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To answer my one reader's comments ... the geekier my posts, the better life is!

Sidux: Early Returns

I like it! I really must admit that I like many things about this distribution very much. It was extremely easy to install, and though I had to edit my xorg.conf to include 1280x1024 resolution, and my refresh rate was different enough to disiorent me slightly at first, I got used to it before long. I'll be changing it to 60Hz next time I use it, just to avoid that, in fact.

But overall, ease of use is there, it installed quickly and easily, with a ton of programs that I use normally (of course, as a branch of debian, firefox and thunderbird are replaced with iceweasel and icedove). It would not be painless to switch over to that full time (a lot of the community being in German, and my Deutsch being very, very thin), but it wouldn't be too intimidatingly difficult.

I did have one unsolved issue, which was installing beryl, but I have a feeling that I'm missing some dependencies.. I was able to get it installed, and run it, but it seemed to break the window manager altogether. This could be a lack of XGL, but honestly, I'm not sure what it is. I'll have to do some more reading before I play with it again.

All in all, I definitely liked it.

Stuff I must have

There are a few non-standard programs I have to remember to install, as well. For example, all the LaTeX (or rather, TeTeX) packages, but I generally remember those as I try to use them, and they're painless to put in place. The main non-standard kubuntu apps I use (most of them available in repositories but not installed by default), are:

1. Firefox. Duh.
   
2. Thunderbird. I just don't like kmail very much.
   
3. QComicbook. Its a very nice comic book .cbr reader. Needs the rar/unrar packages.
   

Wow. I really thought there were more than that. Opera likely won't have a Feisty package available, though, and I'll have to, of course, install all the other packages that ubuntu annoyingly leaves out, for building software from source. But again, those are fairly easy to take care of when they are needed.

A few things before I make any changes to my system, I wanted to document the problems I'd had at my last reinstall, and what I'd done to correct them. I got about halfway through the list, but I figured I might share it if not with anyone (because, come on, who is actually going to read this?) at least online for my own reference.

I had been using BasKet to keep track of them, as it really is a handy little app for quick note taking, quick reference links, etc. So here goes:

• Set up a 'Not heard in 30 days playlist in amaroK'

This was relatively easy, in retrospect, and now that I know how to do it, I've been playing around with variations on it -- though they have been less successful. Here's the howto I worked from originally.

• Mouse forward/back buttons in web browsers, etc.

This gave me a whole bunch of problems, even though its a relatively minor annoyance, I have this fancy mouse, and I like using it. I found many walkthroughs and howtos, but this is the one that I finally got it to work with.

• Googlebar in firefox

Okay. Seriously. I love the google toolbar. But it doesn't love how ubuntu reports itself to the browser. It wants it to just say 'linux', instead of the more specific information that it gets. I found the workaround here.

I had some other things I wanted to get working, for example, I had a problem with kwallet's password management for kopete. I got it working eventually, but I'm afraid I don't recall exactly how. It came from a lot of flailing at its GUI, and I finally got everything updated. I have a feeling that it all stemmed from me buggering it up with incorrect passwords from the start, though. So I suppose I can avoid that in the future by not being retarded.

I do continue to have problems with konqueror's handling of audio CD's, but I've just not used that particular point of functionality. I wasn't able to get my various USB peripherals to automount to specific locations (other than usbdisk-n), and I wasn't able to (nor did I try very hard, after my first couple attempts) to get movies converted to a format which would work on my fancy ipod and/or getting them onto said ipod.. nor does digikam recognize the Casio Exilim camera I got for christmas..

And the last thing on my list is 'desktop icons'. I only vaguely recall what this refers to, and it was last on the list for a reason. It will stay last.

Focus

Right. So, I've lost it completely. But I'm going to make another attempt with a different distro, and at the same time, upgrade my main kubuntu desktop to Feisty. I've heard (on the ubuntu podcast) that there's a problem with one of the Fiesty Herd releases that it doesn't recognize hardware. So step one is to burn the Herd 4 CD image and make sure it works. The workaround is to install a command-line only Edgy distribution, update sources to Fiesty (and dist-upgrade), and then apt-get install the Kubuntu-desktop packages.

Hopefully, I won't have to deal with that.

On the other end, I'm going to switch from the main branch of Debian to Sidux, as it seems more specifically geared towards what I want to do. It is always based on the Debian Sid, and it defaults to a KDE desktop enviornment, which is my preferred desktop.

There are a couple of things I want to play around with on that testing side of my PC, one of which a friend left me an excited voicemail about while I was at work on Saturday morning, called Songbird. I'm also thinking it might be time to test out KDE 4, and definitely taking a newer version of amaroK (1.4.5) out for a spin, as I've been using 1.4.3, from the ubuntu repositories.

Of course, now that I think about it, the new version of amaroK is likely in the Fiesty Herd 4 (I can't bring myself to call it Fiesty Fawn. I'm sorry. I just can't.) install as well.

Oh, if only the odd dream I had, that I had until the end of february to spend $2,000.00 and get reimbursed for it all by my bank were true... then I could be playing with all this stuff on a brand new laptop. ;)

Powered by Vista

This makes me wish I had $200 to burn and a paper shredder.

Speaking of Network

Network

I want to say, finding this post on Warren Ellis' blog, only a week or two after it was mentioned on wwdn, reminds me once again what a great film this was. It is relevatory in its look at how media companies have come to handle their News departments, even moreso when you look at the 24 hour cable news channels. If you haven't seen it, put it on your netflix queue, or just go buy it from amazon.

So far...

So, I've been fiddling around, and I installed one of the apps that I wanted to play with. The reason I hadn't installed Democracy Player before was that its a gtk app, and I didn't want to install all the gnome dependencies on my kubuntu setup. The thing is, while I find it to be interesting, I just can't get past the pure ugliness of the gtk aspect of it. Its got a nice, slick interface for say, 90% of the window, and then there's this big blocky section with horribly ugly buttons.

So, I'm going to play around with it tomorrow and see if function can overcome form.

My failure of the evening, comes in configuring xterm to be more friendly. I've found a couple walkthroughs for editing .bashrc or setting up profile files in ~, but none of them seem to work when I bring up a new xterm. I may just end up reverting back to kde's konsole, simply because I like its different settings.

A plus is that apparently new versions of Firefox (or Iceweasel, the form of it you get with debian) was actually able to install flash seamlessly, without having to install manually, as I've always had to do in the past.

I may/should be playing around with this a bit more, tomorrow. For now, its time to just veg out and watch more Scrubs.

Did you stitch your initials in me?

Set up!

Well, I've set up debian, installed xorg and fluxbox to experiment a bit in a more minimal enviornment. Really, I'm mostly watching the first season of Scrubs, which I borrowed on DVD from a friend ... so very enjoyable.

Back again

Okay, when I first thought of setting this up tonight, it was to document setting up a currently unused partition on my machine (currently running kubuntu primarily, and Windows almost exclusively for playing Civilization) as a sandbox for playing around with Debian GNU/Linux and some things that I've been meaning to explore for some time now. Hopefully one day I'll migrate to that completely, but for now ... just learning.

Then I thought, hey, I've always liked talking about music, and movies, and I'll probably do that. And post about things I read online, since I spend an inordinate amount of time reading about things online.

But really, when it comes down to it, I just want to show this off somewhere:

I am: William Gibson The chief instigator of the "cyberpunk" wave of the 1980s, his razzle-dazzle futuristic intrigues were, for a while, the most imitated work in science fiction.

Which science fiction writer are you?

Warren? I totally win.