Nora the most popular Linux Baby

My Daughter Nora, has become a very popular baby in the open source/Linux community. I recently added her photo to linuxjouranl's flickr pool. Thus she ended up on linuxleak.com And bianconeri4ever submitted her photo to digg. She has now appeared on Planet Fedora, via Tux Planet. She seems to be appearing more and more places as we speak. I couldnt be more of a proud linux daddy. Thank you to everyone involved.

Distro to Distro

So I haven't written in awhile. But I have been on a distro hunt. After a recent disagreement in the #ubuntu and #ubuntu-ops channels, Ive decided that Ubuntu is not the distro for me. (Ubuntu I still love you for what you are, but you are not the stable desktop Im looking for.)

That said I have recently tried just about everything. Tried Mandriva, didn't like it. Tried debian, opensuse, opensolaris and fedora in VMs. All of which werent exactly a pleasing exp in a vm. So I tried fedora. I installed fedora 9 on a differnt work machine. This machine had the Intel Vx-t virtual machine helper intergreated on the VPRO processor.

VM performance on this machine, excelent. Fedora exp over all...Not so great. If anyone has used Fedora in the past, they know of rpm.livna.org. This is a repository that estentially gives you everything you expect from a modern OS (mp3 support for example). But inconviently the build server for livna is having issues, thus packages you would want, like nvidia drivers, fail to download and install. (Recently found out about yum install akmod-nvidia, thanks to this blog.) But since that machine is a work machine I'm not worried about those issues. After struggling with Virtualbox and virtual host networking I eventually did switch to the Fedora desktop as my main machine (had write my own script to get host networking to work). That said, sound does not work and mp3 support still does not work either. But, with that said... I tried fedora 9 at home, mp3 support and sound works. (Tried KDE4, and its borked after trying to install a widget, I have the worst luck with KDE4)

In the end, I am happy with fedora but its not perfect. What man made OS is?

I have been really likeing Chrome on a slightly different subject. With all the talk about the 'browser replaceing the os' things are exciting. But lets be realistic, that isnt going to happen. I am however glad to see yet another step towards operating task enviornments. (Comment, if you want to discuss the thought farther).

Anyway, BYE!!

LHC First Beam

First Beam
Im not going to explain what this is but if your geeky enough check out the stream here

Also very humorous xkcd

Hardy Heron-gvfs

This has put a complete stop to my day.

Today I ran across the problems with gvfs (Gnome Virtual File System-Not to be confused with gnomevfs).

About a month ago I connected to a 'large' website via FTP on my Ubuntu box. I made the connection through Nautilus... I did not check remember the password. Today, I was backing up my home directory, when I notice the backup grabbing a directory /.gvfs/user@xftpsite.com/web/thewebsite. Well thats odd no? I opened up that directory, saw what looked like a local download of said website. Then assuming it was a local copy, I started to delete the directory. WRONG IDEA! I quickly stopped the delete task, started to sweat, and realized I almost deleted the whole website that resided on that ftp site. Big whoop right? My own stupidity...well..wrong. Not only did I not know I was still connect to this ftp site, I never saved the password. This happend because gvfs 'mounts' virtual filesystems in the home directory...something in my opinion that should never hapen. Besides that, gvfs should have clossed the connection to the ftp site after closeing nautilus. It did not, I finally managed to close the connection with the commands ps aux | grep gvfsd-ftp -- found the process id and kill -9. This finally disconnected to the FTP connection. THIS SHOULD NOT HAPPEN ON A LTS DIRTIBUTION. It was a bad idea to switch from gnomevfs to gvfs. I have to say, I am contemplating switching to a more traditional linux os.

Wimax

People need to understand the beauty of this proposal. Clearwire to provide a nationwide Wimax network, all backed by Sprint, Google, Intel, Comcast and others. 6mbps down 3mbps up, forget your evdo, 3g and 4g networks. Why? because all of those choices will lock you in to a propeitary set of devices. 'New Clearwire' will allow for any certified wimax technology to connect. I.E. any of the up and coming Intel based laptops with wimax radios. OPENNESS, Wimax is the technology that is important. Stop blabering about the waste of money 3g Iphone.

Ote designer?

http://benchase.com/sustainable_design

That is the most wonderful innovative design I have seen. With free software and the ability to switch HDD from modular machine to machine. My operating task environment would reside on a modular brick that requires no tools. How wonderful.

VM

Vmware Server didn't work out to well on Ubuntu. Installed Virtualbox 1.6 instead. Have XP virtual machine running all my necessary apps. Setting up a host interface was a bit of a nightmare. In the end the manual on Virtualbox.org had the correct way to do it. Fourms and blogs did not help at all, in fact they confused the situation. But innotek/Sun's directions did not mention that you needed to use the Intel 10/1000 MT virtual network card instead of the default. So setup a vbox fake interface and bind it and eth0 to br0. Install the intel drivers with NAT'ed the default way, and you golden. Sorry no pictures yet.

On another note, Asus's XG is probably on the way, and Steam's Cloud is soon to be. Great way to minimalize the need for a single machine, nice tools for OTE