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...
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