Indigo Jo Blogs

In the last few weeks there has been the usual flurry of new Linux distribution releases. Ubuntu's new one, Gutsy Gibbon, came out in October; SUSE released version 10.3, Mandriva have just put out their 2008 release (the second this year; the last was 2007.1, and the 2007 version itself came out this time last year), and Fedora, which was originally Red Hat Linux until the company realised it wasn't making money out of that product, have just put out version 8. I tend to have two versions of Linux sitting on my computer, one on each of two 40-gigabyte hard drives, and right now I've got Fedora 8 on one and SUSE (or rather openSUSE) 10.3 on the other. Until recently I had the previous version of Ubuntu on the drive on which Fedora now sits, but I found Gutsy less responsive and with more bugs than the old version. I installed the third Release Candidate of Fedora 8 earlier this week, but yesterday I found aspects of it annoying and got the notion to move on.

Continue reading "Mandriva One 2008: brain dead" »

Posted by Indigo Jo at 10:13 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Last month the British Linux magazine, Linux Format, did a big comparison of the current crop of Linux packages or distributions (distros for short), concentrating on the ten most popular as measured by DistroWatch. They were SUSE (version 10.2), Fedora (Core 6), Mandriva (Spring 2007), PCLinuxOS (2007), Debian (version 4), Ubuntu (7.04 "Feisty"), Slackware (version 11) and Sabayon (version 3.4). Of these, Ubuntu came out as a clear winner, scoring full marks in hardware support, community and software selections and very highly in security and performance. At the bottom, Slackware and Sabayon came out very poorly on all fronts, while the others all seemed to fail badly on at least one issue. With PCLinuxOS (a relatively new distro but now the second most popular on DistroWatch, an installable live CD based on Mandriva), the fall-down point was security (although their main criteria was how long it took to patch a security hole which was revealed a full year ago, something which affects none of the versions they were testing); with Fedora and SUSE, it was performance. Having a computer which I use mainly for programming and experimenting (things like typing letters I do on my Mac), I've installed most of these at some point in the past year. My experiences haven't been happy, in a lot of cases.

Continue reading "The current crop of Linux distributions" »

Posted by Indigo Jo at 8:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (8) | TrackBacks (0)

Technorati Tags: charlie brooker, i hate macs, mac, linux, opensuse, suse

This Monday Charlie Brooker (Guardian columnist of Nathan Barley and TVGoHome fame) told the world why he hates Macs in the most-read page on Comment Is Free this week. He not only hates Macs, but also people who use them and "even ... people who don't use Macs but sometimes wish they did". Thabet @ Eteraz agrees with him. Brooker reckons that "Macs are glorified Fisher-Price activity centres for adults; computers for scaredy cats too nervous to learn how proper computers work; computers for people who earnestly believe in feng shui" and that the "I'm a PC/Mac" adverts, which in the UK feature a comedy duo called Mitchell and Webb, whom I've never watched, are "devastatingly accurate" for the wrong reasons:

[Mitchell & Webb] are a logical choice in one sense (everyone likes them), but a curious choice in another, since they are best known for the television series Peep Show - probably the best sitcom of the past five years - in which Mitchell plays a repressed, neurotic underdog, and Webb plays a selfish, self-regarding poseur. So when you see the ads, you think, "PCs are a bit rubbish yet ultimately lovable, whereas Macs are just smug, preening tossers."

Continue reading "And I'm a Penguin (but my Mac's well weapon)" »

Posted by Indigo Jo at 10:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (5) | TrackBacks (0)

Yesterday I went to the second LugRadio Live event in Wolverhampton, organised by the Wolverhampton Linux User Group who do a fornightly "podcast" in which they discuss the state of the scene and interview various important people. Last year it was in the Molineux stadium terrace bar and featured the BBC's Bill Thompson and Mark Shuttleworth, the money behind Ubuntu. This time they had Sarah Ewen of Sony, discussing the Playstation 3 and running Linux on it, Michael Meeks of Novell (talking about the office suite OpenOffice.org, Stephen Lamb of Microsoft (talking about "how to securely integrate Linux and Windows") and Simon Phipps of Sun (topic: "the Zen of Free"). I have to say that I didn't hear all of these talks because there were other events going on at the sides, where I usually was. It ended with a live recording of a LugRadio show, as did last year's. The event continues today, but I could only afford to attend one day (not due to entry fees, but travel costs).

Continue reading "LUGRadio Live 2006 report" »

Posted by Indigo Jo at 8:55 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Technorati Tags: ubuntu, kubuntu, apple mac, emac, linux

On Sunday evening I finally got round to ordering the new hard drive for my Mac (a 120Gb Seagate). It arrived on Tuesday morning by standard first-class post, which was unexpectedly early, though they do say on the dabs.com website that "low-value" items may be sent that way. I put it in the wardrobe, still surrounded by most of its packaging (minus the cardboard boxes) while I read up on how to disassemble my Mac so that I could replace the existing one. The procedure turned out to be staggeringly complicated.

Continue reading "My Mac and Ubuntu" »

Posted by Indigo Jo at 11:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (9) | TrackBacks (0)

Technorati Tags: linux, mac, osnews, alcibiades

OSNews recently published a really poorly argued piece by a former Mac enthusiast who subsequently became a Windows and then a Linux fan (Why I will probably never buy another Mac). It lasts for five pages, and in the first page he goes from becoming a Mac enthusiast while other office workers were being lumbered with PCs, through the whole history up to OS 8 and 9 and Windows 98: after that, he says, the quality of Mac hardware went down, the price stayed more or less the same, the operating system became vastly less reliable and fell behind Windows, and the community did not want to be told that their hardware was a poor choice compared to a PC running Windows.

Continue reading "Why I will probably continue to buy Macs" »

Posted by Indigo Jo at 12:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (22) | TrackBacks (0)

Via the Planet SUSE RSS feed, I got this article on Why Windows Vista will suck by Ziff Davis Internet senior editor Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols. The piece is in reaction to an earlier article at ExtremeTech called "Why Windows Vista Won't Suck".

SJVN talks about the staggering hardware requirements of Vista, which will basically rule out any computer bought before 2006. He talks about the fact that the kernel of the OS is basically still the rickety old one - the proof being that MS recently shipped a patch for the Windows Metafile security hole which affected every other version of Windows.

Continue reading "Why Windows Vista will suck" »

Posted by Indigo Jo at 12:32 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

After I went to the London Linux World Expo a couple of weeks ago I ordered a copy of Novell's new SUSE Linux package, having missed the "product launch without a product" which was the main event of that expo. I ordered it from Novell's official distributor, Holborn Books, which charged a bit more than Amazon (and most of the sites out there which sell it are actually Amazon resellers), but Holborn promised a mid-October delivery date and I wanted my discs as soon as possible. They arrived yesterday. (Technorati tag: suse linux, ubuntu.)

Continue reading "SUSE Linux 10 is here" »

Posted by Indigo Jo at 11:15 AM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)