Yet Another Linux Blog - Page 51 of 54

The Great Schism Continues and the Rift Grows Wider

We can never be sure that the opinion we are endeavoring to stifle is a false opinion; and if we were sure, stifling it would be an evil still. ~John Stuart Mill, On Liberty, 1859¹

It has happened again. Just like water seeps into cracks in rocks and freezes in the cold, splitting them apart…so has an ideal begun to chip away at Linux. In my previous post on this subject I talked about how Linux was beginning to be categorized. Not in the normal categories you would think…but in demographic and social categories. Linux is beginning to become associated with political ideas and social idealism. Political Correctness and concepts of sexism have flexed their muscle from within Debian.

The Debian Women’s Group (link broken at the time of this article) have spoke yet again against something considered sexist. Instead of being sexist language in a file…we have something a bit different. Newsforge reported on a small program that had been submitted for packaging called Hotbabe, which is a graphical representation of CPU activity. It depicts a cartoon woman who strips off clothing with higher CPU activity and is based on the artwork of Bruno Bellamy, a French cartoonist. The synopsis of what happened is this: Someone didn’t like the fact that this could be considered sexist or erotica…so they submitted a bug to the list and started a thread on the Debian Women’s Mailing list. A BUG!?!?? Since when did content become a “bug”? For that matter, where in Debian Policy does it say that a package must contain content that is unoffensive to all groups?? Wouldn’t that defeat the concept of free software and uncensored free software?

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Dual Booting? Reinstall Windows Without Losing Your Apps & Settings

I’ve found a nice tip for something that always happens….you have to reinstall Windows XP. I’ve had to do this twice in the past 2 years for my Windows box. This is especially good for those of us that dual boot…Nothing frustrates me more of having to do a complete reinstall and losing all of my apps and settings in the process (as I did on my first reinstall). So I set out to find a way to reinstall without overwriting the important stuffs. A buddy of mine that I work with scribbled this info down onto a paper for me…if it is posted somewhere else or from another site, I apologize and please correct me so that I might give credit where credit is due.

To keep your settings and apps, follow the instructions posted here:

(Link Removed…Forum is no longer being used)

5 Distros of Desktop Linux go head to head…

Not all distros are created equal. This is something I’ve found out the hard way during the past 10 years I’ve experimented with Linux. Keeping this in mind, I wanted to search for the most new user friendly distribution of Linux I could possibly find on the market in order to recruit my friends and acquaintances to Linux. In order to find the best of the best, I’ve selected 5 distributions of Linux that are some of the top rated ‘Desktop’ linux distros (according to distrowatch.com and user opinion). I’m going to install each one of these distros for a week and let my wife try to do all of the stuff she normally would do (blog entries, surf web, email, burn CD’s, listen to mp3s, link her portable media device) and see how each one stacks up to each other. My wife is a new user to Linux. While she does know the basics of what Linux is…she’s never used a Linux desktop. I hope this qualifies her as a ‘new user’.

I’ve selected the criteria that all distros will be judged on which I will post after I install Knoppix to hard disk and do a quick comment under the ‘distros’ category here (sometime next week). I install these distros before hand to ensure that there are no large issues that cause problems for me so that when we go to actually rate these distros…they’re all on the same starting point. I also do a quick commentary with my take on the distro so you know my biases and opinions (which I will eliminate from the rating process as much as possible).

We’re one week away from posting the criteria of rating and 2 weeks away from getting started. It is important to note that if any hardware conflicts arise, I will not help my wife resolve them. She has told me that if something that ‘just works’ in XP doesn’t work in Linux, she’s giving up on that distro and moving on. That sounds a lot like what a new user would do so I have no problems with that. So, some reviews might be quite short. I’ll be equipping my wife with the command alsaconf and that is it 🙂 We’ll really know what distro is great because the hardware configuration (posted earlier in another entry) is really standard and isn’t cutting edge new…if a distro can’t detect and install what I’ve got…they not really that great. If I were to add a modem to this, I’m sure that it would really throw a kink in many distros spokes…but I think I’ll save the modem/winmodem tests for a part II of this feature. I’ll publish each review by mrs.devnet in the ‘reviews’ category here with as many screenshots as possible. Countdown, 2 weeks.

Fedora Core 3. Polished?

I type this from Firefox 1.0 after updating FC3 via yum. Upon first booting FC3 I think there is a sense of eager anticipation…it is visually pleasing. This is a perfect second distro (I’ll explain further on in this post) but I don’t think it is a very wise choice for those crossing over into Linux for the first time. It’s bound to score low for mrs.devnet because there is quite a bit of configuration that is needed to get it up and running. The sound didn’t work out of the gate. I’m used to alsaconf…so I didn’t go into the menu’s right away to get the sound working. While I do like the organization that they have going on in the menu AND the ability to get your sound going by clicking on a menu option…I don’t like the fact that I am not able to run alsaconf if I want to. One other peeve is the fact that when I go to do a yum update via commandline…I have no gpg key set. It tells me to run rpm –import blahblah.key.gpg and when I do…it fails. This was annoying but the up2date gui is very nice and eliminated the need.

I’d say the worst part about things is that there are no plugins installed by default in the web browsers. Trying to install them…both fail automatic installs. Mrs.devnet would be stopped in her tracks right there. Any new user would be stopped in their tracks. They’d be about as inclined to try a manual install as they would to try and stick their fingers into a blender. So…while FC3 is visually pleasing with a fantastic install…I believe it to be more hype that anything. We’ll see how it stacks up when mrs.devnet gives it the test drive.

Knoppix is in!

Kanotix and Knoppix.? Great distros….but not extremely new user friendly to install onto hard disk. However, to be completely fair…many new users are exposed for the first time to Knoppix. So, I’ve decided to include Knoppix in the list of desktop distros for the review. Some may swear and some may cheer…doesn’t matter…knoppix is in. On a different note: I installed kanotix last night and was thoroughly impressed with it. It’s got real potential to develope into a well thought out distro.? It has a great installer you can use that is included right on the disk. I have one complaint…why not put the installer in an icon on the desktop?? Wouldn’t that be simple?

Yoper doesn’t fulfill the bargain…

I gave the latest version of Yoper a try tonight and was not impressed. It’s an extremely different installation. I was able to get everything installed after a couple of tries to see different options and how they would play out. However, I could not get either Lilo or Grub to play nice. I thought that perhaps the media had been messed up (even though md5 checksum was ok) but everything checked out fine. I tried switching filesystem types because I’ve heard that grub doesn’t like reiserfs much…but no go. So, unfortunately, the “fastest Linux distro out of the box” has to be put back into the box and out of my little test. I may have to just remove one distro out of the list.

I’m going to ‘attempt’ a couple of more installs before I throw in the towel. I’ll attempt Kanotix and Arch Linux to see if things will play nice…I just want another unknown distro to fill in with some of the more well known ones now to showcase it’s desktop. Perhaps I’ll find it in one of these two.