First of all, I guess we got all jealous of Ubuntu because we have a startup sound now. There goes signing in with the speakers on late at night or early in the morning. Second, I apparently no longer have any functionality in Gnome. There are no panels, I can’t right-click the background. I can rotate a cube, but that’s about it. Oh, and I can move my mouse around. Time to figure out what went wrong.

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.

The exciting conclusion to my pictures from the Orioles game:

Saturday, I went to the Orioles v Angels game. Here are some of the shots I got:

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.