from our friends over at xkcd:

Ok, I noticed that most complaints on the Fedora mailing list seemed to have been solved and it has bene a few months since Fedora 9 came out. So I figure that it’s time to finally upgrade. Also, my biggest problems appear to have been resolved. Although X.org is still in beta, nvidia has released drivers that will work in the interim. And today KDE 4.1 was released! I expect it’ll be in Fedora any day now. I was going to wait until it was there so I wouldn’t have to download all the KDE packages twice, but I figure it’s not that big a deal.

This month’s Linux Format Magazine had Linux Mint as one of the Linux distros on the DVD.  I’ve been hearing a lot of people talk about this Ubuntu-based distro.  So Mint is based on Ubuntu which is based on Debian.  Why not just base Linux Mint off of Debian?  Ok, so given that it’s based off of Ubuntu and Ubuntu is becoming synonymous with Linux because it’s so easy to use, why would you want to use Linux Mint?  I check out tout the Linux Mint About Page and I’ll sum it up here.  Basically they appear to be focused on making things even MORE user-friendly than Ubuntu.  It appears that they intend to do this in in two ways - by having the media codecs and firmware available and by having some better user interfaces.

Back in May I reviewed Puppy Linux along with a bunch of other lightweight Linux distros. This month Linux Format Magazine included Puppy Linux 4.0 on their disc and I thought I’d check it out. I’m mainly focusing on how things have changed and improved or gotten worse since Puppy 3.01. I burned the disc and put it into my test rig computer.

The first time it Kernel Panicked. So I told it to go completely in RAM like last time. Then it had some kind of “bread failed” kernel error and paused for 60 seconds. It tried to use UnionFS and kernel panicked again. I gave it one more shot with loading completely into RAM and ACPI off since that can sometimes wreak havok with Linux. It finally worked! Interestingly, when I rebooted, I had a hard time making that work again. Sounds like something the Puppy devs need to fix. However, I guess it could be something wrong with my burned CD.

This will be a few days old by the time this blog post appears on the site, but Gnome 3.0 is set to come out by 2010!  This is huge news!  Ever since Gnome started getting into the 2.2x series, people have constantly been asking about when Gnome 3.0 would be coming out.  Since the Gnome project has decided that Gnoem 3.0 would be an appropriate time to break API and ABI compatibility, they have been saving that until it was needed.  However, ever since KDE 4 was announced a few years ago, people have increased their calls for a Gnome 3.0.  After all, they don’t want to seem so ridiculously behind when compared to KDE.  Computer geeks like you and I know that doesn’t matter, but the lay person might think Gnome was outdated.  Now that KDE 4.0 is finally out and with KDE 4.1 due at the end of this month, it seems that the momentum has finally built up for Gnome 3.0.

It’s been a really long time since I last looked at Songbird. In fact, according to my blog, the last time I checked it out was version 0.2 back in October of 2006. The UI certainly has a bit more polish. I submitted some bug reports on their Bugzilla about Metadata problems with WMAs and problems with podcasts. Eventually, I just got frustrated and stopped using it. I updated to version 0.4 a while back, but it still seemed a bit unstable. With Rhythmbox and Amarok meeting my needs on Linux, and with me hating Windows Media Player so much, I’ve pretty much stopped listening to music on my Windows computer.

My wife’s aunt’s computer was always getting full of viruses.  I’d spend a few hours every time I came to visit removing the viruses and get the computer back to a working state.  Sounds like the perfect job for….. Linux!  All she does on her computer is email and watch videos - that’s it.  Plus, I can set everything to Vietnamese for her thanks to Linux’s great internationalization efforts.  Since I wanted a nice, worry-free desktop for her, I installed Ubuntu 8.04.

Once again I was pretty excited to find that I had been aggregated onto LinuxToday for this blog post. The funny thing is that I almost didn’t make that blog post as I was contemplating it for over a week and usually if I wait that long, the blog post doesn’t get written.

For what I think is the first time, I was dugg for my Xfce article!

For the past week to two weeks I’ve done something I had’t done in years - I switched my default desktop environment in my GDM login screen. I’ve been logging into Xfce instead of my usual Gnome. There are basically three reasons why I’m loving Xfce over Gnome.

First of all, I love the theme. I know it’s just Bluecurve, Redhat’s theme, for the Window manager, but I just love how it looks compared to Gnome. I can’t really explain it, but there’s something about the share of blue they’ve chosen and the way it blends with the White of the letters and min, max, close buttons that’s very, very pleasing to my eye.  It’s definitely one of those subjective things and I’m sure there are others who will disagree with me, but I think it’s beautiful.  There’s something about the shades of blue they use that I just love.  (For the curious, the theme of the desktop environment is Clearlooks, their newest theme, but that’s not available as a theme for the Window Manager)