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.

If you are an American reader of this blog, make sure you vote.  It doesn’t matter who you vote for - just vote.  And keep your eyes out for any hanky-panky with the voting machines.

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)

Another distro in the seven distros included in Linux Format Magazine issue #110 is Gentoo 2008.0.  This is an interesting release given the recent news that, at least for the time being, Gentoo is not going to be releasing these discs anymore.  Apparently for both of the last two years there has been a lot of trouble with compiling the LiveCDs.

On the one hand, yearly (or biannual like Ubuntu) releases are redundant for Gentoo users.  You just install Gentoo and from then on you just emerge newer versions of packages and always stay up to date.  I have to say this is one of the features that makes Gentoo very attractive to me considering all the problems I’ve had with Fedora in-place upgrades.  But if they are no longer making these annual LiveCDs, what will the Linux magazines feature on their distro discs?  After all, there are people who have bandwidth issues and can’t download Linux distros to instasll.  They are dependent upon magazines to carry the latest releases.  And you know the magazine isn’t going to make a LiveCD for Gentoo.  I still think that a yearly snapshot makes sense.  Also, there has to be a starting point from which the user has a rolling updating system.

For some reason, I didn’t get Linux Format Magazine issue #110 when I was supposed to. I ordered another copy and it arrived recently, so it’s time for another slate of Linux reviews. Unfortunately, something appears to be wrong with the way they mastered the magazine DVD, because I was unable to boot into any of the Slax options. So I went online and got the latest ISO off of http://www.slax.org.

Got Spore on Saturday and I’ve been playing it more or less non-stop since then. It was very, very fun! A lot more fun than I expected from the reviews. I don’t blame the reviewers since the game had been hyped for the past three years. I think the cell stage sucks and I don’t know if I’ll ever play it again. It’s very boring and there isn’t much to do other than eat red or green dots. The tribal stage was also boring and needs some tweaking - perhaps a la expansion pack. All the other stages have been a lot of fun - especially the creature stage.

First my amaturish Creative Commons video:

The Creative Commons from djotaku on Vimeo.

Now, this awesome one I saw on Lawrence Lessig’s Blog:

So, I was working on fixing up some armature problems with the characters for I’m Not Mad.  If you watch David’s Lip Sync you can see there were some major fixes needed for the Dan and Dave characters.  Well, in the time since I started working on the character models Blender 2.46 was released.  In 2.46 a new Hair Particle system was added to make working with hair a lot easier.  So, here’s the David character’s new hair.