People often groan when they hear of someone making another game of Tetris, Window Manager, or audio program.  After all, people ask, “Do we really need another?  Why can’t you just contribute to fixing annoying bug X in gTetris/KDE/xmms?”  I’ve always been on the side of the argument that said - “So what!  They’re doing it for free.  Not only that, but they’re not getting paid for this.  It’s their hobby.  So you can’t tell them what to make.  If they don’t WANT to help Amarok, then leave them alone.  Don’t download their program and they will eventually lose interest.”  I’ve never been one for telling people what they should do in their spare time.  (Not in any serious sense, anyway)

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:

From 25 to 50 views:

From 50 to 75 Views:

From 75 to 100 views:

This has also aways bothered me.  As usual, Randall, at xkcd, has put in a comic what was in my head.  Recently, I was thinking of making a post about how old concepts from the 1400s and 1500s still influence our terminology and words today.  One of the most prominent ones you often hear on the news is the reference of Europe as The West and China, et al as the East.  That never made sense to me growing up.  But if you consider that all of our history and culture is Eurocentric, it all makes sense.  Europe “discovered” the world.  And from Europe’s point of view, Asia and everywhere else in the world was The East.  That’s why people weren’t sure that if Columbus sailed West that he would get to the East before he ran out of supplies.

I’ve always been one of those guys that believe you should try everything you want to do.  Just throw it at the wall and see what sticks.  That’s how I got into blogging back in 2003.  (Holy cow, almost exactly 5 years to the day)  It’s also how I got into computer animation.  And photography.  But it’s also how I figured out that I am not into chemistry, weather phenomenon, Macintoshes, etc

From 75 Views to 100:

From 100 views to 200:

From 300 views to 400:

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.

First I updated Wine to 1.0.0 (It didn’t work properly on 0.94) on Ubuntu.  In there I have D as the CDROM drive. So I typed wine d:\install.exe  This installed just fine

Here’s what happened with 0.94 when I first started this post:

But the first time I clicked to play it, it did not work. The screen just went blank. When I restarted X, edited the registry keys as it says to do on the Wine site and started it up, this time it started up When I tried to play the first campaign it froze up Gnome so I restarted X again Wine FAQ says the movies folder should be renamed for stability reasons

Exactly how I feel, Randall - over at xkcd.