This is something which is funny and sad at the same time. Its not the first time I encountered this issue, which is that people who evangelize Linux (or basically any other product) don’t use it themselves. If you are going to be an evangelist, have the decency to practice what you preach.
After recently acquiring Macromedia (and taking over their MacrmediaAdobe Flash business), and due to the large Shopping spree, Adobe has been conducting in the recent years, buying companies left and right (and I have many more links) you’d think that Adobe is trying to corner the computer publishing market or something. Not helped by the Adobe-Microsoft PDF dispute and some Adobe patents which look not unlike Microsoft’s idea of patenting “non-obvious” inventions (no links this time – go look it up on your own), Adobe was starting to look more and more like other computer giants we know and “love” ;-).
Late as usual (but starting to catch up), I listened to Novell Open Audio‘s Ted Haeger interviews Nat Friedman, formerly co-founder of Ximian (The GNOME desktop company – bought by Novell and hence the link does a funny redirect) and currently Novell’s VP of engineering for Linux desktop (or something).
I’ve been using Fedora Core for a while now on my laptop, and also on several computers at home and work. In the past I’ve tested Fedora many times, but only Fedora Core 5 was good enough compared to other major Linux distros that I thought it deserved to be run as a primary OS (mostly due to the GNOME 2.14 desktop, which despite still some annoyances matured enough to actually be a useful desktop). I’ve been running with rawhide – Fedora Core’s development branch for a few months now and I really liked the direction that Fedora was taking and I expected Fedora Core 6 to be even better then Fedora Core 5 – even though the latest GNOME, 2.16, isn’t so much different from 2.14 (as 2.14 was from 2.12) it does fix most of the problems that were still present at the previous version, but more so Fedora have introduced a lot of really interesting technology under the hood, from getting hardware to work better and easier, through kernel 2.6.18 the inclusion of Xen and other interesting tools such as the Sabayon user profile editor, to modern desktop compositing with AIGLX.
So when a friend asked me to help him install Fedora Core on his new laptop – a Lenovo 3000 N100 – I suggested he tries the Fedora Core 6 pre-release: 6 is scheduled to be released sometimes next week, and though he can’t wait till then due to external time constraints, I though that this late in the game there’s no reason the current rawhide snapshot shouldn’t be almost as good as the full release – I have a lot of experience with pre-release distributions – Mandriva and SuSE for example – and in my experience, as the products nears its release date (especially this close), there usually aren’t any major issues preventing a competent user who knows what he’s doing to install and use the product as a primary OS. So I was completely unprepared for what followed next.
Yes, it can make coffee, but can your operating system manage a swimming pool control system
?
Yes, new frontiers for linux.
I’ve been listening lately to a Linux oriented podcast called The Linux Link Techshow, which is rather interesting – each week they bring in new guests related to Linux specifically and open-source software generally, and they are usually rather interesting (and correction – its not a podcast – as they keep saying, its a live show that you can also download old episodes as podcasts).
From the people who brought you – “I don’t have anything better to do with my life”, and “I still don’t have anything better to do with my life”, comes a new worthy cause – off with the CAPS key!
The people behind CAPSoff.org have come up with the novel an noble cause of riding the world of this accursed key, the bane of e-mail readers everywhere – the CAPS lock key.
[עדכון 20:00 : כל התוכן המקורי של המאמר שהיה כאן נמחק (מוגן בזכויות יוצרים וכו’, אם כי אני לא משוכנע שהנקודה שלי הועברה במלואה) כדי לקרוא אותו נא להשתמש בקישור לעיל].
הכרזות של חברת Despair, Inc (בעלי הסימן הרשום 🙁 ) מוכרות וידועות בעולם (ונמכרות דרך כמה חנויות פופולאריות, מקוונות ואמיתיות), אבל מדי פעם עוד מישהו מגלה את אמריקה ושולח אותן בדואר לכולם, או כותב על זה בבלוג שלו.
The problem with most Linux distros, is that you need to do a lot of things after the install to get it to do something useful (say, connect to a wireless network, play multimedia, etc’).
So here is what to do to get FC5 up and running in no time 🙂 :
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