After countless, endless hours of nagging on my part, my girlfriend finally put Linux on her laptop. I thought it would be interesting to hear what a long-time Windows-using non-programmer thinks of Linux (Kubuntu in this case) after a few weeks of use. So I interviewed her. Read on. My thoughts […]

My Westinghouse L2410NM LCD monitor arrived at Westinghouse’s factory, according to UPS tracking, on Thursday at 10AM. Thus the clock starts. In one week I’ll begin periodic phone calls to Westinghouse requesting updates on the status of my RMA. I know that every phone call you make to a call center costs […]

Planet Larry seems not to be updating for some reason. It’s stuck on September 27th. Hope that gets cleared up soon.
It’s been a few months since I switched back to Gentoo from Ubuntu. Things are going well. Everything works fine. I don’t find myself spending any more time keeping it […]

This is why I like Gentoo. I installed ZSNES and I got version 1.51 from the Portage tree, but that version doesn’t have netplay. The version I want was some funky 1.42n version somebody wrote with netplay built in. It took me all of five minutes to write an ebuild based on the […]

My Gentoo install went swimmingly. Of course swimmingly for a Gentoo install means that I had to recompile my kernel twice. (I foolishly tried to get away with using /proc/config.gz from the liveCD instead of configuring it by hand, and it turns out the liveCD doesn’t compile SATA support into the kernel, so […]

Having used Ubuntu for almost exactly eight months at this point, I think I have a good idea what its strengths and weaknesses are in relation to what I want.
Strengths:

It’s fast at installing things.
It’s brainless to use; a monkey could install it, a monkey could keep it going.
Packages are fairly up-to-date. You’re […]

I tried to play a “custom radio station” in Amarok via last.fm today, and I get a message stating “This item is not available for streaming”. I did some googling and read that this is a problem that may have been fixed as of Amarok 1.4.6. I upgraded Amarok via Ubuntu’s backports and […]

:perldo s/something/other/
E319: Sorry, the command is not available in this version
In spite of my previous actions which I thought led to a successfully non-gimped Vim install, it turns out that I actually ended up getting rubydo to work AT THE EXPENSE of perldo.
Apparently what I actually needed was vim-full. Installing vim-ruby and […]

Error: Required vim compiled with +ruby
E117: Unknown function: rubycomplete#Complete
I had this magic vim-ruby package installed, but it wouldn’t let me :rubydo or use Ruby omni-completion in Vim. I had to force-uninstall every vim-related package. It whined when I did that because apparently some system package had a dependency on vim.
It turns […]

I wish there was some setting that would tell apt, “automatically install all the -dev packages relevant to anything I install”. One thing about Ubuntu that really annoys the heck out of me is how single programs are broken apart into multiple packages. And for that matter, another thing is how so many […]