Curious's Journal

So Lenovo posted a poll asking people which linux distribution they should include with their laptops. I found out about this poll from an email I got from Madriva (formerly Mandrake). Anyways, I’m a strong believer in Debian based systems. However, I also know that Debian is no where near ready for the out of the box crowd. Ubuntu is pretty darn close to being ready for mass consumption.  Walt Mossburg recently reviewed Ubuntu and found that it lacked polish and expected built in capabilities. Lack of polish is mostly the fault of the Gnome developers and hopefully they will work those issues out. The reason Ubuntu is missing key functionality is because it is missing things that supposedly require licenses. Ubuntu is specifically missing an mp3 codec, to play and encode mp3s, and a dvd player that can play “copy protected” dvd. Being the commercial entity that Ubuntu is, it would be extremly risky for them to release these things with their distro without paying fees to the “owners” of the mp3 codec and dvd “copy protection”.  Blah…

City of Munich chooses Debian:

news.zdnet.co.uk/0,39020330,39195204,00.htm

I decided to exchange Nixel’s PC with an Apple Ibook since it would fit her needs much better… I’ve decided that if she is going to have a “workstation” for laptop, I was too… so I’ve setup my laptop to dual boot (was just XP home)… started off by installing Xandros… but I discovered that I wouln’t be able to firefox/mplayer/etc via thier package network (or at least not the free network)… also the free version of Xandros is so far out of sync with the current “testing” release of Debian, that I wouln’t beable to use anything from debian without… uhhh upgrading to debian … next got knoppix… was irked with how slow captive was…. and the “install to harddrive” tool wasn’t working… so I went ahead and installed debian from a debian CD (which I should have done from the start )…

Quicky “Why debain”:
-awsome package management
-everything ‘just works’
-guidlines and policies alow about a thousand developers around the world build this wonderful system that will always be open source
-I’ve been using it as my server OS for many years

So, I decided to change from Exim to Postfix for my mailserver… did an apt-get install postfi… clicked y, answered a couple of questions, and poof… I “just worked” (err… ok, it didn’t ask me if I wanted to give other systems the ability to relay mail, so I had to edit the config for that )

Wheee..

Apparently Fedora is not yet a modern linux distro:

www.newsforge.com/article.pl?sid=04/12/14/152237

Debian based distros do not have this problem….

gotta love apt

Welp.. I haven’t been keeping up to date with all the LJs out there… and lately I’ve just been posting links I think people should check out.. then out of the blue.. someone decided to reply to one of my LJ entires… (weev)… welcome weev.. anyways he found me via Jesse’s blog… shrugs… looked at his lj profile.. he has a “top ten lj list”… well, I don’t lj much so here is a list of intresting rss feeds I keep up with… not nessarly top10 and not in any order.. hell I’m no even going to link to em… just trust me
- jwz’s lj
- Jesse Ruderman
- asa’s
—-erms… no really… I follow things other then mozilla…
-planet.debian.net
-microsoft watch
-bbc news
-security focus / full disclosure / random security mailinglists
-google weblog
-boingboing
(I forgot to sync my rss “state” from work.. so I haven’t opened my rss reader this weekend… I think I follow about 100 feeds wheee)

btw I’m still looking for a mozilla based rss reader that can sync “state” like rss bandit can… if anyone knows one.. let me know

tset

So I have an old ultrasparc1… gotta decide what to put on the box… I’m leaning against Solaris primarly since it seems that settingup a net-install is a pain in the butt (the box has no CD drive)… ohh and I simplly do not like Solairs… moving on:

Possible choices:
BSD
OpenBSD
FreeBSD
NetBSD

Linux
Debian
A souce based (like Rock or Gentoo)
(most of the commercial linuxes have bailed out of Sparc support, period)

Other
There are some embeded OSes like VXWorks that also run on UltraSparc, but I doubt I would be intrested in paying for them.

Once I have the OS, what do I do with it?

I currently have a small debian install that I put in a small unused partition so I could easly look around the drive and so forth…

The box is fairly low-end by todays standards 128mb of memory, 2G drive 164Mhz the wonderfuly useless “bogomips” listing shows 333.41 while my P3-800 is 1576.96. Waiting for this box to create RSA keys was worrysome.. I thought the process had hung at one point…

what to do… Ideas? Suggestions?

Yet another person with a debian tattoo…

www.amayita.com/index.php?section=cult&photo=20&action=show

still haven’t decided what I’m getting yet..

www.cs.utexas.edu/users/suriya/kernel_2.6_migration.html

crazy