Three, perhaps four years ago I began looking to replace FreeBSD with Gentoo Linux. The reason was simple. FreeBSD had become mired in politics, members of the core team were leaving, and their next major release was behind Linux 2.6 in functionality and performance. What was once an icon of stable and elegant operating system development was quickly deteriorating. Gentoo presented itself to me at the time as a young, fresh approach to a ports system.
If you’re using phpSysInfo and finding it telling you to build PHP with the ‘xml’ module, add ’expat’ to your USE flags. Fixes it right up.
Around the early to mid-nineties I had heard a song on the radio, and like many, it got stuck in my head. I began listening to specific stations because I knew they would play it at least once a day. Then, as quickly as it appeared on the air, it went away never to be heard again. I spent a great deal of time combing through record stores and search engines trying to find this song.
Reading OSnews is an amusing pastime for me. It’s replete with comedic gems like this one: Why Apple snubs its open source geeks For over a month the claim has been made that MacOS X is now a proprietary operating system when it was once an open-source panacea, and many in the open source world have rattled their sabers and had a lot to say about how evil and draconian Apple is for having done so.
Having just seen the movie ‘The Da Vinci Code’, I must say I’m a bit surprised. I’m surprised because I found the book to be childishly written and the screenplay worked out better, which never happens. Also, while the story has clearly been sensationalized to the point of a number of people believing it to be true, or at least worthy of discussion as a serious, non-fictional topic, some of the ideas expressed are distorted realities.
I ran across this keynote speech on Chris Blizzard’s blog, and I think it deserves passing around. This is a keynote speech by Corey Doctorow, who used to be with the Electronic Frontier Foundation. This organisation basically fights for the preservation of the end-user’s rights in a world where the law is still being firmly established on the Internet. In this keynote he’s detailing a lot of the negative things that are happening to our rights to use the things we buy.
Lately I’ve taken note of a dark trend in the Linux world, and looking back it’s one that has been present throughout the history of Linux advocacy. Linux users commonly mention that large corporations spread propaganda about the superiority of their products and FUD about competing products in order to get ahead. This sort of trickery is pretty widely regarded as low on the ladder of civility, but I’ve found it to exist in spades in many open source communities.
Switching to WordPress from iWeb (although I still love iWeb, wordpress has a few nice features I miss). Hopefully a smooth transition!
While reading my regular list of news sites this morning I ran across an article detailing the improbability of Apple releasing a Red Box. To those who are unfamiliar, this is a long-rumored compatibility environment in which Windows applications would run alongside Mac programs, much as Blue Box ran Classic Mac applications within the new MacOS X. As I gave this some thought, I found that a red box environment could be built out of existing technologies with surprisingly little effort.
As I’ve been using Linux I’ve explored many varieties of software and many desktop environments to see which one had the best fit for me. I eventually began to see that the GNOME desktop environment was becoming the dominant player, and would probably represent the mainstream future of open source desktops. GNOME is a great environment to work in. Uncluttered and orderly, it presents the most common tasks available to the user and keeps the less common ones hidden but accessible.
