walkah: linux

i've recently gotten my grubby little hands on an x86 laptop (my brother's old laptop prior to his joining the cult of the mac) - a dell inspiron 2650. so - since i naturally have no intention of letting it retain it's current operating system ... i'm wondering which linux distribution proper geeks run on their laptops these days?

i'm currently thinking either ubuntu hoary (for that comfy old debian feel) or gentoo (which i kinda liked before). anything way better?

those of you who know me (or have ever talked to me) know that I have a major techno-crush on apple's powermac g5. well, jason finally succumbed to the urge and bough a new dual 2ghz g5. then, this morning, i find out that even linus has one (from zdnet):

"My main machine these days is a dual 2GHz G5 (aka PowerPC 970) - it's physically a regular Apple Mac, although it obviously only runs Linux, so I don't think you can call it a Mac any more ;)"

and now boris too!!

i think i should be next. don't you?

for now anyway.

no, i haven't gone crazy, but.... for those of you that don't know, i've used linux on my desktop machines exclusively since around '98 or so. i've spent countless hours over the years trying to tweak my desktop to get it "just right". i've been through enlightenment, sawmill/sawfish, and most versions of GNOME (and, yes, i've tried KDE too). I've churned through installs of most every redhat / fedora version, every debian version since slink (which I still use on every server I have control over), and even recently gave gentoo a try. I may be just getting old and grumpy... but I've had it with needless tweaks. for the time being, I'm working exclusively off my powerbook.

actually, it all started because my current desktop machine ( a dual 1ghz pIII box) is noisy as hell (as boris recently pointed out in a skype call). it was giving me a serious headache on a grumpy morning. so, *perhaps* i really just need a new desktop machine. i'd love something a bit faster and a lot quieter. but i still have some real complaints, but the main one is that: there doesn't seem to be a conveniently up-to-date yet stable enough for daily use distribution. now, i have isos of fedora core 3 and ubuntu sitting around waiting to try, both of which claim to solve that problem (fc3 even claims to have fixed yum to a usable state). ubuntu is promising, in that it is debian-based, and would thus be usable with other apt archives (in theory).

so, maybe it's possible, and i've just not tried to the "right one". what do other people use on their desktop workstations?

I'd also *love* to see some compliments to a few OSX apps, namely : AddressBook and iCal. I've started to use these apps religiously. i tried evolution , but i don't want another outlook. i want good, simple apps for each task that integrate well together. i think apple "gets it" in that respect: perhaps i just want evolution-data-server ? still seems too complicated.

i have a longer list of gripes, but many of them are nit-picky and would bring on flames should anyone every stumble upon this blog, so i'll keep them to myself. but the bottom line is, i'm getting old, and have to "work for a living" - rather than fiddle with my conf files. so, for now, i'm enjoying mac os x's "just works" factor. long term, i still believe heavily in free software. i want to see (and even help) the gnome project succeed. i'm not gone for good. but i need a "just works" distribution / set up. anyone got any ideas? or am i out of luck for now?

as anyone who uses email a lot can relate, it's hard to find a really good mail client. maybe i'm too picky, or too quirky, or too something. but i just can't seem to find a mail client that really suits all of my needs. i posted a while back about the things I like about thunderbird, and it's still mostly true. but, i'm still not quite happy - in fact, i've gone back to using Mail.app on my powerbook. Why? well here are the top couple things that have been driving me crazy with thunderbird:

• no search or filter on flagged messages. i can't believe that this hasn't been addressed! actually the one mail client that seems to have this right is evolution, which lets you save a search for flagged messages. maybe my workflow is wrong. but i use IMAP mail exclusively and when I get new messages that require action, I flag them.
• on that note, am i crazy since i can't find a keybinding in thunderbird to flag a message? i mean even mail.app has that.
• no on the fly spell checking. it's a minor nit, but it does get old. when sending work emails, i like to avoid nasty spelling mistakes, but having to run through each misspelled word (especially when my email routinely refers to "bryght" or "drupal") can be a pain. my eyes are pretty good at ignoring red squiggles that don't apply.

So, for now, i've switched to Mail.app on my powerbook as my primary mail app. I know, it doesn't satisfy the flagged message thing - although i saw a preview image of tiger's mail.app : which promises to have "smart folders" for things like flagged messages. that would be awesome. plus, mail.app comes with the nice features of - a) showing address book images with messages (the power of images - behold!) - for that matter, address book integration in general. the linux world should take note of simple, specialized applications that then work well with each other. b) the unread message count in the dock is great.

but, mail.app isn't perfect. it will start to bug me again soon, i'm sure. so what do other people use for mail?

so, it's november 9th, which means firefox 1.0 is out. if you're not using firefox, you should. i love it so much, i bought the t-shirt:

go now. getfirefox.com . take back the web.

UPDATE: apparently one of the big secrets was that the new firefox start page is really a firefox-branded google page. welcome to the future, google. :)

i was aware that the project was underway behind the scenes. i was excited about it. as a long time subscriber, i am thrilled to see that the linux journal has taken the wraps off their new site - powered by drupal! woohoo!

i'm not the first to point out that everybody's favorite web browser and mail clients both released updates today. i've got to totally disagree with jonas here, i have to say that both the new versions rock.

however, there's even a cool drupal tie-in! check out spread firefox, a new site devoted to firefox advocacy - and oh ya, it's powered by civicspace / drupal. right on.

so, for quite some time i've been on a bit of a quest to find my ideal linux distribution for my desktop (which, yes, i realize may or may not be the ideal linux desktop solution -- i tend to fall into the "power user" category). i'm a long time debian user and fan and don't envision using much else on servers (when i have the choice) for a long time to come. however, i've been fairly frustrated by some things with debian on the desktop for a while. specifically, even in unstable, packages tend to take a long time to get adopted (even if the software is deemed stable by the "vendor") and, while socially conscious, the licensing restrictions tend to leave out a fair bit of really useful applications.

so, after brief stops with various revisions of redhat/fedora, i finally decided to give gentoo linux a try. i must say, this is not aunt millie's distribution :)

one of my big reservations about trying gentoo had always been my fear of a 3 day lapse to get the system to a usable state. well, thanks to a stage3 live cd and the outstanding install instructions in the gentoo handbook, i was up and running in a single afternoon (and still worked on my powerbook for most of the afternoon).

it's been a couple weeks now, and i'm quite fond of gentoo on the desktop. apps are always current, so far emerge has "just worked" and there isn't an application that i use regularly that isn't available.

one thing that i really dig, is that there are "ebuilds" for a couple of the other distributions' artwork packages (notably redhat and ximian). one of the main reasons i kept trying fedora was because i really like the bluecurve theme. well, on gentoo it's a simple "emerge redhat-artwork " away.

i also get a wide array of j2sdk options, and there's even a package for transgaming's winex.

so, if you use linux on your desktop (as i do) and frequent sites that use a lot of flash (as i do), then you'd probably be happy to know (as i was) that macromedia released flash player 7 for linux yesterday. so, since i am currently running fedora core 2 on my desktop i ran over and grabbed the new rpms.

all i can say is performance is much better!