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.

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.