I originally got interested in checking out the Chakra project because it was based on Arch Linux. As I mentioned before, the super customizability doesn’t appeal to me. I don’t have time for that - perhaps if Arch had existed when I was in high school or college I might have enjoyed it. What I do like is that they tend to have the latest packages and they tend to keep the distro as simple as possible - with very few customizations. When I went to do my pre-review research, I found out that while Chakra WAS based on Arch, they’ve now split off into their own proper distro. (Kinda like Fuduntu and Fedora) While they still use Pacman and other Arch-y things, they’re slowly changing to their own products.

Two years ago I reviewed Arch Linux.  My conclusion at the time - great if you have to control every aspect of your system, but it’s not for me.  I later used it on my Pogo Plug to set up a file and print server and it definitely has its merits.  I know, generally speaking, that one of the best parts of using Arch is getting access to the latest software before anyone else.  So I decided to take a look at a few Arch derivatives that take the work out of getting Arch installed while still having the benefits of Arch’s early access.

Fuduntu started off as a customized Fedora install, but recently forked Fedora to create their own special distro that borrowed a bit from Ubuntu and a bit from Fedora.  It has a very nice look when it first starts up and I almost forget that it’s Gnome 2.x:

I decide to jump right into the install before doing any messing around.  I like their logo, “Punny Name, Serious Distro”.  Not surprisingly for a distro that started off as a modified Fedora, it uses anaconda for installation.  The first question I get is the hostname.  Then comes timezone and root password.  After that is partitioning and the install finally begins.  Overall, not too many options.  It’s neither the easiest installation ever nor the hardest.  I’d say it leans towards very, very easy, but I think Linux Mint actually wins for the easiest, nicest installer.  (And Ubuntu - which I haven’t installed for a few months now might edge it out of second place)  Overall, the installation is extremely quick, but I’m cheating in that it’s in a VM so, of course, I don’t need to worry about CD or DVD drive speeds.

I’ve installed Debian here and there on different computers in the last seven or so years that I’ve been using Linux.  I almost ended up being a Debian person, but the Fedora book at the bookstore was more comprehensive, so I was set along the Red Hat path.  On the one hand, I’ve often envied Debian both for its ease up upgrades and for its stability.  On the other hand, I like having the latest stuff.  KDE 4.8 is about to come out and I’ll be restless for the next few months before it makes its way into Fedora.  So Debian’s never quite been for me.  I’ve heard a lot about Aptosid (formerly Sidux) which turns Sid (the unstable repo) into a usable distro.  Of course, Ubuntu does this along with a little extra polish, so I figured I’d see what Aptosid’s up to.

So I took a look at Blogilo a few days ago. So, taking a look at my Blogilo post I have to say that it is pretty much ALMOST there for the perfect offline blogging tool for someone using Wordpress. Sure, it doesn’t allow your to create categories, but a blog like mine that’s been around for ~7 years probably has all the categories it needs. The extra fidelity can come from tags which Blogilo hands just fine.

For the most part, I haven’t seen the point of using blog editors like Blogilo.  While there might have been a purpose to them back in the dialup days, it seems pointless in the days of always on broadband connections.  Also, back before blog software like Wordpress had their great visual editors, I could see the need.  However, I guess I could see some use for it on my laptop.  I often compose blog posts on there in a text editor when I’m traveling.  It would be nice to have it all formatted correctly and ready to go when I got an internet connection rather than have to load up Wordpress then spend time formatting it when I could have done that on my laptop while I didn’t have a connection.

I’ve been using Virtualbox for a long time to run virtual machines when I want to check out other distros before I install them on one of my computers or to review them.  It’s MOSTLY open source, although some of the key parts like USB 2.0 are free to use, but not open source.  So now that Red Hat’s Virtual Machine Manager is starting to look pretty useful I figured I should check it out.  That way I could be using a FLOSS virtual machine program - assuming the features were good enough to match Oracle’s offerings.  Also, Virtualbox requires a kernel module that has to be recompiled every time a new kernel is installed and that’s annoying.  I figured I’d test out both programs by installed a VM of Centos.

As usual, every time I upgrade Fedora I write a blog post to preserve this knowledge for others who might run across the same problem or in case it happens to me again next year.  This time around the situation was a little less smooth than previous upgrades.  After the preupgrade was done, when I rebooted I was 2 MB short in /boot.  This shouldn’t happen to you if you started with Fedora recently, but I’ve been on the same install for two years.  In the past if the preupgrade failed, the installer would put your system back into its previous configuration and you could use it again.  This time around it didn’t do that and I no longer had a working system.  It complained that a bunch of services weren’t starting and I couldn’t get a shell, not even in single user mode.

I’ve spoken about Amarok’s Dynamic Playlists before.  Despite my best attempts, I couldn’t quite get it to work correctly.  However, Amarok 2.4.3 has revamped the dynamic playlists engine and interface, so I wanted to check it out and see if it worked better as well as testing out some of the new features.  For one thing, they changed the interface to more closely match the interface for static playlists.  See:

Just used preupgrade to go from Fedora 14 to 15.  The entire process took about 3 hours.  That’s not too shabby!  In the old days of disc upgrades it had to go for days.  Yum upgrade often had to work overnight.  This one was much faster!  After the upgrade, I had to turn off my dropbox repo - apparently they don’t have a Fedora 15 repo turned on yet.  That allowed me to run yum distro-sync which bought me up to more or less at least what’s in Fedora 15.  Otherwise you’re just upgrading your packages, but you may be missing some new ones that were added in.  That’s what messed me up on the last upgrade.  I still have to work on the rpmnew thing to get my config files as close to what they should be as possible and I have to figure out if the orphan packages I have installed are programs I should get rid of to make sure they don’t potentially cause problems in the future.  KDE is working just as good as before.  GDM looks very different - very similar to Gnome 3 and Gnome Shell.  I’ll have to sneak in there later on in the week and try Gnome Shell out.  Sound works and everything else works.  (I only use an Ethernet connection so it’s not too complicated of a situation)