Penguin Pete has started a very interesting view of what drives people to use certain operating systems. You may find part one a little heavy, especially if you don’t know the history behind it. Basically, Pete has been slammed quite a few times for his blasphemous viewpoint that Ubuntu is a watered down version of Linux that doesn’t always show users the true spirit of Linux. Part two is a witty, well written historical (and fanciful) acount of how we arrived at the current situation. The fractionalization of the three main OSes is the subject of Part Three.

Flickr has a secret algorithm for producing a list of the most interesting pictures. So here are what Flickr thinks are my 10 most interesting pictures. Do you agree?

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.

So gNewSense 2.0 came out a few days ago as the gNewSense crew is tracking Ubuntu LTS releases. Of course, the bad part is that there is no upgrade path from gNewSense 1.0 to 2.0. Ubuntu recommends upgrading by going from release to release so upgrading is not feasible (or is too hard for the developers to implement) so freedom lovers need to have a good backup strategy.

Since I reviewed gNewSense 1.0, I wanted to structure this review as comparing and contrasting this release to the last one to see where the progress has come. They have a much cooler looking desktop background. There wasn’t anything wrong with the last one - it just didn’t have as much of a cool factor. They still have ugly icons on the screen.

Back when I reviewed an earlier version of Flock, one of my complaints was that it was impossible to watch Youtube because the video was always stuttering.  Well, the Flock programmers have fixed that bug and it’s now definitely usable to watch Youtube videos.  I’ll admit that I only watch, perhaps, 1 a month, but to most people that was a deal-killer before.

Some developers are working on a neat new program menu for KDE called Raptor Menu.  Thanks to Plasma and other underlying KDE 4 technologies it is now a pretty trivial hack to change the program menu if you don’t like the default.  Such enhancements exist for KDE 3, but they are all very kludgey.  Thanks to Plasma’s modular nature, it’s easy to replace it.  Even the KDE developers have acknowledged this when people have complained about their new program menu.  Bear with them to fix it, they say, but if you don’t like it, it’s now very easy to implement your own.

Thanks, as usual, to Monroe of xkcd:

Yes, the race for the White House has hit new lows, even for this race.  It appears that we haven’t learned from the past two races and it’s starting to scare me.  Both in 2000 and 2004 one of the biggest reasons stated for George W Bush winning was that both Al Gore and John Kerry seemed too “elite” and “aloof”.  George Bush seemed a little more down to earth, someone you could invite to a BBQ.  Well look where that got us!!

Which is not Mexican Independence Day.

Written Friday, 2 May 2008

Today I decided to upgrade my Mythdora to the latest verison, 5.0. I downloaded the CD media and booted into the install. I had to do a text install to be able to watch it on my TV. Then I just needed to yum install the kmod-nvidia drivers. (Although, first I had to uninstall the previous nvidia drivers - they were neither automatically upgraded nor uninstalled) I started at about 1930 and was able to be completely up and running by 2055, just in time so that I didn’t have to missmy 2100 recording of “Best Week Ever”.