A couple days ago, KDE 4.6 was released for the world to enjoy. It boasts myriad bug fixes, new features for applications like Dolphin and Marble (among others), a revamped Activities feature, and better integration of GTK+ applications. I've come to enjoy testing new KDE 4 releases because it gets noticeably better with each release (or so I would hope), as opposed to GNOME, Xfce, LXDE, and other DEs which don't change much between "point" releases (i.e. X.Y ("X point Y")).That said, it's not available for Linux Mint 9 "Isadora", and I don't plan...
Monday, 31 January 2011
Sunday, 30 January 2011
Main ScreenIf you are a regular reader of this blog, Sabayon needs no introduction. Suffice it to say that version 5.5 has been released, and as has become tradition for me (so to speak), I am testing the KDE version of this new release.It seems like there aren't really a whole lot of new heavily-advertised features in this release; it mostly consists of bugfixes. Let's see how true that turns out.I tested this as a live USB made with UnetBootin....
There was only one post this week that garnered comments, so I'll post all of those.Preview: Bodhi Linux 0.1.4 BetaAn anonymous reader had this to say: "-v.nice review,prof P -that cluttered dock You mention, also come on other distros -it's easily sent to the bottom of the deep blue sea,if you chose to do so & you end up with a non-cartoonish desktop -just right click/properties... cheers".Bodhi Linux creator Jeff91 had this to say: "Just a comment about the bar at the bottom - the last screen in the setup wizard entitled "quick launch" lets...
Thursday, 27 January 2011
Well, I had a nice, long winter break by virtue of the fact that this time I chose to stay home during MIT's winter session. That's come to an end, and I'll be heading back tomorrow.I'm glad that I've been able to write as much stuff here as I did over the last month and a half. Unfortunately, that's probably going to end for a while, as classes start next Tuesday (and this semester will be a little more stressful than the last due to the introduction of grades (as opposed to pass/no record for first-semester freshmen)). I'll try to have something...
Wednesday, 26 January 2011
Main Screen + Main E17 MenuI've been reading a lot of good things about Bodhi Linux recently. It's a young (just a few months old) Ubuntu-based distribution that exclusively uses the Enlightenment E17 WM. (The name is appropriate because Prince Siddartha (later to be known as the Buddha) achieved enlightenment under a bodhi tree.) I've used GNOME, KDE, Openbox, and a bit of LXDE, Xfce, and Fluxbox, but I've never used Enlightenment before, so this...
Tuesday, 25 January 2011
There's been a lot of controversy about Amy Chua's memoir Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother surrounding her harsh and very strict parenting methods. Even more controversy was created when excerpts from the book appeared as a condensed Wall Street Journal article.Amy Chua has said in the book (and this part also appears in the WSJ article as well as, from which I am taking these points, Wikipedia's article on her and the book) that her daughters were not allowed sleepovers or playdates, parts in the school play (or complaining about that), grades...
Monday, 24 January 2011
Today, a terrorist blew up a section of the international arrival area of one of Moscow's airports. Around 35 people died with scores more injured. The particular section of the arrival area where the explosion occurred was low on security guards but filled with travelers moving from place to place; also, the explosive device was hidden in a suitcase. This is a terrible tragedy, and we should make sure that something like this doesn't happen again.Now, I don't know what threat detection machines were in place in the airport, but it evidently wasn't...
Sunday, 23 January 2011
There were a few posts that garnered a handful of comments, so I'll try to post most of them.On Megabytes and MebibytesReader T_Beermonster said, "how did you create your 900MiB partition and did you put a filesystem on it? Firstly you probably didn't actually get a 900MiB partition because most tools by default end up rounding to "cylinders" and giving you a bit less. Most linux filesystems by default are set up to reserve 5% of space for the root user - so that makes available space 855MiB as a user. depending what sort of jiggery-pokery...
Friday, 21 January 2011
Installation DVD Boot MenuWow, what timing! Just yesterday I took another look at Pardus 2009.2 "Geronticus Eremita", and today Pardus 2011 is out! Incidentally, I previewed a beta release of Pardus 2011 to disappointing results. However, a few months before that, I did declare Pardus 2009.2 the winner of a 5-way comparison test, so I figure it's only fair to give Pardus another shot now that the newest official release is out in the wild.For those...
Thursday, 20 January 2011
A few months ago, I did a comparison test between 5 KDE distributions that aim to be friendly to newbies. These distributions were PC-BSD 8.1 "Hubble" (which is technically a distribution of BSD, not Linux), PCLinuxOS 2010.07 KDE, openSUSE 11.3 KDE, Sabayon 5.3 KDE, and Pardus 2009.2 "Geronticus Eremita" (live CD). (I also tested Chakra Alpha 5 "Panora", but that wasn't compared to the others due to its pre-release nature.) I did all these tests on my old Sony VAIO desktop. I intended to make live USBs out of all of these using UnetBootin, but...
Wednesday, 19 January 2011
Main Screen + Main MenuI've read a couple of reviews of Trisquel GNU/Linux, an Ubuntu-based distribution which aims to remove as much non-free (i.e. proprietary) software from the kernel and distribution as possible. There are a couple other distributions that do this, like Slackware-based Kongoni, KNOPPIX-based Musix, and Fedora-based BLAG. However, as stated by Jim Lynch in his review of Trisquel 4.0 LTS "Taranis", quite a few of these other pure-free...
Tuesday, 18 January 2011
Yay! I've got another guest post on Tech Drive-in! This time it's a comparison test between the web browsers Epiphany 2.30 and Midori 0.2.9.Here's a little snippet of the article I wrote:Since then, Epiphany has also jumped onto the WebKit bandwagon. I've used both browsers before, but I've never tested them side-by-side. They are quite similar (at first glance) in nature and goals. Both aspire to be relatively lightweight GTK+ browsers. Both are...
Monday, 17 January 2011
Ever since I was a young kid, I was confused by how sometimes, a megabyte was 1000000 bytes and sometimes something different. This confusion still gets me to this day, and it's because there's no consistency.The webcomic xkcd has a great take on it regarding the smaller unit kilobyte. For the unit "megabyte", the problem is compounded by the extra multiplication possibility: megabyte can not only be either 1000^2 or 1024^2 bytes, but it can also be 1024*1000 bytes.Yesterday, that issue came back to bite me. I was creating a new partition on my...
Sunday, 16 January 2011
There were a handful of comments on a few posts this week, so I'll repost them all.Chinese Company Copying the Burj KhalifaReader T_Beermonster said, "I'm not aware that the Blackpool Tower has had any significant negative impact on Paris," then later added, " The Blackpool Tower isn't a copy of the Eiffel Tower as such, like the proposed hotel in Beijing it was "inspired by". http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackpool_tower It is smaller, made with a cheaper construction method and was commercial in intent. There is also the Tokyo Tower which is much...
Saturday, 15 January 2011
This week, news that many eagerly awaited finally came true: the iPhone will become available for Verizon Wireless customers in less than a month. Initially, when the iPhone was introduced, many people were disappointed that it was only available for AT&T Wireless customers given AT&T's bad reputation for call quality and coverage and Verizon's good reputation for those things. These people are saying this move was long overdue.But if you ask me, I actually think it's good that this happened now and not earlier. If the iPhone became available...
Friday, 14 January 2011
I have posted an update to UberBang on the same SourceForge project page. It now includes the FBXKB keyboard layout switcher system tray icon, and Volumeicon and NM-Applet are now fully functional. Also present are the Openbox, GTK, and icon themes from the latest build of #! 10 "Statler"; however, the default GNOME-Colors-Statler icon theme used seems to not have been copied over correctly, as some icons (e.g. back, forward) appear a little weird. It seems like Elementary-Statler works fine though. Maybe for the next update I'll use that instead.I...
Wednesday, 12 January 2011
Many of you know of the shooting that occurred last Saturday in Tucson, AZ. It's truly a terrible tragedy and my heart goes out to the families that lost loved ones on that day.Since then, there's been a lot of talk about what role Sarah Palin had to play in all this, because a couple months ago, she had put online a map of various congressional districts marked with sniper rifle crosshairs (meaning voters should vote those representatives out of office), one of which was Representative Gabrielle Giffords's district. Sarah Palin herself has posted...
Tuesday, 11 January 2011
Main Openbox ScreenI've had a couple of encounters with #! before, starting with this review of version 9.04.01 and including this review of version 10 "Statler" Openbox (Alpha 2). I was pleasantly surprised by the features and minimalistic beauty of version 9.04.01, and I was later slightly let down by the relative lack of polish and removal of some features in version 10 (Alpha 2). Now, the #! developers have come out with a (actually,...
Monday, 10 January 2011
A couple days ago, I saw featured on Linux Today an article in PCPlus about a new USB multiboot creation script called MultiSystem. It's a GUI tool, which is nice for newbies like myself, and it automates the creation of a multiboot live USB from multiple live ISO files.Now, as many readers know, I've tried a not once, not twice, but three times to make a multiboot setup. The recurring issues I had each time were that each ISO file was written to a different partition and there was no unified boot menu to select a live session among the different...
Sunday, 9 January 2011
There's a relatively new article (Liz Goodwin, Yahoo! News) reporting on how Chinese land developers are looking to build a skyscraper that rips off of the design of Dubai's Burj Khalifa (formerly Burj Dubai). I've seen Chinese manufacturers use (without much modification) foreign competitors' designs before, but this takes it to a level I haven't seen before.There are two questions I have upon seeing this: how much harm will such blatant copying really do, and what's the best way to prevent it from happening in the future?Skyscrapers have become...
There weren't too many comments this week, so I'll post all of them.Julian Assange: Traitor?Reader T_Beermonster said, "I really don't see how an Australian citizen, operating a business out of Sweden and currently located in the UK, with no obvious allegiance to the US could be prosecuted for Treason by the US. Sedition suffers a similar hurdle. The most likely option would be espionage of some sort - but then it would be difficult to justify going after one publisher (Assange/Wikileaks) but not others (New York Times among others) unless...
Saturday, 8 January 2011
I have to confess that (1) I'm not a huge fan of apocalypse films and (2) I had some preconceived notions of the movie before watching it. The entire premise of the movie is based on the Mayan "Long Count" calendar ending on 2012 December 21, but the truth (according to the Mayans) is that when the calendar reaches its end a new era begins and the calendar will restart (i.e. the world won't end) and that the date isn't actually 2012. I felt like...
Friday, 7 January 2011
If you've been keeping up with the news around the Internet, you know that there's a viral video of a homeless man named Ted Williams who has a great radio-announcing voice. The video spread everywhere, and within a day or two, he got dozens of offers for both local and national announcing gigs.Unfortunately, as Mike Masnick of TechDirt reports, that video has been taken down from YouTube at the request of the Columbus Dispatch, an employee of which shot the original video.The person who shot and posted the video online specifically asked for viewers...
Thursday, 6 January 2011
It's been a really long time (over a year, in fact) since I've done an Autofailblog post. I read Edmunds Inside Line fairly frequently, and this week I came across this article reviewing the BMW X3 compact CUV.Frequently, this online site has been criticized for being biased towards BMWs by brushing off faults that would be roundly criticized in other cars and giving excessive praise to certain other traits that would only earn mild praise in other cars. While I feel like that has become more true over the years (I've been reading it for over 4...
Wednesday, 5 January 2011
It's been quite a while since I've done one of these massive combined posts, but I feel like it's necessary today.I mentioned in a post a couple days ago that, along with releasing an update to UberBang, I would continue working on a new build of Fresh OS. Well, those plans (regarding Fresh OS) have hit a snag (actually, a couple of snags). For everyone's information, I've been starting with Linux Mint "Debian" and using Hadret's Debian PPA for all the requisite Elementary-fication. The thing is, there are two separate Hadret repositories ("unstable"...
Tuesday, 4 January 2011
Yay! I scored my second guest post! This one is a comparison between Linux Mint 10 "Julia" GNOME and Pinguy OS 10.10, two featured-packed newbie-friendly Ubuntu-based GNOME distributions. Here's a short tidbit from the article, which has been published on Tech Drive-in:[...] First, some history. Linux Mint was started in 2006 with the release of version 1 "Ada", based on Kubuntu 6.06 LTS "Dapper Drake". Though that release was KDE-based and unstable...
Monday, 3 January 2011
This comes from a conversation I had with a few friends at a new year's get-together. The topic of WikiLeaks somehow came up, so I briefly mentioned how it's good that WikiLeaks is doing what it has done so far, and that because someone within the military leaked the documents (and WikiLeaks just published the already-leaked documents), if it wasn't WikiLeaks, it could have just as easily been a different organization.They disagreed, saying that though the documents this time around may not have been harmful, that could easily happen with the next...
Sunday, 2 January 2011
There was only one post last week that garnered comments, but there were a lot of comments. (I find it interesting that most of last week was part of last year.)Apologies about the Slackware ReviewReader dick had a long comment, so I'm only repeating part of it: "Just a suggestion if you try Arch. I did a couple of years ago and found it really an interesting period of time. I tried first on my own and had no success at all. Then I stumbled across a website called Raiden, if I remember right. Raiden had a huge instruction manual on how...
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