Fedora Pre-Upgrade: Finally!
As many of you know, according to the Google search terms that bring people here. I am of the not-so-humble opinion that Fedora’s upgrade process is about as pleasant as being forced to walk through the desert without a canteen of water. First of all, they recommend to just do a fresh install which is a non-starter for me. I’d have to waste way too much time restoring all my files and settings. Ubuntu and Debian seem to get me through upgrades without reinstalling without any problems. I blogged about the horrors up upgrading to Fedora 8 here and here. I blogged about how awesome the yum upgrade worked here, here, here, and here.
Finally...evaluating the purpose of both Gobuntu and gNewSense
I’ve always been the first to jump to the defenses of people who love creating more distros and programs. After all, if everyone just stuck to the established distros we would never have had Ubuntu and perhaps Linux would still be just a curiousity to most. However, I just didn’t see the purpose in both Gobuntu and gNewSense. First of all, they’re both based on Ubuntu. It’s not even that one is Ubuntu and one is Debian or that one is Ubuntu and one is Red Hat-based. That would have made sense to me as perhaps they liked a different packaging format or something.
A Novel iTunes Exploit
Brought to us by Randal Monroe of xkcd:
Also, you much check this one out both for its mention of Python and the Asus EEE PC.
One last, good look at KDE 3 Part 1
As you can see, by trawling through this, I have gone back and forth between KDE and Gnome a lot. As I’ve mentioned many times before, I initially loved KDE over Gnome. It looked more like Windows, it had more neat options, and great programs. Not only is Amarok the best media player out there (although Rhythmbox is not far behind), but the KDE programs feel so much more tightly integrated than Gnome. That’s one part where they’ve always had a huge lead over Gnome, although Gnome has been catching up recently. Still, I hope that KDE continues to evolve its KParts and KIOSlaves infrastructures. (Or whatever they evolve into in KDE4) KDE programs also just seemed to fit together visually so much better, I don’t know why because Gnome has the HIG.
How Long *were* They in the Garden?
If you take the Biblical story of Adam and Eve literally (as opposed to figuratively or allegorically) there is one possible explanation for the world as science sees it that I’ve never, ever heard anyone propose. This shocks me as it seems to be a convenient answer that fits with the science. The Bible tells us that when Adam and Eve ate the fruit of the Tree (not the apple…) they had to die. This means that prior to that, they were immortals. At least that’s the only possible reading of the story of Adam and Eve that doesn’t make God a liar.
Photos Moving up The Ladder
Here are some photos that recently went up in views and I wanted to share. From Views 75 to Views 100: The Old Gun Factory - another view -bw by DJOtaku, on Flickr
Awesome? Or Too Much Time on His/Her Hands?
Someone decided to represent all of the Linux Distributions as Anime girls. What do you think? Does it represent the attitude of your favorite distro?
My Latest Procedural Art
More math-based art, but I really like how this came out a LOT better than my experiment with Fibonacci. Check them out!
Tight Cornell Archemedean Spiral by DJOtaku, on Flickr A really tight Archemedean Spiral featuring my photos tagged with Cornell
Portrait Archemedean Spiral by DJOtaku, on Flickr An Archemedean Spiral based on my Portrait Photos
The Ego-less Desktop vs The Commercial Desktop
In the most recent LugRadio episode was a feature about how the Gnome Human Interface Guidelines (HIG) states that applications should be named in the applications menu not as the program name, but as what the program does. This is something I’d like to explore a little more in another post. But during the discussions, they mentioned an interesting point: Gnome follows (or tries to follow) the paradigm of the ego-less desktop. This means that it’s not important who coded your program, it’s important what it does. And this got me thinking about one of the HUGE annoyances I have as I read the blogs and news pages about Linux. Everyone complains about how Linux isn’t quite there yet and how it needs to fix this or that before it’s easy enough for the proverbial Grandmother. Let’s take a look at some use casse and see how Linux is precisely the opposite - it’s MUCH easier to use than Windows.