I’m not 100% sure, but I think this is the longest I’ve purposely waited to upgrade to another Fedora release. I’ve been reading the Fedora user and developer mailling lists and what’s I’ve seen there has pretty much convinced me not to upgrade. First of all, there are a lot of answers to people complaining about Fedora 9 being unstable which include variations on “no one told you to stop using Fedora 8.” Some answers put it more politely and some more bluntly. And that’s ok. Just like the people who bought the iPhone last year got their pants pulled down over the price, so do those who upgrade to distros right away pay the price in instability. This happens with all distros from Fedora to Ubuntu. Sure, there’s an alpha testing period and a beta testing period, but not everyone can take part in that. I, for example, use my Fedora computer as my main computer for everything but gaming and photography. I can’t be unable to do my banking or type stuff up or work on my animations just because I’m trying the latest bleeding edge Fedora. And there are others like me, so the distro doesn’t truly get tested until it comes out. This is the argument used by the KDE team with respect to the POS that KDE 4 is, according to others - I haven’t tried it out.

Dang that’s a mouth-full! Let’s break it down a bit for anyone who may not be familiar with the lingo surrounding this very blue Linux. Mandriva Linux is the name of this distro. One is the name of the sub-distro. The choices are Free, One, and PowerPack. Free only contains free software. One is free as in beer, but may contrain some non-free software - perhaps, for example, MP3 playback capabilities. PowerPack costs money and contains commercial software such as Cedega, which would cost money if you got it anyway, and other software like Adobe Reader. The French and Brazilian folks at Mandriva release twice a year (Like Ubuntu and Fedora). This is the Spring release for 2008 and later we’ll have the Fall release.

Foresight Linux was supplied on the most recent Linux Format Magazine disc. Unfortunately, the distro doesn’t run in LiveCD mode (or at least such an ISO was not provided) so I decided to try it out in Virtualbox, which I have heard so much about. It appears to be equivalent to VMWare while also being mostly open source, so that was a bit of a draw.

A few quickies.

1) I fixed up a bunch of my links.  Some of them led to websites that no longer existed, one domain had been bought by a pr0n website.  So all my links should go to where they’re supposed to now.

2. I haven’t updated to Feodra 9 yet because I keep hearing that Fedora really jumped the gun on this release and there’s still a ton of stuff broken.  Since I use Fedora as my main daily computer, I can’t really sit there wasting time debugging it - especially since I’ve got a few animations that I’m working on.  I’ll move it it when it gets a bit more stable.  I’m thinking of maybe moving to another distro in the future.  Perhaps Mandriva….we’ll see.

I’ve been reading a lot of reviews recently about the upcoming Banshee 1.0.  ( Arstechnica and Linux Magazine, for example)  It looks like it’s going to be an awesome release, but I wanted to see where it is now and compare that to Rhythmbox.  As I mentioned here, I switched to Rhythmbox in May 2007 (a year ago!) from Banshee which I had been using approximately from May 2006 (when Mono programs were first introduced into Fedora).  Back then Banshee (and other Mono-based programs) were around version 0.1, but it was the new cool thing and everyone was talking about how awesome Mono would be for Linux.  (This is before everyone turned against it and Miguel de Icaza)  Eventually I left Banshee because it was slow and bloated (as are most Mono programs), couldn’t handle podcasts (which I had recently discovered), crashed when updating my large music library and when I changed Metadata it wouldn’t stay changed.  Since then Rhythmbox has been meeting all of my needs.  For Banshee to be worth switching to, it would have to provide all the features of Rhythmbox along with adding some new features.

I’ve used Damn Small Linux (DSL) quite a bit in the past. Before getting my laptop I used to use it to be able to get a Linux desktop at my in-laws’ house. I decided I wanted to try out some of these other lightweight Linux distros that everyone is always talking about. Even on Linux Outlaws they mentioned how they like some different light distros over DSL.  Since I’ve used DSL so much, I decided to evaluate these other Linux distros based on how they compare to DSL.

Fedora usually has a wacky little story to go along with each release.  Here’s the one for Fedora 9:

An ancient text prophesised this day would come, detailing the fate of all who are willing to accept what is offered to them:

http://docs.fedoraproject.org/release-notes/f9/index.html

And that day has come: the Computer said “I will convert these unbelievers, and now that I have Sulphur it will be easy.” At that, the heavens opened and burning Sulphur descended upon all the world, taking on many different forms.

If all goes well, then as this post appears at 1000, Sulfur will be released to the mirrors and available for download!  Enjoy!  If you download from scratch, be sure to use bit torrent so you can share the bandwidth.

Yesterday, to my surprise, when I went to LinuxToday, I found that I had been aggregated!

For those (like my wife) who don’t know what this means, it’s more or less the equivalent of a garage band being discovered and being invited to play at The Apollo.  I’ve wanted to have my Linux-related blog posts aggregated on there for years.  I’m happy to finally make it.  I hope this means I’ll be there more often.  Of course, I’m a little disappointed that this post was the one they chose to spotlight.  I have had so many better written Linux-related articles.  Oh well, better to get my blog out there and hopefully get posted more often than to never be posted at all.

I’ve been reading so much about all these Linux distros and I’ve been curious what they’re all about. In particular, Mandriva’s been calling to me a lot because I think that, had Ubuntu not been around, I probably would have installed it on my laptop. I’ve certainly had a bit of interest in the distro. There’s also all these other strange distros like GOS and Foresight Linux that I everyone’s talking about. I find myself wondering what’s so different or great about these? As you’ve noticed recently, the pendulum on my blog has swung away from Blender and back towards Linux while mostly skipping over politics (there really isn’t much to be said there that hasn’t been said over and over on cable news). So you may notice some more reviews on here.