This is going to be a quick post. I've made a couple changes to UberBang, such as installing the Murrine theme engine to make the #! theme look right and making VolumeIcon and NM-applet start on startup. I've combined all these and released version 10.04.1 of UberBang, and it can be downloaded here in the same SourceForge project page.Also, I am working on a new release of Fresh OS ("Elementary"). I will likely be dropping the "Traditional" version for this release because the newest build of Linux Mint "Debian" seems to fill that void adequately...
Friday, 31 December 2010
Thursday, 30 December 2010
Yay! I've scored my first guest post!I did a review of Chakra 0.3.0 "Ashoc" for FreeTechie, and website administrator Ben Kevan has been kind enough to post it there. Here's a short excerpt from it:Many of my regular readers have heard a couple times before that Chakra is an Arch-based KDE distribution. However, since its alpha releases, it has diverged enough from Arch and KDEmod to become to Arch what Ubuntu has become to Debian: while they share...
Wednesday, 29 December 2010
Since I've gotten back home from college, I've been able to watch a good deal more TV, which means I also get to see (and make fun of) the advertisements that I've missed out on for the last few months. One of these ads is for Symbicort, an anti-asthma medication, and it takes my interest both because I suffer from asthma (but it only happens when I get a cold or when my seasonal allergies act up) and because the ad seems to shoot itself in the foot.Here's what I mean: it's supposed to treat and control asthma in sufferers. Yet, asthmatics whose...
Tuesday, 28 December 2010
Two days ago, I watched How To Train Your Dragon with my family. We had rented it from a RedBox for a gathering at our house, but no one at the gathering watched it, so we decided to watch it before returning it that night.It's a great movie, and I would even say it was better than Toy Story 3 (which I reviewed just over a week ago). Unlike that movie, this one didn't have any gimmicky political lines or plot. It was a fun, lighthearted movie that also had a surprisingly complex plot (for a children's movie), as there were at least 2 different...
Monday, 27 December 2010
A couple days ago, I reviewed Slackware 13.1. I wanted to see if I could use it post-installation, though from what I had read from commenters and writers on various blogs, it would be tough. At the end, it did prove to be as tough (and for me, fruitless) as I thought it would be. Though I did get to resolve a network connection issue, there wasn't really a whole lot interesting for me to see (other than a multitude of WMs in essentially vanilla form). Anyway, I wrote and published the review on this blog and it ended up in Linux Today and TuxMachines;...
Sunday, 26 December 2010
Unfortunately, there were no comments on articles from the previous week (2010 December 12), so there was no accompanying "Featured Comments" article. That can be attributed to the fact that I wrote very few posts that week. Anyway, there were a whole bunch of comments this past week, so I can only post a couple.Review: Slackware 13.1There were many comments about this, so I'll post a couple, as well as my responses to them.An anonymous reader writes, "You never even talked about this distro whatsoever. You just complained about what stuff you...
Saturday, 25 December 2010
This past week, a couple Ohio State University [American] football players have been suspended for half of next year's season and have been made to pay thousands of dollars for selling things like [parts of] their uniforms, their championship rings, and other awards and sports paraphernalia. News outlets reporting this story have frequently made reference to a similar incident a couple years ago, when Reggie Bush voluntarily forfeited his Heisman Trophy (though he was under pressure to do so at risk of it being forcibly revoked) for receiving gifts...
Friday, 24 December 2010
I wrote a post a couple months ago regarding Mr. Graham Morrison's assertion that the overabundance of choice in the open-source software community is its failing and Ms. Caitlyn Martin's counter-assertion using the example of breakfast cereals. In it, I mostly agree with Ms. Martin's statements, though I do question the use of breakfast cereals as an analogy because that industry has not ever been so thoroughly monopolized like the PC OS industry.One of Mr. Morrison's gripes was the confusion in package management, with so many different front-...
Thursday, 23 December 2010
This is a sort of follow-up and is opposite to the previous post. There are a couple things that I had bad experiences with that I should probably try out again; these things have probably left worse impressions on me emotionally than rationally.First is Toyota. Toyota has had a rough couple years, starting with issues of premature rusting in its trucks' frames and leading up to the "unintended acceleration" fiasco. Through it all, it's managed to become #1 in sales, but this too has come at the cost of its quality; now, the parts it uses especially...
Wednesday, 22 December 2010
The thought about the content of this post occurred to me yesterday when surfing the web as normal. (Interestingly enough, I forgot about it until this afternoon.) It started with Mozilla Firefox crashing. I feel like although with computer-related things I'm a bit more flexible and willing to change (compared to average users) when better software alternatives come around, with some things I just stick too much to what I know, often to my own detriment. Follow the jump to find out exactly what I mean.Read more...
Tuesday, 21 December 2010
KDE Main ScreenI never envisioned myself trying out any of the more advanced distributions like Slackware, Arch, or Gentoo, but having tried derivatives like GNU/Linux Utopia, Chakra, and Sabayon, I think I'm ready to try Slackware and Arch, and I am writing about the former today. Hopefully, the latter can also happen soon. (I'm still not going to try Gentoo.)Note: this review will be heavy on images, so don't be surprised if the page takes a little...
Sunday, 19 December 2010
This evening, as I am back home, I got to watch Toy Story 3 with my family. (On a side note, the DVD seemed pretty badly scratched as there were many parts that jumped and skipped around, but it was tolerable.)I had heard from many of my friends over the summer that this movie is an exceptionally good movie, and to be honest, while I think it's a good, clean, family-friendly movie, I don't think it's anything to rave about. I found a lot of the political themes (e.g. "we are in control of our destiny") a bit off-putting for a kids' movie (though...
Wednesday, 15 December 2010
Yay! I'm done with my first semester here at MIT! Overall, final exams worked out pretty well.I'm going back home either tomorrow or the day after that. When I do, I'll be able to spend more time with loved ones and more time relaxing (and writing here).For those people in school/college, how did your term ...
Monday, 13 December 2010
Last week, I released an Openbox respin of Ubuntu 10.04 LTS "Lucid Lynx" called UberBang 10.04. Shortly afterwards, I emailed CrunchBang creator Philip Newborough with questions about the theming issues and related things. He very kindly answered my questions, so I've incorporated those changes (and a few others) and reuploaded the ISO file (which is slightly bigger now but is still under 600 MB). The download link is unchanged. Also, when I get the time, I'll make a wiki for UberBang like I did for the other respins.Before that, I also released...
Sunday, 12 December 2010
There was only one post that garnered comments, so I will be reposting all those comments.Fedora 15: A Potential Savior?Reader yochalgal had this to say about it: "The reason fedora 15 will have that ability is because they are switching from X to wayland as a display server. Ubuntu (what mint is based off of) is also switching. So you will have that ability." Of course, the Linux Mint developers have said that they won't be switching to Wayland exactly when Ubuntu does.An anonymous commenter added, "The Nvidia-Intel video problem stems from...
Saturday, 11 December 2010
Main Screen + Openbox menuIf you've been keeping up with this blog, you'll know that CrunchBang ("#!"), an Openbox distribution that was previously based on Ubuntu, has switched to a Debian base (and has added Xfce to the mix as well). While I agree with many of the developers' reasons for switching bases, I feel like now there's a void in the realm of Ubuntu derivatives using Openbox. No, Lubuntu doesn't count, because it uses LXDE, which is a little...
Friday, 10 December 2010
One of my friends was showing me today a Gource-created video of his semester's work that he made on his Fedora 14 "Laughlin" laptop. It looks really nice, but even though it has a quad-core processor, 4 GB of RAM, and a very nice AMD ATI dedicated graphics card (I don't know exactly what model/specs), it still took a couple hours to do (i.e. far longer than it should have).I told him that I'd love to be able to do a similar thing on my laptop, but given that it has even lower specs than his, it would take even longer. This is also because Linux...
Thursday, 9 December 2010
There's a new article (Brett Michael Dykes, The Lookout) about a leaked document posted on Wikileaks reporting that American TV shows and movies have been very effective at painting a positive portrait of the US in the eyes of Saudis (ever since American channels there have started showing actual American TV and movies and not just US-sanctioned propaganda). Of all the quotes in the article, this one stood out the most:[...] even in the remote, highly conservative regions of Saudi Arabia where anti-Western thought typically proliferates. The cable...
Wednesday, 8 December 2010
In the last couple days, there have probably been more news stories about the leaked government documents put on Wikileaks than there are actual leaked documents on Wikileaks. TechDirt has a funny (sadly, it's true) article about how the State Department supposedly wants the leaked documents back. Evidently, it somehow thinks that digital goods are simply analogue goods on computers that can be "reclaimed". Unfortunately, it doesn't realize that online, once it's out there, it can never be put back; this is also true of businesses and trade secrets,...
Sunday, 5 December 2010
Last night, I watched the movie Die Another Day with my family. Interestingly enough, we tried watching it on an older DVD player hooked up to the TV; we were able to hear the background music but not the foreground dialogue. When I was told that this happened with other movies as well, I concluded that the DVD player was dying, so we watched it on a laptop.It was an entertaining, typical James Bond movie but it wasn't anything special. Having watched the two newest James Bond movies and seeing how awesomely cold and efficient Daniel Craig's James...
There were two posts that garnered comments this week, so I'll try to repost most of the comments.Peter Pan Buses: Good for People who Supposedly "Can't Grow Up"Reader Jen had this to say: "Totally agree that this country needs high-speed rail! (And no, Amtrak's Acela doesn't count...) Was there wifi on your Peter Pan bus?" (Yes, there was.)In Praise of the Arch WikiA multitude of anonymous readers left comments. One comment that summed up the sentiments in the other comments as well reads, "The Arch Wiki is why I switched to Archlinux, well that...
Saturday, 4 December 2010
This is something that I have wanted to do for the last week and a half or so, but I haven't been able to do it because I've been really busy.I said in my review of Debian 6 "Squeeze" Standard that I wanted to customize that installation with Trinity 3.5.12. Well, now it has finally happened: please welcome the newest member of the Oxidized Trinity family, Oxidized Trinity 6 "Squeeze"!There are a couple differences between this and the original (Kubuntu-based) Oxidized Trinity 10.04, the most significant being that the only way to install Oxidized...
Thursday, 2 December 2010
I'm not an Arch user. In fact, I've never used Arch before (save for two reviews of Chakra GNU/Linux, an Arch-based KDE distribution made to make Arch easier). So why am I talking about the Arch Wiki?Well, I'm looking into doing a couple more respins, and the Arch Wiki has been absolutely indispensable for configuration tips. As Arch Linux is built from the ground up, there needs to be thorough and up-to-date documentation about how exactly to install and configure various applications and services, and the Arch Wiki does not fail. Everything is...
Wednesday, 1 December 2010
I was going to write about the failed Oregon bombing plot and how the TSA would be powerless to stop it with its scanners and pat-downs for it was a domestic plot that was to use cars and such. Then, I saw this gem of an article (Mike Masnick, TechDirt) saying that the FBI helped the would-be bomber throughout the process and then arrested him just to bolster its own reputation. It links to many different other articles (which I will leave you to read on your own) that talk about this as well as similar fabricated plots.There really isn't a whole...
Monday, 29 November 2010
I got back to college yesterday night. While I flew home, I came back on a Peter Pan bus. It was pretty nice because there weren't any inane weight restrictions and there certainly weren't any security checks of any kind. I just got on the bus and went on my way. Plus, the tickets were pretty reasonable (considering that it was pretty nice inside the bus): $25 per leg.Until the TSA lets up on this ridiculous security theater (there, I said it), this is how I'll probably travel from now on for these distances (if someone doesn't drive me). (Of course,...
I want to apologize for not having posted this yesterday as usual. I was traveling back to college (more on that in an upcoming post) and didn't have computer access all day.There were quite a few comments on posts this week, so I won't repost all of them. Adafruit Bears Fruit for MicrosoftIn response to my question about why Microsoft seemed so defensive, an anonymous reader had this to say: "Because Microsoft stir hackers' defiance whenever they say they have protected their products. For Microsoft, it was just saying "I challenge you to hack...
Friday, 26 November 2010
Two days ago, I helped a friend (whose identity I will not reveal here) perform a Linux Mint installation on her computer. That computer had Microsoft Windows 7 on it which was becoming extremely slow and unreliable by her own count. Because of this, she was willing to try something new. She doesn't really do much aside from web browsing and document creation; hence, I figured that something like Linux Mint would be perfect for her.I let her try out what she would use most before installing, and she seemed happy with it; even during the installation...
Thursday, 25 November 2010
Happy Thanksgiving to everyone! I hope you all are able to spend it with family, friends, and other loved ones; I've come home from college for the weekend.On a related note, I did have to go through the new security procedures and I got the grope. That said, though I am still a bit wary of the whole thing, I'm happy to report that the security person was extremely polite, professional, hygienic (changing gloves before examining me), and didn't actually go directly over my nether regions, so not once did I feel truly uncomfortable in the process.Once...
Wednesday, 24 November 2010
This just in, folks: Ubuntu is about to become (Susan Linton, OStatic) a rolling release distribution! SWEET!Of course, this means no more weird numbering system, and no more silly "[adjective]-[animal]" names...or does it? Mark Shuttleworth does say that like any other rolling release distribution, Ubuntu will release ISOs periodically for people who are installing for the first time as well as for people who need to reinstall Ubuntu for whatever reason.I'm not too happy about the move to Unity, and I'm cautiously optimistic about the move to...
Tuesday, 23 November 2010
Several days ago, open-source hardware company Adafruit offered a "bounty" of $3000 for the first person to hack Microsoft's Kinect (formerly Project Natal) device. For those of you who don't know, Kinect was originally just an add-on hardware accessory for the Microsoft XBOX 360 allowing for motion sensing of one's full body (as opposed to using an external device, like the Wiimote in Nintendo's Wii). However, companies like Adafruit saw the additional value in a product like this, and Adafruit offered a cash prize for whoever could first release...
Sunday, 21 November 2010
I remember seeing a couple comments spread out over reviews I've done in the past asking why I don't do my reviews now through actual live media. Well, the reason was that with my new laptop, for the longest time I thought that USB booting was a lost cause; furthermore, I didn't want to waste the few blank CDs and DVDs I had (and still have) on random distributions.Well, I'm happy to report that I can in fact boot from USB on my laptop (and in fact, I'm writing this from a Linux Mint "Debian" 201009 GNOME live USB), and for this I need to apologize...
This past week, only one post garnered comments.Review: GNU/Linux Utopia 20101211 (Idea by Manuel)Manuel had this to say about it: "Thanks for review i agree in a lot of things, i think is coming a newer version soon, anyway it's slackware, whats in minds no dependencies control, no language selector, no user selector, if normally i use Debian/Ubuntu with apt-get and similars slackware looks strangeTip:For add user: type en in the bash :adduserWe working in a tutorial and screencasts.Thanks fro review, nice job! thanks!"On the other hand, an...
Saturday, 20 November 2010
Das U-Blog now has 0x100 (the hexadecimal number 100, equal to 256 in the standard decimal system) posts! Yay!That aside, I've been having some issues with my cell phone. I'm not talking about call, build, sound, or photography quality; I'm talking about a feature called "City ID". When I first got the phone, whenever I made or received calls, I could see not only the name and number of the person in question but also that person's location (and I believe this is based on the location where the phone is first activated, not the real-time location)....
Friday, 19 November 2010
Yesterday I got to see an advanced screening of this movie with many other MIT students. It was a lot of fun, though there were a couple mishaps regarding getting there (for some reason handicap-accessible taxis can't be counted on to arrive at a specific time, according to one company), but that's all fine now.The movie? It was great! The only thing I will say is that the director overdid the relationship between Harry and Hermione (because in the book that was solely a figment of Ron's imaginatio...
Tuesday, 16 November 2010
I was reading an article in the New York Times about the proposed overhaul of the New York City taxi fleet; all of the finalists in the selection process are minivans targeted at small business owners (Ford Transit Connect, Nissan NV200, and Turkish company Karsan's entry). Just for fun, I searched all three on Wikipedia (and got no results for the last one). While reading the article about the first, I saw that it goes through a rather ridiculous shipping/manufacturing process just to avoid the "chicken tax". I then clicked that article.Apparently,...
Sunday, 14 November 2010
GNU/Linux Utopia Main ScreenReader Manuel kindly asked me to write a review of a distribution he has created called GNU/Linux Utopia, and I am doing that right now. Available on SourceForge, it is a feature-packed Slackware (64-bit)-based distribution tailored for Spanish-language users. As I do not know Spanish, it was interesting for me to see just how well I can navigate a (literally) foreign environment using only what I already know about Linux...
There weren't too many comments this week, and they were spread out over different posts, so I'll repost most of them.Ease: An Elementary Presentation ApplicationIn response to Ease not working at all, an anonymous commenter said, "You should be at "Ease" to put it in the trash where it belongs...".Airport Traveling GripesAn anonymous reader had this to say: "This new full-body scan/procedure was really started by the failed Christmas attack of last year, not the cargo plane attempt. As you know, the attacker hid the explosives in his underwear,...
Saturday, 13 November 2010
In a week and a half, I will be heading back home by airplane for the Thanksgiving holidays. Thus, I will have to deal with all the truly ridiculous "security" measures at the airport that are being talked about today.(Side note: there's a really nice xkcd comic about this as well, discussing how inconsistent it is to confiscate small liquid containers yet allow laptop batteries to go through.)Anyway, there seems to be a real backlash (Derek Kravitz, Washington Post) against the new super-restrictive rules regarding full-body frisks and scanners;...
Friday, 12 November 2010
There are a couple of things I want to say before beginning with the real content of this post. First of all, I want to apologize for not having written a post for a few days. That said, I did warn at the beginning of this semester that my work may make me busy enough to be unable to write a post, and that's exactly what happened in these few days. Furthermore, it will likely happen again soon, as I anticipate being fairly busy this weekend and next week.Second, this is not a Debian version that I wanted to test for the sake of testing it; my ultimate...
Monday, 8 November 2010
GNOME Office has always had a pretty good word processor (Abiword) and a great spreadsheet program (Gnumeric). Abiword is fine for most things, though it can't fully support exporting documents in Microsoft formats (though it says that older versions of Microsoft Office Word did the same as well) and it doesn't support all macros. Gnumeric is great for statistical analysis, speed, and having every single feature present in Microsoft Excel (save a few). What GNOME Office has always lacked, though, is a presentation program. Sure, Evince could always...
Sunday, 7 November 2010
There were a few posts this past week that got comments, so I'll go through most of them.Seriously? Vegan Chicken Wings?Reader T_Beermonster had this, among other things, to say: "I suspect that a large part of the pseudo-meat boom is down to the fact that for most non-vegetarians cooking for the lone vegetarian (aka awkward person) is an annoyance and an afterthought. I know that most of my family when cooking for my wife will just fall into the lazy practice of cooking the same thing but with faux-meat. Obviously it tastes revolting but...
Saturday, 6 November 2010
Last week, I commented on how many Linux users are turned off by Canonical's seemingly unilateral decisions with regard to the development Ubuntu, the latest (at that time) example of which has been the decision to ship the Unity DE as the default even in the desktop edition, even though it's clear that even the standard netbook version of Unity needs a lot of work. Well, a lot of news outlets have reported that Canonical is going even further with this and that it wants to completely ditch the X/11 Windowing System.Wow. That's a pretty bold move....
Friday, 5 November 2010
An anonymous reader had asked for the template used in this blog. First I'm going to list out the basics from Template Designer. (All colors are given using their 6-digit hexadecimal code.) Follow the jump to see the full template.The base template used is the "Simple" Blogger template (provided by Blogger). There is no background image.The body layout has a main area and a sidebar split into two smaller sidebars a bit down the page. The blog is 1000 pixels wide, and the right sidebar is 320 pixels wide.The font used throughout the blog is Droid...
Thursday, 4 November 2010
For the record, I'm not saying that parodies themselves are declining in quality — far from it. If anything, they've just been getting better and better. No, what I mean is that advertising agencies and record labels are trying to put an end to parodies by claiming that obvious parodies (like the parody of a Lady Gaga song and the parody of a lobbying group's political ad, both covered on TechDirt here and here) don't qualify as parodies because they use the original soundtrack/video footage, meaning that they violate the restrictions on derivative...
Wednesday, 3 November 2010
I see on sites like MakeTechEasier, Dedoimedo, and others that promote Linux articles that say that Linux shouldn't necessarily be promoted for any inherent security advantage over Microsoft Windows because browsing safely can prevent any problems from appearing. This also means that there's no need for antivirus software on Microsoft Windows because safe browsing habits alone will prevent viruses and other malware from appearing. I have two issues with this.For one, on Linux, while it's common sense to exercise safe browsing habits anyway (i.e....
Tuesday, 2 November 2010
There are a couple of qualifications to "Debian". In fact, this isn't really a general guide for Debian itself, but it's more for Linux Mint "Debian". In any case, because Linux Mint "Debian" is pointed towards the Testing repositories by default, for standard Debian, the procedure will still be similar anyway.I wanted to take this opportunity to let you know that the latest versions of Fresh OS are up on my SourceForge site. Yay! These are the download...
Monday, 1 November 2010
I remember in elementary school I got a lot of questions from people (when I told them that I am vegetarian) how I could possibly survive without meat. Although those questions have since subsided, I now wonder whether some people can survive without meat after becoming vegetarian. (Please understand that this is not meant to evangelize about any benefits vegetarianism has over omnivorous eating [redundant?]. If you eat meat, I have no problem with it; I have my own reasons for remaining a vegetarian.)Case in point: our dining hall's vegetarian...
Sunday, 31 October 2010
Before I get to the comments themselves, I want to ask, what do you all think of the new blog look and feel? I had to redesign it to get all the gadgets to look right. Let me know in the comments of this article. Anyway, let's get back to the comments.Open Question: Install Linux without Live Media?This post was about installing Linux on a friend's laptop which can't boot from a USB stick and whose DVD drive is broken.Reader Azmo suggested, "I have had really good experiences with gPXE and Fedora (boot.fedoraproject.org) lately. Just a thought...
Saturday, 30 October 2010
I'm going home for winter break, but I need to be back in college by the end of January. I was thinking of the things immediately afterwards at home that I would miss, and I remembered that one of those things would be watching the Super Bowl with my family and friends at home. (Super Bowl XLV airs on 2011 February 6.) Now, of course, I'll be watching it with my friends here, so that makes up for it. Then, as I thought about it more, I wondered if I would need to buy tickets to attend a showing in my dormitory hall, as it would be considered a...
Friday, 29 October 2010
Yesterday in my web design, the lecturer was a guest speaker. This particular guest speaker is my college's IP attorney, and as we are designing websites, our professor feels that we should be suitably aware of the issues surrounding IP so as to not get sued. At first, I was highly skeptical as a similar talk my high school librarian gave last year was almost totally propaganda in favor of IP-protection and the wonders it does for creative works. That said, I listened to the whole talk, and I'm glad that the attorney delivered the facts straight...
Thursday, 28 October 2010
For the last few years, Microsoft has been making vague threats to sue vendors of Linux-based products for infringing on Microsoft's patents. When Microsoft is asked to elaborate on what exactly is being infringed, it suffers a convenient case of amnesia. In any case, while it has bullied a few companies (first Novell over SUSE, now companies like HTC over Android) into paying excessive royalty fees for no reason, it has never made good on its threats to sue anyone, probably because it would be clear as day just how ridiculous Microsoft's infringement...
Wednesday, 27 October 2010
I wrote a couple posts back that one of my motivations for completing Fresh OS (which is very close to completion but won't be complete until the weekend probably due to my schoolwork) is so that I can install it on a friend's laptop as that friend expressed an interest in running Linux. Well, that thought is right now at the back of my mind. The DVD drive doesn't work (it's partially broken, actually), and she has told me already that live USBs don't work (as she has tried before). I tried using Wubi, but unfortunately some issues with Microsoft...
Tuesday, 26 October 2010
There's always been murmurs of discontent in the Linux community with Canonical, the company that sponsors and manages Ubuntu. Before, I didn't really understand what all the fuss was about; it was the easy-to-use distribution and it seemed to work quite well. Having watched Ubuntu's development over the last year, I can now see why.A large part of this is just that users are jealous that Ubuntu, and not their favorite distribution, is seeing so much success. I'm not going to go into this, because it'll likely degenerate into a flame-war.However,...
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