Review: Slackware 13.1

KDE Main Screen

I 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 time to load.

LILO

Slackware is the oldest surviving Linux distribution, and it brings with it, alongside its famous rock-solid stability, a couple of quirks and anachronisms. For example, it is one of the few distributions that provides no form of dependency management; users need to install all dependent packages manually. Another example is how its ncurses-based installation interface dates back from the 1990s/early 2000s. Furthermore, it still uses the old Linux Loader (LILO) instead of GRUB; LILO is quite limited in terms of configuration and the number of operating systems and types of file systems it can handle, and making it play well with other non-Linux-based OSs (like Microsoft Windows) as far as I know is still a herculean task. Finally, unlike most distributions, Slackware provides no official route to installing GNOME, though it provides a plethora of other WM options alternative to KDE and Xfce.
With all these things in mind, follow the jump to see how my experience with the grandfather of distributions (well, not quite) turned out. I tested this in a VirtualBox environment with 1 GB of RAM and an available 10 GB virtual hard drive.

Ncurses Installer

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Movie Review: Toy Story 3

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 Barbie delivering the "power of the government derives from the consent of the governed" line was priceless), though I guess it's more to please the parents who are also probably watching. Other than that, aside from a few other funny moments (like Mr. Potato Head replacing his body with a tortilla), it wasn't anything truly special. All in all, I'm not really sure what all the hype was about (other than Andy going to college, and even then, I found his actions at the end when playing with the little girl and his old toys simultaneously funny and disturbing).

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Done with 1st Semester!

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 go?

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An Update on this Blog and the Respins

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 Oxidized Trinity 6 "Squeeze", a respin of Debian 6 "Squeeze" with Trinity 3.5.12 themed to look like KDE 4.1(ish). The download link is still here. Also, when I get the time, I'll update the wiki with information about this Debian-based Oxidized Trinity. (As an aside, interestingly enough, the top downloaders of Oxidized Trinity, as opposed to my other respins, use Microsoft Windows. Maybe that says something about KDE's ability to attract Microsoft Windows users. Then again, it's entirely possible that these are Linux users who just so happen to be downloading the ISO in Microsoft Windows. There's no way to know for sure.)
I haven't released a new version of Fresh OS in a while, and that's because of upgrade issues I've been having with those virtual machines. This stems from a couple of issues with upstream Linux Mint packages. Anyway, I'm waiting for the next snapshot to be released; that snapshot is supposed to have all the new features and themes of Linux Mint 10 "Julia", which may render Fresh OS "Traditional" unnecessary.
Finally, you may notice that the look of this blog has changed again. I really liked the old look, but the gadgets were starting to look weird in an old theme, so I decided to upgrade to a newer template and theme that. It didn't look quite the same, so I decided to try again. I think I've finally found something that imitates the parent theme (which, I found out after a lot of searching, is called "Subtle Beauty") well enough that I can stick with this. I hope you all like it too!

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Featured Comments: Week of 2010 December 5

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 the newer Optimus line of Nvidia cards. Nvidia has said they have "no plans" of supporting the switching technology under Linux. That means that in Linux, the Optimus cards will be locked into the Intel graphics performance, while keeping the Nvidia card on as well. Poor performance and poor battery life. Worst of both worlds. Hopefully Wayland will be able to work around this issue."

Thanks to all those who commented this week. Once again, if you like the material, please continue subscribing and commenting! (Also, I have final exams this week, so I won't be posting stuff as frequently.)

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Introducing UberBang 10.04

Main Screen + Openbox menu

If 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 more fully featured and a bit different anyway (though it does use Openbox as its WM). No, I needed something a bit more like the lovely #! 9.04.01.

SLiM Login Screen

Enter UberBang. It's a spin that I created of Ubuntu 10.04 LTS "Lucid Lynx" Minimal. This means that creating this distribution was much like creating Oxidized Trinity 6 "Squeeze" from a minimal Debian 6 "Squeeze" installation; post-installation, I needed to fetch all the requisite packages myself (though I will say that here, thankfully, sudo was properly configured out-of-the-box post-installation). For example, in #! 9.04.01, the scrot command line tool is used to take screenshots. As it is a pretty basic command line tool, I expected it to be installed out-of-the-box; I was wrong.
There were a couple things that I tried to do in UberBang 10.04 to make it feel more like the #! 9.04.01 I knew and loved (as opposed to the #! 10 "Statler" that I didn't like quite as much). For one, I installed Pidgin, Skype, PCManFM, and Cheese Webcam Booth, none of which are present in #! 10 "Statler". I also installed programs like VLC, PiTiVi Video Editor, Claws Mail, Liferea Feed Reader, and File Roller. Next, I installed all of the wallpapers and codecs used in 9.04.01. Finally, I tried to port the #! 9.04.01 Openbox themes and icons (as well as the tint2 configuration) over to UberBang 10.04. While this works overall, this also leads me into the (unfortunately rather long) list of issues to watch out for. Follow the jump to read more about this.
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Fedora 15: A Potential Savior?

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 Mint 9 LTS "Isadora" doesn't properly recognize my NVidia graphics card, so I can only use the Intel integrated card which works fine for me now but would choke under such processor-intensive activities. He then told me that Fedora 15 will have native support for seamless switching of graphics card drivers (especially these NVidia-Intel setups).
Linux Mint, I've loved using you for the last year and a half, but I'm definitely going to be looking into this more closely, because I really do want to use my laptop to its full potential in Linux. If Fedora 15 is relatively stable, I'll probably be using it until Linux Mint gains similar support (and if it comes in the rolling "Debian" branch, I'll just use that then). In any case, I'm excited!

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