About a month ago my wife asked me to get rid of the extra POS Linux and BSD computers I was using for my renderfarm.  They quite a bit of an eyesore and so I agreed.  Unfortunately, in the the group of computers I got rid of was my first ever Linux computer.  It ran Fedora Core 1 and ran the server that ran this website until I upgraded computers and moved to FreeBSD.  So it will be missed - I don’t usually attach too much emotion to objects – especially computers.  I didn’t care too much when I got rid of my old Dell.  But since that computer was what allowed me to get into Linux and learn all about libre software – which I had no idea about before.  All I have left now from that era is the computer now known as luigi and functioning as my print and file server.

If you use Fedora and you want to be able to do useful things like play MP3s or DVDs you need to add an external repository like FreshRPMs or Livna.  This is because MP3 playback is covered by patents in the United States, libdecss may be illegal to distribute, and a license agreement is required to playback DVDs.  Ever since I tried Debian, I liked their way of doing things.  The nonfree packages are in the official repos; they’re just disabled by default.

Linux Format Magazine already has a review.

And here’s the release announcement:

DATELINE: 2008-11-25

KEY FINGERPRINT: 61A8 ABE0 91FF 9FBB F4B0 7709 BF22 6FCC 4EBF C273

LOCATION: GEOSYNC ORBIT, FEDORA SPACE STATION VIA GLOBAL IRC NETWORK

BROADCASTING: FREEDOM FRIENDS FEATURES FIRST

(Cue J. Strauss' "Blue Danube.")

THIS IS FEDORA SPACE OPERATIONS ANNOUNCING with great pleasure the
successful launch of the new ship, Fedora 10: "Cambridge."

Strapped into the pilot seats are the latest GNOME (2.24) and KDE (4.1),
accompanied on their amazing journey by an all star crew of glitch free
audio, better printing and webcam support, and a new faster graphical
startup.

Also on this ride are wireless connection sharing and the next evolution
in PackageKit, hooking through your multimedia applications to help
install supporting software (codecs).

For developers and system administrators on this mission, we have built
in appliance tools, Eclipse 3.4, NetBeans IDE, improved virtualization
management with remote installation and storage capabilities, RPM 4.6,
and new security auditing toolsets.

Please remember to polarize viewports to properly enjoy Cambridge's
brand new graphics theme, "Solar," shining on the desktop. Also on this
flight is a new lightweight desktop environment, LXDE, joining the more
recent desktop envionment crew member, Sugar (from the starship OLPC
XO), and the venerable GNOME, KDE, and XFCE.

We are now leaving drydock for a 13-month mission of innovation and
exploration. Crew members and guests are invited to the forward lounge
to use, study, modify, and redistribute.

Get your copy of Fedora 10 today:

http://get.fedoraproject.org/

Join the many thousands of Fedora particpants and contributors:

http://join.fedoraproject.org/

If you missed the official launch, attend a Fedora 10 Launch Party near
you:

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FedoraEvents/ReleaseParty

Somewhere along the line I got into my head that Slackware was a distro that involved having to compile everything. From what I can gather from Wikipedia, The Slackware Website, and some comments to my Gentoo post, I was wrong. Slackware apparently uses packages, just like every other modern distro. The difference is that dependency resolution (at least with the default first-party tools) is up to the user. This clears up so much for me because I always wondered why someone would want to make a distribution based off of Slackware if the point of Slackware was to compile from source and be super hardcore. After all, Slackware doesn’t baby you and give you all these little GUIs to configure your system. You need to get down and dirty with Emacs (or even dirties with Vi) and edit those config files. Here’s what the Slackware site gives as the reason to use Slackware:

One of the biggest Ubuntu stories on the net is the elimination of xorg.conf.  They haven’t made it unnecessary, they’ve completely eliminated it.  If you create one and edit it - it will have no effect.  I have not yet upgrade to 8.10, so I can’t verify it, but so far I haven’t seen any news to the contrary.  I think this is very much against the spirit of Linux.  I think that people should not have to know that an xorg.conf exists, but I think if you are “smart” enough to know about it and want to muck about then you should be able to.  Perhaps you want to run your monitor at a non-standard resolution or refresh rate; Or maybe the default settings don’t work well.  Ubuntu - let’s make xorg.conf available for the tweakers and uncessary for the tyros.  Then we will have the best of both worlds.

I’ve been spending time in KDE on the weekends since I usually don’t need to update my podcasts (which I manage in Rythmbox) and here are my current impressions.  Now that the latest nVidia drivers have come out, I was able to enable the desktop composite effects in KDE.  This does not use Compiz, but rather KWin’s built-in effects.  The default effects were nice.  They slowed up my computer a little, but I was still able to run Blender, which is more than I can do in Gnome with Compiz turned on.

This month’s Linux Format Magazine came with CentOS 5.2 on the disc. CentOS, in case you don’t know, is a community supported version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. (RHEL) Again, in the unlikely case you don’t know - Red Hat is required to supply the source code to all GPL code it uses in RHEL. What they don’t have to do is supply the Source RPMs which make it extremely easy for a distro like CentOS to exist. They can take the SRPMs and just remove the Red Hat artwork/logos and repackage it off as their own. The GPL allows this. Why in the world would Red Hat do this? They are, in a way, helping for a gratis version of their distro to exist and take away money that might otherwise go to them.

Since both Gentoo and Sabayon were included on this Linux Format DVD, I decided I would first try and install Gentoo and then Sabayon and compare how easy the installations were since Sabayon is a derivative distro from Gentoo.  As you know, I was unable to get a working installation from the LiveCD of Gentoo.  If this was the case for most people, then the fact that they will no longer produce one is a good riddance.  Sabayon, like most of the “modern” distros (or at least Ubuntu and Fedora), display a loading screen instead of the “ok” messages.

For a long while there I didn’t want to check out the Avant Window Navigator (AWN) because I was shunning Compiz.  But now that I’m back on the Compiz (and since Metacity should have compositing “soon” anyway) I decided to give a shot when it was featured in Linux Format Magazine Issue 112.  I found the AWN packages in Fedora although for AWN only AWN-extras comes up.  You need to search avant-window-manager to get the main package.  It doesn’t matter since AWN-extras brings in AWN in the dependencies.  Here’s how my desktop looks before that:

Unless something went wrong between when I’m writing this post at 2324 on 29 Oct and tomorrow when it’s scheduled to launch, Congrats to the Canonical and the Ubuntu Release team on Ubuntu 8.10. The servers will probably be pounded today, so you might want to wait a few days before upgrading. I usually wait about a week anyway to make sure there aren’t any show-stopper bugs that somehow made it in. (this saved my bacon 1 or 2 releases ago)