Wednesday, December 21, 2005

Look out any Window

Look out any open door
Look out any Window
See what's going on, around you....

Now this is pretty cool....Linux running as a Windows screen saver.

Tuesday, December 20, 2005

Linux and Lucy

I love the song "Linus and Lucy" by Vince Giraldi from the original score "A Charlie Brown Christmas". Hence, the title of this post.

Anyway, as I said in the last post, I've been gaining interest in Linux. I was amazed to find out that pratically every distribution of Linux has a "Live" CD out now. For those that don't know, a Live CD let's you run Linux without actually installing anything. So it's a great way to try out different distros to find the one you really like or that works best for your setup. Only problem is that they run really s..l..o..w. Afterall, they are running completely off of the CD/DVD. I decided to try one on the Mac and the most recommended was Ubuntu. Plus, I really like saying "Ubuntu". (Hello, my name is Umwalla Umdulu and I am here for the Ubuntu Festival...). I digress. After burning the ISO image to cd, I gave it a try and low and behold....it didn't work. It was reading the cd but at the hardware detection point were it looks for the CD drives, it could not find them. So I goes to the Wiki!
There I learn that it is not a good idea to burn an ISO image at full speed. So I went back and burned another at 2x and walla! Linux on the Mac! First impressions- visually appealing (important to a Mac fan like me) and it seemingly found all of my hardware. I'll play around with it some more, but so far I like it a lot more than Knoppix. I'm going to try the Windows version on the laptop. It seems to be packed with apps. Here is a link to the different flavors of Live Linux if you are interested.
Yuletide Greetings,
b3nd3r

Tuesday, December 06, 2005

Cold Rain and Snow



Well, we got our first taste of winter this week. Maybe an inch and a half here in Enon. Thanksgiving was a hoot at the Lake. 10 of us came down and we rotissieried a turkey and I made my semi-famous fruit dressing. Everyone agreed this was a good time and we will probably do it again.

Been playing around a little with Knoppix 3.8.2 (I think) and it has made me want to check out some other versions of Linux. I know that Debian will run on the Mac but my version of Fink has the GCC 3.1 compiler and won't install w/o 3.3. Problem is I can't find an interim version of the Apple Developers Tools. I guess I'll wait until after Christmas when I'll have Tiger installed.

My other option would be to install it on the Lake machine, an older HP w/ 800 Mhz Celeron. I recently put a new Western Digital 250 Gb hd in, but the old hd is faulty and crashes the system. I can't even slave it and reformat for Linux. I wish I had set up a partition on the new one for Linux but I figured I would wipe the old one clean and use it. From what I have read, Linux doesn't play well with NTFS so I will probably try and find a cheap-o to stick in there if I decide to go that route.

All for now, Merry Ho Ho,

b3nd3r