symsys Ltd. feels a need to point out the following entities:
a) Symsys IT Solutions (2008) Ltd (Registered in March 2008)
b) www.Symsysit.co.nz
They have absolutely no association with Symsys Ltd. and indeed do not have our express permission to use ‘Symsys’ in thier course of trade in New Zealand. They have in fact been asked to cease using our trademark politely without malice or threat due to HOW it has been carried out on and off the www. They did not respond in any way.
It is important to point out here that:
Mr Keiller has and never will be an employee of Symsys Ltd.
A Mr Brett King is the owner and director of Symsys IT Solutions Ltd.
and Mr Ian Keiller claims to be the Director of Symsys IT Solutions Ltd. (and is not)
Mr Ian Keiller has now responded to our sugar-coated polite request to cease using our trademark. Not by contacting us or coming to an agreement, but by breaching our trademark several more times, deliberately breaking fair trade rules and regulations and purchasing three more domains that constitute “domain hi-jacking”.
www.symsys-it.com, www.symsys-it-solutions.co.nz, www.symsys-it-solutions.com
Background Information
Information
With regard to the company name registered in the Companys office database.
Symsys Ltd. proposes that ‘Symsys IT Solutions (2008)’ Ltd. is NOT sufficiently different from (as was then ‘Symsys IT’ Ltd.) via simply tagging on ‘Solutions (2008)’.
The first part ‘Symsys IT’ of Symsys IT Solutions (2008). It was a direct clone of a previously registered and trading company, namely ‘us’. We responded by changing our name ‘Symsys IT’ to straight ‘Symsys’ to help define the differences. At this initial point, Symsys Ltd. has already been caused gross inconvenience and cost, not limited to but including many hours spent internally, re-branding our image.
Legal outline of the operation of trademarks.
Quotation from www.out-law.com:
“The Registered trade mark shall confer on the proprietor exclusive rights therein. The proprietor shall be entitled to prevent all third parties not having his consent from using in the course of trade:
(a) Any sign which is identical with the trade mark in relation to goods or services which are identical with those for which the trade mark is registered;
(b) Any sign where, because of its identity with, or similarity to, the trade mark and the identity or similarity of the goods or services covered by the trade mark and the sign, there exists a likelihood of confusion on the part of the public, which includes the likelihood of association between the sign and the trade mark.”
Symsys Worldwide.
For all those that are savvy with a Google search engine, it is easy to discover that ‘Symsys’ is not a soul term utilized by ourselves and the above mentioned entities.
One of the topmost search results you will find is ‘Symsys.com’ which is a simple yet effective search marketing page that offers a mileage calculation form. They do not offer IT services of any kind, and appear not to be a company and offer no services whatsoever.
In New Zealand, there is also ‘symsys.co.nz’. They were an established company in Albany that appear to have offered exclusively programming services (not general IT) that have changed their name and moved on. Their web address brings up a Windows 2003 server default web server screen, which is most likely residual of that company. They are now Talentzeal Ltd. Dealing in Recruitment Management Systems Software.
There is a German company that offer their own bespoke programming solutions for specific purpose.
There is UK company that have an extremely minimal website presence for bespoke programming services and no other evidence of activity can be found, anywhere.
A Company in Australia literally JUST (October 2008) named a software program ‘SYMSYS’ which is designed to manage health in the workplace. We said hello due to thier vicinity and simply let them know that we are here (and of the others). No problems there at all.
Lastly, there is an educational institution – Stanford University in the USA that has a faculty ‘Symbolic Systems Program’. The use of ‘Symsys’ is a natural phrase for this faculty to coin in order to abbreviate the official term.
This concludes our findings for ‘Symsys’. We have absolutely no objections to these entities using the word Symsys, we do not believe we own the rights to their names, domains or business and we have no intention to begin doing so. They are not trading in our field, or in our geographical location, plus the majority of them were in existence before we were. Also it’s worth pointing out that the American University entity was the inspiration for our company name, which we explain next in ‘So why choose Symsys’
So why choose ‘Symsys’.
For a start, the word itself is an incredibly well balanced combination of lettering to the trained typographical eye. Although we can offer bespoke programming (like some others), this is by far not the core in the range of services that we provide and certainly not exclusively limited to it. As any company grows, the master identity stamp , or ‘umbrella’ normally fades into the background against the products and services that are released. On the one hand, a heavy part of out work load involves creating SYMbols in the form of Graphical ID as part of our branding solutions. On the other hand, a greater part of our services are SYStem maintenance, not to mention a whole barrage of other services including server maintenance and generally ensuring that the operations of our customers business run smoothly and effectively. In the ever growing web industry, it is recognized that many now will not seek a graphic designer for their website and prefer to seek an IT company. Most graphic design is now integrated with and required to work with online media yet most websites also require programming and complicated back end structure. You can either have a fantastically functional core system or website that ‘looks’ grotty, cheap and/or difficult to navigate causing poorer performance or you can seek a company like us that can build functionality AND increase its visual value and efficiency.
When you look at the word ‘symsys’, it actually has no meaning, has no dictionary entry and has no acronym easily pertaining to it, yet implies technology. And so we chose it, after research, having this name being completely available for us to do so.
If you refer to ‘Symsys Worldwide’, you will see that in all fairness, it is not a global issue that caused the need for this notice. It is the direct use of our Trademark, in conjunction with directly advertised services that conflict (even within the company name), AND not only the general geographic region of the world, but in the same very small country, evidence of our own client base being effected also played a large part in the generation of this notice. We see this as a direct infringement and due cause for exception.
Please note that comments are left OPEN on this subject and respectful notice of page presence has been sent to the third parties involved.
Any written / formal comment can be directed at Symsys Ltd. PO Box 15741, New Lynn, Auckland 0640, or faxed to us at request.
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