Last week I had some undiagnosable problem at bootup and I decided to just backup my home directory, /etc and some other key files and reinstall Gentoo from scratch (stage 1). It turned out to take longer than I remembered, but it has proven to be well worth it.

Having run Gentoo before (for a few months now) I knew to set up the /etc/make.conf file with optimized USE tags. Basically, I put in everything I knew I would need and disallowed the rest. Being a fan of KDE my tags looked something like this: USE="kde kdeenablefinal qt -gtk -gnome".

Eleventy-billion hours later I had compiled my system (with only two commands, thanks to Portage). I noticed immediately when I started X that things were different from before. Window response was much faster, applications loaded much faster, and I had more free RAM. Sweet.

I’ve been looking into every distro that’s featured on DistroWatch for a while now and I just can’t imagine giving up my Gentoo. Now, if the Portage tree contained Yast2 for system configuration this would be a flawless OS.

Debian 3.1 has finally been released. It took over two years to get from Debian’s last release (Woody) to the current one. My experiences with Woody could be summed up as “stable, but really old”, so hopefully this new release will breathe some life back into the Debian user community.

Get it:
via ftp

Debian main site:
http://www.debian.org/

GNU software provides an equivalent to almost any Windows application but for people who’re new to GNU/Linux, figuring out what they have available to them can be tricky. Photoshop doesn’t exist on *nix systems and beginners are unlikely to expect something called ‘The Gimp.’

The following website keeps an updated chart of corresponding Posix - Windows software.

http://www.linuxrsp.ru/win-lin-soft/table-eng.html

The KDE Project has released KDE 3.4.1. They’re calling it a ‘maintenance’ release because it’s mostly bugfixes and small alterations. Despite this, the release has some much needed changes. One of the bugs that it solves has been slowing down my work all week.

The KDE Project emphasized fixes in its 50 translations in the official release, but they also listed a page full of bugfixes at their changelog.

Some of the excellent ones:

• ftp will try active if passive fails
  (I’ve been having to use the terminal ftp client alongside Quanta to upload to an IIS ftp server that only does active)
• many good fixes in khtml
  (khtml is to KDE what Gecko is to Mozilla - it’s their web page layout engine)
• a hundred other fixes

I’ll be installing it as soon as it appears on the Gentoo servers.

Knoppix is an excellent distribution but it should be pointed out that the newer versions of it are optimized specifically to run on newer hardware. It doesn’t require anything extraordinary, but older computers that you’re thinking of fixing up with Linux should be given Fedora, Slackware, or even better DSL.

I tried Knoppix 3.8.2 this morning on a system with a 500MHZ CPU and 128MB mem. The video card was not ancient but it wasn’t anything fancy either. It took Knoppix over an hour to finally tell me that it couldn’t find an X-server that would work. It was comical to watch it click and whir for twenty minutes at a time attempting to get some configuration to function. I’ve used several other LiveCDs on the same machine (I’ve even watched anime on it thanks to Dynebolic), so I know the hardware can support Linux.

Knoppix is an amazing OS, don’t get me wrong, but it’s not your first choice for old hardware.

It’s a slow day on Slashdot and there’s a post up about LinuxISOtorrent.com where several Linux and *BSD distros are available for download via a torrent tracker.

Many of the comments echoed what I’ve thought before - that this is a great service but it would be much nicer if it provided an exhaustive and current list of all distros. Something like this can be done in XML-RPC or RSS because all the information is readily available. I use the Distro Watch RSS feed to keep track of new stuff that comes out, I’m wondering why this can’t be automatically integrated into a tracker where new distros are available for download as soon as Distro Watch says they’re released.

If you have any desire to get involved in this project I’d be happy to hear from you. I’m thinking about doing it myself but I’ve been sorta swamped so it might be a while before I get to it.

I want to start with an apology to the regular Distro Jockey readers, there hasn’t been much posted of late. Along with starting a second programming job I’ve been working on the redesign for this site (and a migration to its own domain).

It’s still the same site though. It’s just me (Danger) and some contributing writers here and there who like to talk about Linux distros and play with them ’till we go mad. If you have ideas for other things I could change, I’d love to hear from you. For now, I plan to resume my schedule of keeping an eye on Distro Watch.com and downloading absolutely as many distros as I can.

Hope you like the new layout, if you have ideas for more color I’d really appreciate some input, I’m not such a fan of grayscale but I tend toward it just the same.

The best remote desktop client for Linux is rdesktop. The KDE bundle offers us the ‘K Remote Desktop Client’ in the form of krdc but really that’s little more than a VNC viewer. VNC is great, but it lacks the right protocol to work as a thin client with a Windows server.

When I first installed rdesktop I was befuddled by the complexity of the arguments it needed in the command line. After a few minutes I managed to track down tsclient which is a handy frontend to rdesktop.

What the Remote Desktop Protocol Provides
VNC is a way to replace another’s computer’s monitor and keyboard/mouse with your own. You are able to control and view it as if it weren’t a different computer. While this totally amazed me the first time I used it, VNC has some drawbacks. It doesn’t separate the client session with the console session, it doesn’t handle user accounts at all, and if the host computer hangs on shutdown you’ll never know because the VNC server is the first program to get killed when Windows heads toward a reboot.
Remote Desktop is a VNC-based protocol that solves all these problems. It integrates with the host computer’s client accounts, it runs as a system service, it can even automatically transfer the sounds that should plan on the host computer (far away one) to the speakers of the local computer (the one you’re typing on).

I’ve recently contracted a new development job where they’re running PHP/Apache on a Windows 2003 server. It’s painful to know that they could have saved a lot of money and gotten better performance out of a Linux box (which also would have been easier for me to administer). But since I’m stuck using a Windows server, I’m happy to have found myself some GNU tools to help me get the job done fast.

Links to rdesktop and tsclient:
rdesktop
tsclient

My housemate is a jerk. Dumb jerk. He has a powerbook running Mac OS X and I told him tonight about Gentoo for Macs. I told him that there was a special version of the super-popular (and super hard to install) Linux distro that ran on Macs.

He had the thing running in a couple of minutes. That’s why he’s a jerk. I spent a whole evening and the next day installing, compiling, and configuring my Gentoo system. He only had to download a dmg file and double click it. Then he had Gentoo running.

Gentoo can run on Mac OS X
If you go to Gentoo-Wiki.com you’ll find detailed instuctions on a not-so-difficult process of installing Gentoo. What takes a significant amount of time when starting from scratch only takes a few minutes when you’re embedding it into a running OS. Here are the steps required:

• Download the .dmg file available here
• Double click the installer (it’s called “Gentoo For Mac OS X Installer.pkg”) inside the image.
• type # emerge --sync
• Now you have Gentoo running. Perfectly.

It’s a frustrating thing that one of the most difficult to install Linux distros can be so simple if you’ve already got a host system. It just takes the glory out of it. However, this is a keen illustration of how Gentoo is less like a proper distribution and more like a meta-distribution. Gentoo is mostly just Portage (Gentoo’s package manager) and it can be run on any POSIX-compliant OS (FreeBSD, Mach, Linux). If it can run on a Mac, I really want to see what else it can run on.

A lot of websites make money off of selling T-shirts with their logo or something funny on them. I’ve seen this around for a while and it wasn’t until today that I realized the Linux community needs more stupid t-shirts. Really, I think it does.

I’m starting some sketches for a T-shirt that isn’t particularly related to this website but used the phrase ‘Certified Distro Jockey’ or something else equally nerdy. I’d totally wear it and I was wondering if anybody else was interested. I don’t expect a lot of comments on this, but if there’s a couple of people who would be interested in a shirt I’ll go ahead and make the design. All of the revenue from the shirt would be given to the favorite distro of the readers of this site (decided by poll). If anybody has ideas for the best online service to use for the shirt (I only know of CafePress) that’d be really handy.

I just head that Acer is starting sales on a Linux laptop. This is awesome news.

As far as I can tell they’re only selling it in Thailand so far. You can check out the specs for yourself at the Acer Aspire 3000 webpage. Down at the bottom - second from the end - you can see where it says ‘Linpus Linux BE.’ Linpus is not a GPL distro - it’s in the real of Xandros, Linspire, etc. Still, it appears to be a decent OS for new users doing email, movies, office stuff and other basic productivity things. All of the non-GPL, entry-level Linux distros are going to be short on configurability, but that’s to be expected.

This is a great step forward for those of us who want to see Linux become a standard OS for regular users. It’s finally become good enough that Acer expects people to want to save a few bucks and go with a non-free Linux. Maybe the next step is they’ll realize that Mandriva is even more user-friendly and they’ll go with an entirely free distro. I sure hope it doesn’t take long.

Even though this laptop is not running my ideal (at the moment) Linux distro, at least it’s cheap. Even if I bought it with Windows on it I’d just reformat it - so I’d be happy with a cheaper license no matter what software it has.

There’s a petition going around asking printer manufacturers to support Linux with their driver base. This is a rather significant issue for making Linux a real desktop-replacement OS. Right now Linux is excellent at handling all of the various video/sound/networking interfaces that the hardware industry has thrown at it - but it’s seriously lacking in printer support.

I received a Canon i80 as a college graduation present from my grandmother. It’s a wonderful printer because it’s super-portable and prints high-quality documents quickly. The serious drawback is that I have to log into a Windows machine (or Mac OS X) to use it.

This petition has only 85 signatures so far but considering the need for printer support it could quickly become popular. It can only ever be a gesture because petitions don’t work unless accompanied by something with more bite to it, but I think it’s a good start.

If you’re looking to buy a printer or replace your current non-Linux printer, check out the Linux Printer Database. It’s a comprehensive (nearly) list of various makes and models of printers. You can check to see if the printer you’re considering purchasing has support for Linux.

This is one step closer to a full Linux desktop. As soon as we get better printer support we’ll be all that much closer to converting large offices to Linux.

Thanks to Yet Another Linux Blog for the scoop.