Pick The Best

The latest issue of Linux Format magazine has a very nice article on how to pick the best distro. This is a subject rife with controversy, but they do a very nice job of remaining bias free and objective. By listing a wide variety of user types, you can pick your area and see what they recommend.

I do have a couple of nits to pick with it though:

• While Ubuntu has its strengths (the biggest of which is the vast and active user community), I think its choice of GNOME as its default desktop is a mistake. GNOME is quirky and quite different from Windows and offers up too many gratuitous changes from the "norm" for it to be a newbie friend face. KDE is much more "normal" in that respect.


• I also disagree with the admittedly tepid recommendation to use the 64bit version of a distro. Again, just enough annoyances with not enough payback to discourage a newbie.

That being said, I enjoyed reading it and am itching to try a new distro. Still perfectly happy with my openSUSE, but I have a free 40gb partition just begging for some play time:) I did use their recommendation for Qimo as a "family friendly" distro and installed it on my daughters' computers, as WinXP was behaving very badly. They have really enjoyed the pre-installed games and creativity software. I just wish there was better support for it besides comments on a blog post. And I think it should pre-install Flash support, as that is the other big destination for the girls, Flash web games.

Now maybe try Fedora 10, which was included on a recent Linux Format DVD? Or Mandriva? or....

How to choose the best Linux distro for you | TuxRadar

Yet Another Backup Solution

In these days of US$150 1 terabyte hard drives, there is simply no reason not to have multiple hard drives and implementing a regular backup plan. Of course, I don't have one and feel like I'm walking the high wire without a net. I've installed a couple of GUI rsync frontends, but haven't done anything with them. I even did some work to try and update dar to work, given its orphaned status (although they finally updated it in the openSUSE repositories), but still haven't done anything. Here's another tool that looks easy to use, although I really think I should set up a real bacula setup for all the home computers.

BackupGem Manual

Backup is the easiest and most flexible backup, archive and rotate tool. It’s a beginning-to-end solution for scheduled backups in a clean ruby package that is simple use and powerful when customized.

AIRing it out

Very nice intro to AIR on Linux found at Linux Journal. AIR (Adobe Integrated Runtime) is Adobes push for a crossplatform rich Internet app "operating system". I've been using it for Twhirl, a very nice Twitter client. For some reason, there are many Twitter clients using AIR. Adobe claims AIR to be only in an "alpha" state for Linux, but it has been working for me pretty well.

The only obvious shortcoming is that, according to the Twhirl author, the Linux version doesn't support the password encryption that is found on the Windows client, so it doesn't store passwords. And there are some rough edges for the UI, like the super-annoying Mac-like restriction of only resizing the window via dragging the lower right corner. And the auto-update feature doesn't work. You have to download the update file for the app and install it yourself. But it has been very stable for me and I'd like to look more into programming with it.

An Introduction to AIR

Vee Dee Eyes page

Cool page providing a bunch of VDIs, which are images you can use in VirtualBox, my current favorite OS emulator. These VDIs are pre-installed OS images that run in VirtualBox and let you quickly try out any OS (mostly Linux, of course).

Sun xVM VirtualBox VDI Index | veeDee-Eyes

The VirtualBox "Virtual Disk Image" Index
VDI images of pre-installed "Open Source" Operating System distros.
It's a computer inside your computer.

Linux HowTo search

A page using a focused Google search to look for just the right HowTo to scratch that itch:

HowtoFinder - The search engine for Howto's and Tutorials

Beta Try

Very nice coverage of the 1 CD KDE 10.3 Beta2 of openSUSE by Linuxseekers.com. Plenty of screenshots and notes. I tried the Beta 1 and found it a really smooth experience, with barely a glitch (only a small one setting up the NTP daemon comes to mind).

Linuxseekers - Preview of the 1-CD openSUSE-10.3-Beta2-KDE-i386.

Game Linux

Yes, you can game with Linux. While many people, including myself, dual boot into Windows in order to get the latest and greatest games, there are a few interesting games that play on Linux. This group of hackers got together and created a Live (ie., bootable) CD based on ArchLinux that plays Linux games without anything being installed. What a great idea!

live.linux-gamers.net

The project live.linuX-gamers.net was founded with the idea to present Linux games at the Linuxtag exhibition in a novel way.

Forecast for Linux

Whither the Linux kernel? Well, here's a page with your answer:

Linux Weather Forecast - The Linux Foundation

Welcome to the Linux Weather Forecast. This page is an attempt to track ongoing developments in the Linux development community that have a good chance of appearing in a mainline kernel and/or major distros sometime in the near future.

Display This

The newest version of the ATI Proprietary display driver is out, and maybe it is time to really give this a try. I guess there isn't anything too revolutionary in this release (it just went from 8.39.4 to 8.40.4), but I haven't tried this at all. I'm not really into fancy eye candy, so not begin able to run Compiz or some such isn't a big deal. And I don't worry about 3d gaming either. But I could be tempted, I guess.

ATI Proprietary Linux x86 Display Driver 8.40.4

Information Overload

One thing I've talked about before, coming from a FreeBSD world, is the vast amount of Linux information available. Everywhere I look, there's another  Linux news portal, blog, software review site... And that is not even taking into account the sites specifically for a particular distro! But one that I have recently added to my startup bookmarks is The Linux Home Page. Much like daemonnews, it is a news aggregator (in fact, it even includes daemonnews). It has a pretty stark layout, but is information dense and is a good overview of the major Linux and BSD news sites. I give it a quick once over when I fire up my machine and like what I see so far.

Linux Home Page

Underappreciated CLI

Eight underutilized CLI tools are examined and explained in this very interesting page from Novell. Here's the eight tools under the microscope:

• watch - a builtin command


• jumpgate - 3rd party utility


• lsof - builtin


• atop - 3rd party


• iftop - 3rd party


• pstree - standard command, albeit with some weird terminal requirements


• netcat - 3rd party GNU utility


• strace - standard utility

It's a little strange then, the title and the fact that half of them are third party apps. I would have thought it would concentrate more on standard tools that are underused, not 3rd party apps that you might not know about. But still, a nice list of CLI utilities. I only knew about lsof, iftop, pstree and strace, and only lsof and iftop are part of my standard CLI arsenal, so I was glad to get a refresher course on these tools. Off to YaST to install the 3rd party ones!

Cool Solutions: 8 CLI Tools that are Under-utilized, Sometimes Unknown, or Unappreciated and Yet Pack a Powerful Punch

Stick It to the Man

Cool free software project stickers you can print out and stick on your computer case, either over that silly  3D windows one or after removing it. As I always build my own boxes, I don't have any Windows stickers on them, but I like the looks of these!

Free Software Sticker Book

(from nixCraft)

Simple SUSE

An rpm I wish I knew of when I first installed openSUSE, konvenientSUSE does all the basics to make openSUSE truly usable. Like many Linux distros, openSUSE maintains a "Chinese wall" between the official release and many more-or-less closed pieces often found in the Windows world, like license MP3 compressions and Flash. There's a constant push 'n' pull between providing a "free" distribution and providing a usable one and trying to find a balance between them.

This looks like a nice compromise. The official release doesn't have things like DVD playback (licensed and copyrighted encryption), Java, and Flash. This rpm quickly and easily purports to add them to a base 10.2 installation, as well as adding in some recommended 3rd party package repositories and closed source display drivers. I still need to try and play with the ATI proprietary drivers.

 konvenientSUSE KDE-Apps.org

Beta Time

I figure as a plaything, I'll give the new openSUSE 10.3 Beta 1 a try, so I'm downloading the DVD version via Bittorrent as we "speak".

openSUSE News » Blog Archive » Announcing openSUSE 10.3 Beta 1

The openSUSE team is proud to announce the first Beta release of openSUSE 10.3.

More Wallpapers

A good list of high quality, free, photos to use as wallpapers. This includes really big sizes like 2560x1600 and really small sizes, like for an iPhone or iPod.

InterfaceLIFT: High-Resolution Widescreen Wallpaper (by date)

Kick the tires on an HP machine

Cool site using virtual technology that allows you to try out new HP hardware with cutting edge software.  I'm checking out a Blade server as we speak! Basically, you get telnet access to the systems, and you can try out some commercial software, like Intel's compilers and Oracle's database. Here's the list of operatings systems available:

1. HP-UX 11


2. Windows Server 2003


3. Debian GNU Linux 4.0


4. Mandriva Corporpate Server 4.0


5. Oracle Enterprise Linux 4


6. Red Hant Enterprise 5


7. SuSE Enterprise 10


8. FreeBSD 6.2

Otherwise, it is mostly just to check out some tools, mostly HP ones (like Code Advisor). Still, pretty cool.

Hewlett-Packard Test Drive

Want to try the latest technologies over the Internet? This program allows you to testdrive some of the hottest hardware and operating systems available today. Have you ever wanted to try out HP's exciting 64-bit Integrity and PA-RISC technology? Get time on SMP x86 and Opteron ProLiant servers? Try out a Blade server. Try different Open Source operating systems. Do it here! Just register for an account and fasten your seatbelt!

Faster Web Sites

Here are some rules to make your web site faster and gooder. These thirteen rules can be enforced via the new Yahoo Firefox plugin called YSlow, which will examine a web site and tell you how well it does using these rules. In my recent Javascript fixation, I am particularly interested in rule 11. Here are the rules:

1. Make Fewer HTTP Requests
2. Use a Content Delivery Network
3. Add an Expires Header
4. Gzip Components
5. Put CSS at the Top
6. Move Scripts to the Bottom
7. Avoid CSS Expressions
8. Make JavaScript and CSS External
9. Reduce DNS Lookups
10. Minify JavaScript
11. Avoid Redirects
12. Remove Duplicate Scripts
13. Configure ETags

Thirteen Simple Rules for Speeding Up Your Web Site

Leaving Linux Kernels

Interesting interview with Con Kolivas, prolific kernel contributor. He talks about the whys and wherefores when it comes to kernel developing, and dealing with Linux people.

Why I quit: kernel developer Con Kolivas | APC Magazine

Yet Another Linux Page

Here's Yet Another Linux page. Linux Links pulls together links, news, software descriptions and the like, but is organized very cleanly. It calls itself "The Linux Portal", so I guess that explains it all...

Linux Links - The Linux Portal

Google Linux Repositories

Cool page showing how to configure various Linux distros for including updates to Google Linux apps (which at this point is only Google Desktop and Google Picasa). The step by step GUI configuration lists Ubuntu 7.04 (Feisty), Debian GNU/Linux 4.0 and openSUES 10.2, while the command line list includes APT, YUM, urpmi, YaST2, and RPM.

Google Linux Software Repositories