As I’m sitting here waiting for my 1 GIG DVD iso image of SuSE to finish downloading, I’m surfing around looking at various packages that I can use as drop in replacements to my Windows apps. One of these is an MP3 media player. Because o…

I’ll just go outside at -20 degrees celsius… it’s a long walk to my igloo :(

-5 degrees…YUK!

Merry Xmas everyone :)

Snow’s blowing everywhere here… it’s crazy.

Glad you enjoyed it. I’m always a little nervous about what the community is going to do to me when I say things like “I like Linspire” :)

You’re right about the OS. Linux won’t ‘win’ until people stop buying operating systems and start buying computers.

I have no damned idea what a Bloreo is, but I think Mandeep knows :)

What the heck is a Blorio?

The office guy was meant to be the Linspire guy in the forums that was triying to get it working with the Linspire system. It would be nice to know his nickname in the Linspire forums. I hang out there every once in a while but would like to meet him.

A BLue OREO, get it? Clearly Kelly is smarter than most of us to come up with a name that not only makes sense, but was fated to be picked in a random selection. Or something.

At least you gave it a try, Joh, and that’s great. As I said, and what the ArchLinux website mentions, Arch isn’t for everyone. And that’s okay and is what Linux and open source is all about… choice!

Six months ago, I wouldn’t have been ready for Arch myself. But I’m certainly glad I took the time to read about it and learn what it’s capable of.

There’s also a Live CD version of Arch. It’s called Archie and there’s a link to it on the ArchLinux site.

Well, you never know. Every now and again I go downstairs and putter with all the hardware that’s been donated. Maybe one day I’ll put together in that magical way and it will all come to life.

I promise that if/when that happens that the first distro I try will be Slackware :)

I’ve been following your move to ArchLinux on your blog. It was you and Pat that twigged me into giving it a whirl. It sounds like people are generally pretty happy with it.

It’s not for everyone, as it’s a very hands-on kind of OS. But the benefits I’ve gained from it far out weight the time it takes to learn the “Arch way”. It’s bleeding edge, like Kanotix and Debian SID, but these days SID just seems too unstable for me.

Pacman is the most easiest package manager I’ve ever tried. And it’s great to be able to install things from source, making your own Arch packages of the applications you like to use (which don’t yet exist in the Arch repositories).

I’ve also tried Underground Desktop, and it’s a very easy way to install an Arch system (running KDE) for those people still scared of a command prompt. It’s still in development, but if the development release is this good, I see great things for UD in the future.

Best of all, Arch and Underground Desktop is screaming fast on my plunky old PII 400Mhz PC. Great to see something of that age running bleeding edge KDE 3.5 so effectively.

Still…since I don’t have a testing machine, it’s not likely that I’ll be getting to Slack any time soon.

With slack, if you get cds 1 and 2, when you get to the kernel selection screen, you can get 2.6.13 (I run it)…

Had to install some packages proper to 2.6.13 from testing/ on CD2, such as the basic kernel modules, alsa drivers, kernel source, etc.

You can even do a 2.4 install, and install the 2.6 kernel from testing/ on CD2. I know testing sounds bad, but it works fine for many people on the slackware IRC channel.

I’ve never tried Slackware. I’m interested in it, but every time I see the 2.4 kernel I run away screaming. I have enough problems with my laptop running the 2.6 kernel :)

Out of curiosity Jon, I was wondering if you had thoughts on Slackware, and if you had tried it at all?

I’d love to see a show on slack, the grand-daddy of all modern distros :P

Laff..I’ll bet you learned a lot really quickly!

I wish I had a test machine, I could afford to spend more time mucking around with things if I did.

Ah well…life goes on :)

PS: GO PENS!

I also had to hack the NVidia drivers and compile them to get NVidia working with hibernation, and luckily a fellow user contributed a HOWTO on the Ubuntu forums and that worked well. The power of community.

Jon: what version of suspend does Linspire use? (I think you can tell from the grub boot line: resume is version 1 and resume2 is version 2)

This is an interesting problem. I purposely don’t cover off GUI specific tools during the show because I want to be as ‘distro generic’ as possible. If I teach someone how to use apt-get then they can use that on any Debian system. If I teach them to use Synaptic, then they can only use that information on a system that has Synaptic installed (because I never taught them to use apt-get they won’t even be able to install it). The focus on command line tools is intentional.

However, there really isn’t any such beast with Linspire. Apt-get is installed, to be sure, but there are no Linspire repositories in it and there’s dire warnings everywhere that installing from the Debian repositories will bork a Linspire system. So I have to talk about the GUI tool (CNR) in Linspire because there is no other tool to install packages with. No supported tool, anyhow.

I can’t even comment on how CNR and Synaptic compare because I’ve only every used apt-get or yum at the command line. I will admit that I’ve been entertaining the idea of tackling some distro specific tools like Synaptic recently. I think we’re at the point in the evolution of the show that we have all the basics covered: using tar, installing packages, getting networking working, security, and where to find help. Therefore, it might be time to spread out a bit and talk about other more targetted topics.

Thanks for the comment and stay tuned!

I don’t think we’re seriously considering a vid cast, I’m far too ugly to be seen :)

I played with Wink, but then forgot about it in favour of Xvid Cap. I’m not all that impressed with Xvid Cap, though, so thanks for reminding me about Wink. I’ll take another look at it.

Thanks for the information about the history of legality with Linspire. I don’t have much knowledge about the roots of it.

The Office build guy? I’m not sure what you’re referring to here. What did I say?

Re Paying Distros: What I meant to convey is that I wasn’t a guy who *would have* paid for a distro. I might have said the wrong thing and it may have come across as *I wouldn’t*. What I meant to say is that it’s rather fortuitous that the Linsipre people gave me a copy to try. I wouldn’t have paid for a distro before trying Linspire because I didn’t believe that the vendors added enough value to make it worth any money. After having tried Linspire, I see now that I have been wrong with respect to Linspire and possibly wrong with other pay distros as well. These events opened my eyes to the fact that there may be some value in some pay distros. It’s a good thing that happened, not a bad thing.

I agree that there’s no doubt that SOME money has to change hands in order to create a situation where there’s a profit margin which is what entices stores to carry it.

Oh, and Gizmo..yes. As soon as I’m out of Skype Out credits, I’m going to give Gizmo a try :)

It’s pretty mainstream, as far as Linux software installers go, so I was wondering how you think it compares to CNR.

Thats why I like wink. I think I told you already, I have generated in 1 week near 50 video tutorials. They are incredible simple to use, the only pain is to optimize it.

About the Linspire Office build, can you tell me which guy is it. I am also on the linspire forum. I am glad the attitude you took about actually playing with the community.

About the legallity of Linspire, it was actually illegal in the past. The illegality was because they didn´t offer the source code. That means that if they don´t provide the source code they break the contract and all the benefits are suspended.

The linspsire model didn´t include the source, Linspire ignored this claims and it took some lawyers from FSF to sue them and finally they comply.

However now Linspire is great, is more affordable, it has created open source software (phonegaim, Lphoto, etc), it has fund open source development (NVU, Gaim, etc).

I like Linspire, and I like it to grow, I dont run it, and I havent payed them, however I have payed Mandrake and I am a bit concerned when you say you won´t ever payed for a linux distro. Specially because Linux distro need money, whenever is free or non-free, not just linux but anybody that has the need for some craizy issue to eat.

Linspire is pushing to the retail store with PC pre-installed, the problem is that it cost money to put it on the wall-mart. So even if developers dont eat, to see your favorite distro you still need money on the stores.

Linspire, Mandriva, Red Hat, Novel have money and can pay this retailers to carry them.