Rubénerd!

Had this persistant dialogue box on my ThinkPad for over an hour. Didn't have the heart to close it ;)

While I am a Mac guy, this is one of the reasons I love free/open source software ^_^.

clang: noun 1. A loud, resonant, metallic sound. 2. The strident call of a crane or goose. 3. C-language family front-end toolkit. The goal of the Clang project is to create a new C, C++, Objective C and Objective C++ front-end for the LLVM compiler. Its tools are built as libraries and designed to be loosely-coupled and extensible.

The existence of this Linux distribution slipped completely under my radar until this morning. I am excite!

From GigaOM's OSTATIC:

The Mageia project announced the release of Alpha 2 of their inaugural version 1, expected June 1. Developers have made a clear statement that this release is only for developers and bug hunters. It is not for daily use, any kind of production environment, or review. Tsk, tsk, they should know better than that. Reviews are inevitable.

Why was the project started? From the Mageia site itself:

As you may have heard, the future of the Mandriva Linux distribution is unclear.

Most employees working on the distribution were laid off when Edge-IT was liquidated. We do not trust the plans of Mandriva SA anymore and we don't think the company (or any company) is a safe host for such a project.

Many things have happened in the past 12 years. Some were very nice: the Mandriva Linux community is quite large, motivated and experienced, the distribution remains one of the most popular and an award-winning product, easy to use and innovative. Some other events did have some really bad consequences that made people not so confident in the viability of their favourite distribution.

People working on it just do not want to be dependent on the economic fluctuations and erratic, unexplained strategic moves of the company.

That last paragraph sounds like an OpenSUSE user talking about Novell! That reminds me, of all the Linux distributions I tried over the years, I thought SuSE's YaST was the best graphical installer and system configuration tool. And its German, which automatically made it full of awesomeness.

But I digress! I used Mandrake in the early 2000s, even still have the original carton, CDs and user manuals I bought from Challenger! I can sense another pointless nostalgia post coming. Anyway, it's good to see it'll still be living on in spirit :).

Ruben... the FreeBSD guy? Yes!

Mark at Planet Fedora: Everything is better with bacon:

Just thought I would take a moment to remind Fedora folks that even people outside of our project are rooting for us. We are going through growing pains, and quite possibly an identity crisis. This is normal, things improve. Take a breather folks; relax a bit (I promise you – that will really help things quite a bit.)

We have the Four Pillars to help here, as well as the beautiful simplicity of *Be Excellent* to each other. Folks in other parts of the FOSS universe could not help but overhear some of the debates currently happening. We do so much for Linux/FOSS in general- that our health is very important. Most can see this.

People like me

I'm still at heart a FreeBSD and Mac user, but when I deploy Linux I deploy Fedora, just as I did Red Hat Linux back in the day. Its well maintained, has an enthusiastic developer and support community, RPMs for a ridiculous amount of software are readily available, and the releases are reliably scheduled and polished.

Fedora's improvements have a trickle down effect and benefit us all. For example, on my FreeBSD machines I run much of the same software, plus I benefit from the push towards open drivers and upstream improvements to desktop environment usability and software security patches.

I’ve been following several of the issues in the Fedora community on their mailing lists, not least the skirmish regarding the UI future of Gnome 3 which I've commented on. Ultimately I hope these issues are resolved and everyone grows stronger from the shared experience. One of the strengths of the free and open source software movement is democracy.

I didn't even poke fun at the fact that rooting in Australia means something else entirely.

Be still my beating heart. Enlightenment E17 is at 1.0.

Finally after a long time coming, we are pleased to announce the 1.0 release of the core [Enlightenment Foundation Libraries] (With the exception of Eet at 1.4).

In my opinion, Enlightenment is the most beautiful window manager for *nix systems, hands down. Long before Compiz and KDE4, Enlightenment squeezed out some pretty darn impressive graphics out of modest hardware.

In the bad old days, I moved from it to Xfce purely because I used mostly GTK+ apps and wanted visual consistency. Always had a soft spot for Enlightenment though, think it'll be getting an install again :).

After initially mentioning here that my ThinkPad X40 had no suspend issues on Fedora 14, the reported issues with suspending on that hardware have sporadically started to occur. I don't know why it works sometimes and not other times, unless a recent software update stuffed something up.

Fortunately I have a solution! If your ThinkPad X40 doesn't come out of standby, hold the power button, then hit a random number of keys for upwards of 20 seconds. That seems like a long time and the screen remains dark the entire time, but eventually it wakes up.

Arch Linux never did this on this machine, so I'm thinking its a Red Hat issue, or maybe the latest kernel doesn't like this machine either. Oh well, se a vida é.

Just grabbed the latest release of Fedora for my adorable ThinkPad X40 from their tracker. Apparently I'm late to the download party though, I'm not seeding for anyone ;).

The background is the bongily dengy diggy diggy

For those who don't know, my MacBook Pro runs Snow Leopard, my primary desktop runs FreeBSD 8.0 RELEASE (used to be -STABLE, but RELEASE works just fine for me now) and my ThinkPad dual-boots FreeDOS and Fedora owing to some stability issues with FreeBSD issues on that hardware, and it works a little better with closed wireless dongle dengy deng diggy diggys.

Why does it also run FreeDOS? Because its the only system that will allow me to run that creaky old software for my giant purple particle accelerator downstairs, that's why. Sorry you asked?

I used to use the Xfce spin, but going back to the default GNOME one for a while. Don't tell anyone, but I've been secretly using Gedit for some stuff, the syntax highlighting is really quite pretty :).

Why does issues need all those S's?

Now apparently certain models of ThinkPads still have suspending issues, which is a problem because having never been suspended from school I'm not sure how to take it. I also hope they fix that nasty GTK graphics bug, for some reason it didn't affect my desktop when it was installed on it, but my ThinkPad looked downright awful.

Link arms, don't make them

• Fedora Project
• Fedora bittorrent tracker
• Fedora Xfce Spin
• FreeDOS
• Rubenerd.com post on Fedora 13's GTK graphics bug

This barely qualifies as a post, but I'm simply far too excited to contain myself. Having had DSL just provisioned today, this is what I've been able to do:

• Finally downloaded FreeBSD 8.1 and Sabayon Five Point Three!
• Run portsnap, portaudit, portmaster and freebsd-update on 3 machines
• Run port -v selfupdate on 2 Macs
• Updated 3 iTelephones to iOS 4.1
• Downloaded a two month backlog of podcasts
• Scrobbled a ton of cached music plays
• Jabbered to two people
• Wrote three blog posts (including this one!)
• New desktop backgrounds!
• Got my father's Singapore VPN working
• Returned emails for 31 people (41 if you count simple thank-you's)
• Uploaded a bunch of personal project revisions (HUGE!)
• Built a crude time machine and interfaced it with an online flux capacitor

Thank you, and goodnight!

As with my social life, I seem to instinctively pick things that aren't "cool" in computer science. Or so I've been repeatedly told :P. Here's a list I was typing on my phone over the course of this morning.

The listy thing

What's Cool	What I Prefer
GNU/Linux	FreeBSD, Mac OS X
OpenBSD	NetBSD
bash, zsh	tcsh
elinks	links
emacs	Vim
mutt	[Al]pine, TBird
Rijndael	Twofish
Triple DES	Plaintext
Eclipse	NetBeans, TextMate
git	Mercurial
Gnome Terminal	LilyTerm
Nautilus	emelFM2, Thunar, ROXFiler
OOo, Google Docs	Gnumeric, AbiWord
Google Reader	Bloglines (but I caved in!)
PathFinder	Finder
Licence qualms	TrueCrypt
IPv6	Not compromising privacy
Konqueror (KDE 3.x)	Dolphin (KDE 3.x)
xterm	urxvt
Xmonad	dwm
Apache	Lighty
Ubuntu	Sabayon, Fedora
Chrome	Firefox, NoScript
Photoshop	The Gimp
Illustrator	Inkscape
LaTeX	DocBook (for plain text)
QuickTime X	QuickTime 7 Pro
Ruby On Rails	... erubis?
Svelte Apple keyboards	Buckling spring Unicomp
Android	iOS
iPads	Old ThinkPad X40
QBASIC	QPascal
C#.NET	Borland C++ (back in the day!)
Praising Windows 7	Hating on Windows 7
Windows Aero	Windows "Classic"
Tumblr	Extra blog entries
Client-side JavaScript	Server-side processing
Beautiful, premade blog themes	Self made, terrible blog theme :)
Lady Gaga	Marian Call
Akiyama Mio	Kotobuki Tsumugi (pictured)
The Pocket Tiger	Minori
C.C.	Kallen
Chocolate	Vanilla
Blond	Black, brown
Drunkenness	Calm lucidity
Loud	Quiet
Clear days	Overcast days
Blog posts with a point	Blog posts... like this

The question thing

Are there any things you use or prefer over a so called "cooler" alternative?

I'm still getting used to using YUM and RPMs again after being a FreeBSD ports guy for so long. YUM certainly makes it much simpler and faster to update packages, but there are still a few little gotchas! I'm getting used to ;).