Five Acres with a View

Yesterday saw the culmination of a month-long project: rebuilding one of our PCs to replace the ancient E-Machine that belonged to my mother. I had thought about doing this ever since I requisitioned the AMD64 that Jack that Jack bought to make a DVR (Digital Video Recorder) and never quite got working. I have been using the AMD64 as my desktop for months now, and adore it, so finally decided it was time to turn loose of my previous desktop.
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April 19, 2008 – Click on image for higher resolution version.

I updated to the Hardy Heron Ubuntu Linux release candidate today with remarkably little fuss.

How To Redesign Your Desktop The ‘WOW’ Way tells you how to install new themes to your Ubuntu Desktop.

Yesterday, I upgraded my Ubuntu Linux distribution using the instructions at Upgrading your existing Ubuntu installation. It took quite a while, since the servers were apparently getting hammered, but I now have an up-to-date installation on my AMD 64 box.

After running Fedora Core 6 for several months, I installed EdgyEft, the latest Ubuntu release, released on October 26, 2006. I had run previous versions of Ubuntu, but gave FC6 a try because that is what Jack runs on his machines. However, I could never quite get rpm working correctly on my machine and when your package manager doesn’t work consistently, it makes the machine seem very fragile.

Edgy Eft installs Firefox 2, and I was glad to see that my favorite Firefox extensions installed without difficulty. Other than that, I haven’t noticed any big changes: it is just nice to be using apt-get again.

I Want A Linux/Unix Utility To… organizes available tools for the Linux operating system by function.

10 Linux commands you’ve never used has a nice list, with usage examples. I had, however, used several of them.

I love this quote from A Cost Analysis of Windows Vista Content Protection:

However, one important point that must be kept in mind when reading this document is that in order to work, Vista’s content protection must be able to violate the laws of physics, something that’s unlikely to happen no matter how much the content industry wishes it were possible.

One drawback of running Linux as a desktop is we frequently lack cool utilities for things like Flickr. However, during a recent search through the Dapper Drake Ubuntu repository I found a slick tool called Kflickr. Kflickr allows you to drag and drop images from konqueror, gthumb or digiKam, and then quickly title, tag and upload them. It is a much quicker process than uploaded through the browser. You can seem some of my photos at my Flickr account.

Yesterday, I tried to update to Dapper Drake Ubuntu using apt-get dist-upgrade but encountered sufficent problems (couldn’t get xorg to run) that I fell back on doing a clean install from CD instead. Dapper Drake is still in testing, but seems solid enough now that I have it running.