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.

The following was live-blogged on 25 Jul 2008:

Got my Neuros OSD today via UPS!  w00t w00t!  I’ve been lusting after this since it was featured in Linux Format Magazine last month.  (or was it two months ago?)  I unpacked the contents and skimmed through the quick start guide.  Then I hooked it up in my bedroom and connected it to the ethernet network. They have a neat little opening animation about how Neuros is about open technology.  Unlike other companies that build on open source technologies (I’m looking at you TiVo), the guys at Neuros Technology are proud of this and are using it to their advantage.  In fact, they have a few Google Summer of Code projects working on improving the firmware - free engineering hours.  That’s one of the benefits of open source.  Another benefit is that someone like me (or, more likely, someone with lots of programming chops) can take the hardware they’ve developed and then tweak the code to make it do whatever they want.

I just got Anberlin’s latest album, “New Surrender”.  I was pretty lukewarm about “Cities” and Danielle just about hated it.  We both loved “Blueprints for the Black Market” and “Never Take Friendship Personal”.  This album is a return to the sounds and lyrics of those first two albums.  I loved it upon first listen.  Danielle summed it up best, “It’s like their first two albums, but more mature.”  I’ve only started listening to it for the second time, so I’m still picking up the lyrics.  What I’ve heard so far continues their tradition of poetic lyrics that take a few listens to fully appreciate.  If you’ve been on the fence about this album after hearing “Cities”, definitely get “New Surrender”.  If you liked “Cities” and hated the first two albums, you probably won’t like “New Surrender”.

Hardly a day goes by that I don’t see an article on Linux Today about Moonlight and what a horrible person Miguel de Icaza is. So I thought I’d go ahead and do some exploration of what’s going on with Moonlight and Silverlight. First of all, what’s Silverlight? Check out the Silverlight article on Wikipedia. Basically, Silverlight is Microsoft’s answer to Adobe’s Flash. MS is pretty peeved they haven’t been able to get people off of PDF and onto their own format. They waited way too long while the rest of us realized that PDF is great if you want to make sure that the document you create is displayed the same way on everyone’s computer regardless of the fonts they have or which version of Office they have installed. (Or if they even have office installed)

It’s time once again for a Linux distro review.  This month, Antix 7.5 was included on the LXF DVD.  It’s another light distro, so I will use the same metrics I used in the Lightweight Linux Throwdown.  Antix is based upon Mepis which is, in turn, based upon Debian.  I think at one point it was based on Ubuntu, but I think they’ve gone back to being based on Debian.  So, let’s get down to it.  Here’s a screenshot of my desktop upon boot.

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