Posts Filed in the ‘Linux’ Category
Updated: 02 Nov 2009 07:06 am by Ron
Filed: Books & Reading • Geek Stuff • Life in General • Linux
Tagged: books • firefox • Halloween • Linux • Movies • Pat Conroy • soccer • ubuntu
More to come on some of these as we get our lives at least marginally back under control as soccer winds down for the fall…
- We’ve got Halloween pix coming; you’ll want to keep an eye out for those in the next couple days!
- On the Linux front, Ubuntu 9.10 is out as of late last week. I pushed one of my older boxes to it with reasonable success. Not much more there to say other than the startup and shutdown times are impressive, even on old hardware. Brown hasn’t done much for me lately.
- The time change is wreaking havoc on our mornings at this point, particularly with Li.
- The first pre-release of Firefox 3.6 is out, but I haven’t had a chance yet to pull it down and give it a try. At least on the surface, the only interesting aspect is the return of some eye candy regarding switching tabs. Also on the browser front, Google Chrome continue to progress, but the continued absence of the ability to control default font sizes on Mac OS X is mystifying.
- Ian wrapped up his high school soccer career with a trip to the state tournament in Boise in late October. Odd to think that’s over and done with; odder to think that I am going to be saying that more and more over the next few months as he works his way through his senior year.
- Done a bit of reading, although little of it was worth noting aside from “South of Broad” by Pat Conroy. I haven’t read anything by him for several years and this was a great reminder of how much I love his writing.
- On the movie front, go see “500 Days of Summer” if you haven’t yet and can still find it in a theater. Best movie we’ve seen in a very long time.
Updated: 25 Aug 2009 05:20 am by Ron
Filed: Geek Stuff • Linux
Tagged: Linux
On this day in 1991, a student from Finland pushed a post to a newsgroup that would change the face of operating systems. Raise a glass and celebrate Linux’s 18th birthday with me!
Updated: 31 May 2009 06:42 am by Ron
Filed: Geek Stuff • Linux
Tagged: Linux Mint
Linux Mint 7 “Gloria” was released a few days ago, and given what I’d seen about from the comments posted in response to its release candidate the past couple weeks, I was anxious to give it a run. I updated one of my laptops (not the netbook) to it yesterday morning, replacing the Ubuntu 9.04 installation. Being based on Ubuntu, I didn’t expect any problems. The installation went smoothly, as expected, with just one minor hitch: the Mint install image doesn’t seem to include the needed Broadcom driver for the wireless card in this particular laptop so I had to briefly put it on a wired network connection here at home to go grab the needed third party driver. (This is the one significant difference I saw, compared to both previous Mint releases and Ubuntu’s release; given that it wasn’t a big deal to get past, I didn’t do much digging past that. For someone without a wired connection using a similar box, it might be more challenging to get past.)
Mint's default dark GNOME theme with contrasting greens is very attractive, and the most polished Mint to date.
This version continues the Mint team’s obvious emphasis on a polished initial experience with the distro. It is, in my opinion, the most polished of the Mints to date, with a dark GNOME theme and an emphasis on green for highlights, screen background, and icons. It is very attractive, even though I am generally not a big fan of darker themes.
Total time to back stuff up, install, and then get all of the usual stuff installed and configured was less than two hours. That includes the initial installation, along with getting Apache, PHP, MySQL, Eclipse (I went with the Galileo RC1 package this time) along with the AFAE plugin, Songbird, and Railo installed and configured, along with getting WordPress installed locally and running a development version of this blog, and hacking the default GNOME theme to squeeze the scrollbars down a skosh to a more efficient and attractive width.
YMMV but I’m very impressed.
Updated: 25 Oct 2008 08:47 am by Ron
Filed: Geek Stuff • Linux
Tagged: Arch Linux • firefox • gnome • OpenOffice • thunderbird • WordPress
It has been a pretty busy couple of weeks in the land of open source software:
- OpenOffice.org’s new version 3 made it into the regular repositories in Arch Linux last week. One of the aspects of a rolling release distribution like Arch is how quickly stuff like this becomes available particularly in light of the recent announcement by the Ubuntu team that they will stay on version 2.4.1 in their next upcoming release. Both my Arch boxes have been updated, and I’m impressed with the changes and the speed improvements.
- Firefox’s beta 1 of version 3.1 was released up, too, and I’m running it on 3 of my boxes, including my Mac at work. It feels much faster — even without turning on the disabled-by-default new JavaScript engine which is still reportedly pretty buggy — and some of the UI changes are pretty nice.
- Mozilla Messaging release an alpha 3 of the next release of Thunderbird, and I’m running that as my primary mail client on my Mac at work. It has picked up some nice Mac UI changes, provides integration with the Mac address book, and the re-tooled IMAP support is noticably better that the current stable version 2 branch of Thunderbird. And how could you not like a mail client named “Shredder”?
- GNOME’s latest release — version 2.24 — made it into the stable repositories earlier this week, and both of my Arch boxes are now running it. Most of the changes aren’t all that obvious at this point, but it is noticably faster and feels more responsvive. The upgrade was painless (aside from the big download) and seems to have gone flawlessly on both boxes.
- Finally, WordPress released a minor point release to fix a security hole.
Updated: 30 Aug 2008 10:00 am by Ron
Filed: Geek Stuff • Linux
Tagged: Arch Linux
It has been several weeks since I started playing with Arch Linux. I’ve two of my three systems running under this distro and figured it was worth posting at least a short blurb on my impressions and experience…
Both (impressions and experience) have been very positive. I’m running it on two older laptops right now, but have not yet migrated my primary system over yet, and won’t for a bit. The installation experience is very different than Linux Mint (my preferred distro to this point) in several ways: it’s text-based (which in and of itself is not a bad thing, particularly within the context of the Arch philosophy) and because the installation itself really does just install a basic core system, getting to the point where you have a fully-populated desktop environment along with the other needed tools installed, configured, and running takes quite a bit longer. My slow progress really doesn’t have as much to do with the installation process itself as it does with the fact that I am working through it in chunks of about 15-20 minutes each day.
At this point, the two systems in question are probably 90-plus percent “finished” in terms of getting everything I know I need or want for an initial system. Having said that, however, that 90% is a fully functional box with everything I need to access the ‘net, use the system on day-to-day basis to do what I need to do, supports multimedia, deals with removable media (including my camera), and has a working LAMP stack with my blog running locally.
Keeping the system updated and installing additional packages so far has been a non-issue, and I’m impressed with pacman, Arch’s package manager. No complaints or issues there to date. In fact, the only real issue I’ve had at all is an occasional and very intermittent hang on booting at a particular point in the startup process. It’s very intermittent and requires a hard reset, but once past that point in the startup, the system has proven to be rock solid. That particular little nasty is the subject of an on-going thread on the distro’s forums, and others are occasionally seeing it, as well…
Speaking of the forums, the distro’s wiki and forums are definitely two of the distro’s strong points. Both are active, and the documentation on the wiki is excellent both in its coverage and its quality.
The biggest difference for me with this distro is speed. Startup on both of these systems is well under 30 seconds from power on to login under gdm. Shutdown on both is under 10 seconds. What’s the difference? Clearly there are far fewer services running here than on a stock Ubuntu or Mint installation, since the only stuff running is what I’ve installed and configured. It makes me wonder what all that other stuff is doing for me on previous distros because I haven’t missed any of it yet…
In short: so far, so good. At some point, unless I step into a massive hole somewhere along the lines, I will probably move my last (and primary) box over to Arch.
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