Since we’re going to be needing to make some computing changes for the summer (moving our server needs to Rackspace Cloud, converting the now-server back to a desktop to replace Jennifer’s dying Eee), I decided to bite the bullet early and upgrade my laptop to the Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx release candidate (release due out tomorrow).

On a whole, I like it. The new visual theme takes some getting used to, but it’s growing on me. Some elements of it are just gorgeous. Twitter and IM integration is nice too; it’s actually getting me off Psi. Firefox 3.6 and Thunderbird 3 fully-supported are good to have as well.

Read more...

I’ve been using Zenwalk GNU/Linux on my laptop for a couple months or so now. I switched away from Fedora due primarily to their kernels continuously breaking my wireless networking; also, the 64-bit thing (or at least Fedora’s implementation of it) wasn’t working very well or me with only 1G of memory. I was regularly running at much higher memory utilization levels than I wanted with Xfce, Emacs, Firefox, and a few other utilities running.

Zenwalk was originally based on Slackware and still retains many of those roots. As I cut my teeth on Slackware back in high school, the familiar simplicity is rather welcome. In general, I like Zenwalk, but there are a few things that are giving me pause.

Read more...

This week, we made a significant change in our computer configuration. Following up on my migration of my laptop from Debian Testing to Fedora 9 early this summer, we have now moved our desktop/VM host from Debian Etch to CentOS 5.2.

Part of this was motivated by being able to get Firefox 3 supported. Also, I have been quite pleased with my Fedora system, and Red Hat-based systems seem to have somewhat better formalized support by software providers. Debian’s recent security fiasco was also a contributing factor mentally (although no one is perfect, and they did handle it as well as anyone can expect). Also, though, Debian is community-driven. This has notable benefits — it is one of the most technically sophisticated distributions around and maintains a high standard of quality control. However, there is some comfort in running a distribution with a single organization behind it, willing to make decisions and cause things to happen.

Read more...

Until recently, there have not been may seriously viable free/libre options for virtualization (running one operating system in a guest virtual machine on some other host system is the common setup/pattern for this). There was Bochs, which was an emulator, not a virtualization environment, and was thus highly slow. There was qemu, which (when coupled with kqemu) had reasonable speed, but still had some lag. There’s Xen, which is a heavyweight solution that seems to be primarily applicable to servers and also seems (unless coupled with Red Hat’s tools) to be rather poor for quick-and-easy VM creation and destruction.

There’s always the proprietary options such as VMware. This is feasible for the hobbyist now that VMware has made their server product free/gratis (I use it to run my mail/web server VM on our desktop), but it’s still proprietary. I’m not the biggest fan of proprietary things in my kernel (although VMware’s stuff does seem to be solid).

Read more...