lucis

I’ve used gnome as my default desktop for the better part of the last three years. Why? Because it “looked” better than KDE back when I tried them both. KDE was a tad faster, but everyone wants some eye candy! But it looks like KDE has come a long way. This post has convinced me to give KDE another spin. Of all the things mentioned, I think amarocK looks the most impressive. A serious iTunes replacement? We’ll see…

Found this on gentoo forums. Apparently a bug in gcc 3.3 and 3.3.2 causes a sinple 20 line program to completely crash a system running linux 2.4.2x and 2.6.x. Whats worse is that no special permissions are needed for this - any user on your system with execute permissions can bring it down. Even if this really is a gcc bug, the kernel should never allow a thing like this to happen.

I just tried it and it crashed both my laptop and desktop (running linux 2.6.5). While it makes sense to disable logins all critical systems, many unix mail and web servers dont do this. This is really scary with all the 2.4 installations out there!

Have been playing around quite a bit with the gentoo installation on my laptop and at work. Yea, I now use linux almost exclusively on two of the three computers I work on. Just wanted to post an update on some of the cool stuff I’ve installed.

Firstly, I got swsusp2 (hibernate to disk) working, thanks to this howto. Works almost perfectly, including 3d acceleration under X using the X-DRI driver (the ATI binary driver is too buggy). Suspend takes about 5 seconds, and resuming from it about 20. Well, not perfect, but its a start! What I want to do next is to setup a good ACPI configuration to take care of frequency scaling, auto-hibernate, auto LCD brightness control etc.

Also found this really cool add-on to Gnome called gdesklets. This lets you add dynamic content to the desktop. Very flexible and highly configurable. Also provides great eye-candy. Imagine, the latest slashdot headlines, and weather info on the desktop updated in real time! Maybe I’ll try Freedesktop’s Xserver sometime if I am feeling really brave… Cant wait for it to become more mainstream.

Its interesting how once linux was criticized for being too dull and not very fun to look at. Today it is exactly the opposite. Windows is easily the ugliest looking OS around, and it is a battle between Gnome, Kde, MacOSX, and other nifty WMs are fighting for the prettiest desktop!

The only thing that is currently preventing me from switching my home desktop/server to gentoo is iTunes. I really like this app, and have been unable to find something under linux that comes anywhere close in terms of library management, ease of use, and ipod integration. But several apps like rhythmbox, musik, muine, zinf come quite close, and I have a feeling that I will be able to make the switch soon.

For the past week I’ve been working on getting Gentoo to work on my Dell 600m. All I can say is that I’ve never had so much fun with linux since the first time I installed Slackware about nine years back!

For the past year and a half I’ve been using Windows XP almost exclusively, all the while lusting for a Mac OS X computer, but never really being able to afford one. This was mainly because I was too lazy to setup linux so that everything was streamlined (procmail, fetchmail, fonts, etc etc…). Another reason is that Windows XP really is pretty stable (I have had months of uptime!)

Now I finally decided to give gentoo a shot. It is supposed to be more raw than slackware and debian, and had always caught my attention. The installation was took about a day, but that was mainly unattended. For the uninitiated, this is because gentoo compiles everything on the computer it is being installed on. This ensures best performance and no feature bloat. You simply decide what options you want to enable using the USE environment variable, and then start installing packages using the magical emerge command. It automatically resolves all dependencies, downloads the source code from the net, compiles, and installs the software!

Once you get the hang of it, it is really magical. You want to install firefox, for example; just type emerge mozilla-firefox. And the best of all, if you want to upgrade to the latest, greatest version of gentoo, simply type something like emerge sync; emerge -u world. This updates all the packages on your system to the latest. And it does this nicely in the background while you continue your work. No more re-installing from scratch, or even doing a traditional upgrade of the software - ever!

The next thing I realized is how much better Gnome is now. I’ve always been a KDE user, but Gnome has totally blown me away. It is kind of like the poor man’s Mac OS X

That said, not everything works perfectly yet. I am still struggling to get the fonts just right. Suspend does not work on my laptop - ACPI support is still experimental. But its getting there…

Installation can take a long time - days of compiling on slow hardware. Tweaking the options can be hard for someone who is not already comfortable with linux. But for the brave, the rewards are amazing. Easily the best linux distribution. Perhaps even the best OS ever!

Have been thinking about getting an iPod. Specially interested the smaller capacity, lower cost ones that have been rumored. I dont really need 10GB, and a cheaper price will help!

While doing a related web search, came across this. These people have successfully managed a working linux installation on the ipod. This is absolutely crazy! I thought the handhelds.org work to get linux to work on a PDA is great and useful, but this is taking it to a new limit! Absolutely amazing!

So, I have to ask… how much longer before I have a linux installation on my toothbrush? And then add bluetooth (pun) to the toothbrush. Now I can have all the statistics I’d ever want about my brushing right on my desktop without the toothbrush having to leave the bathroom! Imagine the possibilities for dental health!

Oh well…