Rubénerd!

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 :).

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

I just started downloading the all new FreeBSD 8.0-RELEASE from the FreeBSD bittorrent tracker and so should you! I'm more excited by this release than Apple's Mac OS X Snow Leopard from a few months back!

Don't get me wrong, all this talk about Fedora lately hasn't swayed me from my true calling. Heck, even this very website is running on FreeBSD ^_^.

1. IBM PC DOS 2000! 
2. FreeBSD 7.2 + Xfce 
3. FreeBSD 7.2 + Gnome 
4. Windows XP SP3 
5. Debian Lenny + Gnome 
6. Windows 7 RC 

My relative subjective view of sluggishness/performance on a ThinkPad X40. Shorter bars are better.

Because my ThinkPad X40 came with a licenced copy of Windows XP Professional it meant I didn't need to go out a buy a copy of Windows 7 to run a few university specific applications; provided I use XP on this machine due to OEM licence restrictions of course.

I had the same experience Chris DiBona discussed on a recent episode of Cranky Geeks with Windows 7. After hearing all the hype surrounding it, I installed it on this 1.4GHz Pentium M notebook and it ran slower than molasses. I really mean it, it was painful. Even with the ugly Luna theme enabled (which I turn off to make it look like the classier Windows 2000) Windows XP ran circles around it. That's to be expected when we're comparing a decade old OS to a new one, but that's not what all the pundits and bloggers are telling me I should expect.

Windows 7 is faster than XP! It's the greatest OS in history! Leaving aside another discussion on astroturfing and suspiciously saccharine sweet reviews for 7, I get the feeling once the general public has it we'll still be hearing people wanting to downgrade to XP. Eager people running release candidates are not truly representative of the largest userbase for desktop operating systems in the world.

The problem for Microsoft is their Mac OS X eye candy envy is causing them to change their product into something most of their customers don't want. Microsoft has the opportunity here to further secure the market for business users like my dad who shrugs his shoulders at all the pretty icons and gradients on my Macs. He doesn't want superfluous visual effects, he wants a thin layer OS that's secure, easy to maintain, that stays out of his way and juts lets him run his office, chemistry and CAD applications. His entire company is still on Windows 2000 Professional. And speaking of another well established user base, I'm sure there are plenty of gamers who would also love to have as thin a layer of an OS as possible.

I tell you what, for people like my dad ReactOS is looking more appealing every day. When they release 1.0 my dad might want to buy a few bottles of Champaign.

One of the most common uses for the Stacks feature on Leopard and Snow Leopard is to have an icon for the primary hard drive sitting in the Dock; it allows you to navigate most parts of the entire filesystem include user folders, applications and so on. Problem is, you need a separate icon for each drive.

This afternoon though I found a way to have one Stack icon for all your drives: drag the /Volumes folder onto the dock instead! /Volumes is the hidden folder on your Mac's primary hard drive that contains the mounts for each of your other drives.

To unhide /Volumes so you can drag it onto the Dock:

1. open the Finder
2. click Go to folder on the Go menu
3. enter /Volumes (including the forward slash) and hit Return
4. click the column view toolbar button

Unfortunately, the bad news is List view just displays a series of aliases that launch in the Finder. If you use the Grid view on Snow Leopard though you can now navigate to all the folders on all your mounted drives with one icon.

It may come as complete shock to you to find out our first home computer from the early 1990s was a DOS machine. Certainly I've never mentioned this ever before on my blog here (cough!), and I certainly have never blogged about running DOS on modern hardware for nostalgic fun.

Turns out one of the unintended positives of procuring a ThinkPad X40 dating back to before IBM's hardware division was purchased by Lenovo is that IBM were themselves a DOS vendor (an oversimplification of history but it'll suffice) and supported running DOS well after everyone else jumped on the Windows bandwagon.

What this means is even for a 2004 vintage notebook computer from their download page they have complete DOS software for updating the BIOS and diagnosing problems along with drivers for networking, external optical drives, sound and their obscure, limited run USB grilled cheese sandwich waffle irons that came bundled with I'm so full of crap.

I'm stretched for time as is and probably won't be able to test any of this out for a while, but I do have a licenced copy of IBM PC DOS 7 and a ThinkPad with drivers... it might be time to get my nostalgia freak on :).

It's become a little tradition of mine to break in new operating system installs by tuning into Whole Wheat Radio before I do anything else (Low-Fi, Med-Fi, Hi-Fi). It's useful because it tests both the sound card and more importantly the network.

Audion is a [relative] dead end

When I installed the newly released Snow Leopard on my MacBook Pro and got ready to install Audion to tune into the MP3Pro stream, it occurred to me that Audion is a PowerPC application. Snow Leopard is now an Intel only system, and while you can install Rosetta as an optional extra, the rabid system perfectionist inside of me cringes at the idea of installing an entire extra subsystem for only one application.

I've switched to QuickTime for now to play Whole Wheat on my Mac but because it doesn't have the MP3Pro decoder the quality suffers. Unfortunately, I cannot find anyone still supporting MP3Pro on the Mac.

QuickTime 10

While the quality might not be as good as MP3Pro for the same stream size, at my house here in Adelaide where we have a strict download quota I generally only listen to the Med-Fi stream anyway so quality is less of a concern.

With this in mind, QuickTime 10 that came with Snow Leopard is fantastic, its brand new minimalistic UI is very unobtrusive and fast, and part of me really gets a kick out of being told I'm listening to a Live Broadcast :)

User agent string

One of the great things about Whole Wheat Radio is you can also view who's listening and where at the same time you are, along with what software they're using to tune in with.

Because QuickTime is now an important architectural sublayer of Snow Leopard (a dedicated Mac developer may want to correct me on that) the user agent string for QuickTime and other software that utilises it's resources (such as iTunes) is now a cryptic reference to the OS rather than to QuickTime.

I added information on this along with a screenshot to the Whole Wheat Radio wiki, Jim Kloss might want to just create a redirect instead to QuickTime or to the Mac pages but I figured it was worth explaining so at least there aren't any red links on the who's listening page.

Grilled cheese sandwiches

It had to be said :).

With the introduction of Mac OS X Snow Leopard, Apple has decided to disable graphical configuration of font smoothing. Fortunately, there is a workaround!

Previously on Leopard

In Leopard and earlier versions of Mac OS X, if you opened System Preferences and chose Appearance, you could choose the level of font smoothing on your monitor with a handy drop down box.

On Snow Leopard...

For some reason, Apple decided in Snow Leopard to to disable graphical configuration of font smoothing aside from a single checkbox, instead relying on LCDs to report what settings should be used. The problem is, support for this is spotty and sometimes the results look terrible.

The solution!

Fortunately you can still adjust this manually. Open the Terminal in your Utilities folder, then enter the following code on one line. Replace the "2" with a number between 1 and 4, depending on how much smoothing you want.

defaults -currentHost write -globalDomain AppleFontSmoothing -int 2

The changes will only take effect on newly opened applications. The easiest way I've found is just to log out and log in again.

Heaven knows why Apple user interface designers decided to remove access to this feature.

My premininary experience with Snow Leopard after getting around to installing has been amazing. It's most probably also to do with the fact I did a clean install which always helps, but all the applications load instantly or with only one dock bounce even on this 2006 era first generation MacBook Pro! Obviously compiling huge projects or editing video won't be much faster, but if the machine is feeling this much more responsive I might be able to keep using it for even longer which my wallet will love.

There are also lots of tiny little non-performance related things. When you click the hide toolbar button in the Finder it does a quick animation, and the toolbar itself is spaced out more neatly. When I have my external monitor attached the open windows on it are easier to resize to fit the full height without going over. When you open folders in the Finder using column view they show an open icon. The Homebrew theme in the Terminal uses blue as a selection colour. I'm sure I'll find more such things.

So far the only bad things I've come across is hard drives aren't shown by default on the Desktop but a quick visit to the Finder Preferences screen can fix that. Also, for some reason the fonts look dreadful and the Appearance preference pane no longer has a drop down menu to select the degree of font smoothing. A visit to the Terminal will fix this, but it's weird they'd do that.

Now it's time to put the Dock back on the side and install my applications. Speaking of which I need a cup of coffee. Why doesn't Snow Leopard do THAT for me still I ask?

After much anticipation my copy of Snow Leopard I pre-ordered back on Monday arrived in our mailbox early this morning. Of course Murphy's Law was in full force: I had classes, a ton of assignments and work, I tagged along with my sister to the airport for her flight to Canberra and I set our toaster oven on fire when I tried to make a slice of toast and forgot about it. Imagine the damage if it had been a grilled cheese sandwich.

Well here we are at 23:30 and I finally have some time to install this here Snow Leopard. Problem is I absolutely loathe upgrades, I much prefer starting a new install of an operating system from scratch so there's the lowest chance of something going wrong and it also forces me to do a thorough system clean out and to check the few files I don't have backed up daily.

There probably won't be many blog posts today while I frantically work on this here Snow Leopard install preparation, so you can take five. Speak of the devil, I'm listening to that now. Genius.

Oh bummer, one of my external hard drives is almost full already. This is going to be a long evening!