Having a WITty Day
Well, Christopher is busy this week, so he invited me (as well as some really great bloggers, a few of which are on my blogroll) to “sub” for him. I just put up my first post; it's about reading blogs. I'd love to hear your thoughts on it, so why not stop by and give your comments, here.
The Path to GNU/Linux
Seriously, it was mostly curiosity, as well as my desire at the time (in late 1997 and early 1998) for a good Perl development environment, since WinPerl left something to be desired. I do not believe ActivePerl was available at the time; if it had been, I may not have ventured into the exciting territory of the penguins.
At any rate, I had read in early-1998 in Byte Magazine about GNU/Linux becoming friendlier with the new "GNU Network Object Model Environment" (that'd be GNOME), and I thought that sounded really interesting. GNOME stayed in the back of my mind, but for a number of months I didn't look into it anymore.
It was about this time I noticed that Best Buy had several different distributions — SuSE, Red Hat and Caldera. I knew my previous web host had used Red Hat (at the time I was using a FreeBSD powered web host; these days I'm back to an RH-powered hosting provider) and I'd heard good things about it, so I decided to give it a try.
Red Hat still had a deal with MacMillan Software at the time, and BestBuy carried this special version rather than the "official" boxed set. For some reason (I can't remember what), I decided to do a big search for an "official" pack (I was told this was the best way to get started), and found an Official Red Hat Linux 5.1 boxed set for $40 at a small computer shop. I didn't know anything about LILO, etc., so I also went and bought System Commander Deluxe for handling switching between Windows and GNU/Linux.
At any rate, after three attempts I finally got Red Hat installed onto my 500 meg hard disk and tried to figure out what to do with it. My modem wasn't configured, my printer wouldn't print and the pre-installed FVWM95 desktop wasn't anything like the "friendly" system I had read about.
So I rebooted into Windows, wondering if I'd just tossed a hundred bucks out the window (heh), and started reading. I got some tips on modems, although it took me awhile to get that going, but I also located some GNOME rpm's on the second CD of the Red Hat distribution. Red Hat didn't install GNOME at the time because it was at something like version 0.16 (alpha quality).
I fought with GNOME for hours, but couldn't get the silly thing to install. Worse, and here is where I should have "read the fine manual," I couldn't figure out why "del" wouldn't delete files and why "move" wouldn't move them (I was pretty good at getting around MS-DOS, so I was comfortable at the GNU/Linux prompt, but…). All of this made me wonder exactly what I was even hoping to accomplish.
At about this time, two things happen that set me on a collision course with using GNU/Linux seriously. First, while looking for documentation, I ran across the Free Software Foundation and thought this "GPL" thingy sounded kinda neat. So I fired off an e-mail to ask about using the license on my own code. Just a short time later Richard M. Stallman wrote back, which got my attention, since I had read enough of the GNU.org site to realize that he had founded it. I didn't appreciate just how important the Free Software Foundation was, nor all that Stallman had done, but it was still kind of neat.
The second key, ironically, since it was non-free at the time, was that I ran into the KDE Project. I had found a site with all kinds of window managers, and had tried some, but none of them worked that well. Then I stopped by KDE's site. They had just hit 1.0 a few days before and they had this really nice looking desktop. So, I downloaded some src.rpm's (since there weren't any pre-compiled rpm's for Red Hat 5.1), and then went into GNU/Linux and copied them onto my Linux partition from Windows' partition.
The next week or two, I almost went crazy. I had never compiled anything more complex than a Visual Basic application before, and so this whole "./configure; make; make install;" process mystified me somewhat. The real problem, however, was dependencies. Configure couldn't find qt-devel and so I went and searched for that. But then that wouldn't install due to some x11 "header" files missing. I said to myself, "Self, what is that?" Unfortunately, I couldn't answer myself, even after many hours.
Well, I finally gave up and asked, and once someone explained what I needed to get off my Red Hat CD, I finally started the long, arduous process of compiling KDE on a Pentium 100. Finally, it got done, and… it didn't work. It turned out I needed to set the PATH and LD_LIBRARY_PATH for /opt/kde.
Finally, the KDE wallpaper appeared, then the desktop icons, and then the kpanel (the thing that kicker replaced in KDE 2.0). It was something to behold. Perhaps not so much because of how wonderful KDE 1.0 was, but after hours and hours of fighting with it, it felt like I'd accomplished something pretty good.
However, I quickly ended up leaving the GNU/Linux community. It was about this time that I bought a new system — a Dell Dimension XPS 450. At the time the Pentium II 450 had just come out and so I was pretty nervous about fooling with the system too much. The Dell techs really didn't know much about Linux but noted that repartitioning my hard disk for it would erase the restore partition. So I just gave up on Linux; I didn't want to mess up my restore partition, and it still wasn't working that well for me.
Then, in November of 1998, Windows 98 died. You know how Windows is, it was just hopelessly messed up. So I fired up the restore utility, only to find the restore partition missing. Sigh. That was bad news, but after I thought about it for a bit, it was also good news — I finally felt free to repartition and get GNU/Linux back on.
Over the next few years I'd go into GNU/Linux and play around, but I still wasn't happy with it. Netscape 4.7 was horrible, KMail wasn't very good compared to Outlook at the time (not considering worm vulnerability, of course), etc. I tried SuSE Linux 6.1 in May of 1999, and liked it, but it was still buggy and it was really hard to get X11 working. I did help beta test KDE 2.0 over the summer of 2000, but things still weren't quite right. Over the early spring of 1999, I also spent endless hours fighting with xfstt to get TrueType fonts to work (finally did, then lost how I did it and had to relearn it two or three months later).
I bought SuSE 6.4 and it had a nice new GUI installer, but KDE 1.2.1 still didn't meet my needs and I still didn't get this whole "freedom" concept. So I got it all working but barely ever used it.
Finally, in early 2001, I bought SuSE 7.1 Professional. It was great. KDE 2.0.1 was still kinda clunky, but KDE 2.1 had just come out and it was, in my opinion, the release that made the GNU/Linux desktop a serious reality. It was stunning. Konqueror's web browser worked well. KMail was multithreaded. Everything worked beautifully. I knew I should switch and get away from the bug-infested Windows operating system. But, inertia is a powerful force, and everything was still working alright in my new Windows 2000 install, so I just stuck to the status quo.
Then it hit. Outlook died for the second time in three months at about 9:00 p.m. one Tuesday after Bible Study Fellowship and I knew a complete reinstall of Windows was the only way I was going to get it fixed easily. I was tired. I was cranky. I just wanted to check my e-mail.
So I did the most logical thing: I exported my Outlook mail to Outlook Express, rebooted the computer into GNU/Linux and imported everything into KMail. That was that, I had made the first major step toward actually jumping over to the GNU/Linux desktop.
Since then, I've learned to stop calling GNU/Linux just "Linux." I also learned to say Linux correctly and not just the Americanized way — it's properly pronounced Lynn-ucks not Lie-nicks (the confusion enters in that the American pronunciation of Linus is different than the Scandinavian pronunciation that Linus Torvalds uses). But, that's another story.
Later in November of 2001 I got tired of SuSE's non-free installer/configurator and some bugginess in it and made the jump to Mandrake Linux 8.1. After a brief jump to Debian 3.0 "Woody" in February 2002, I went back to Mandrake Linux for 8.2, then 9.0, 9.1, and I'm getting ready to switch to 9.2 (which is great, but I haven't had time to move my main stuff to it yet). After using Debian, I was able to appreciate not only apt-get but also the power of Mandrake's apt-get clone, urpmi, and now I can't imagine how anyone lives without powerful dependency resolution and software upgrade tools like these.
It was on October 5, 2001 that I launched Open for Business (www.ofb.biz), and since then I've had the opportunity to try pretty much every major distribution.
In all, I've used:
Red Hat 5.1*, 8.0, 9.0
SuSE 6.1*, 6.4*, 7.1*, 8.0, 8.1, 8.2
Caldera Linux Technology Preview (2001)
Lycoris Desktop/LX Amethyst
LindowsOS 3.0
Debian GNU/Linux "Woody" (pre* and post release)
KNOPPIX 3.0 (and KNOPPIX KDE 3.1 Edition)
Libranet GNU/Linux 2.8
Xandros Linux 1.0
Mandrake Linux 8.1 (DL)*, 8.2 Betas, 8.2 (DL* and PowerPack), 9.0 Betas, 9.0 (DL)*, 9.1 Betas, 9.1 (DL* and ProSuite), 9.2 Betas, 9.2(Discovery Edition).
FVWM95*
KDE 1.0*, 1.1*, 1.2.1*, 1.9x*, 2.0*, 2.0.1*, 2.1.x*, 2.2.x*, 3.0*, 3.1.x*.
GNOME 0.16, 0.90, 1.0, 1.2, 1.4, 2.0, 2.2
And numerous others, though not as seriously
[A * denotes a distribution or desktop I used as my default in GNU/Linux for a period of time.]
Bzip2: Ubercompressor for Everyone
I realized I had filled up my hosting quota (ouch!) and so I logged onto ssh and started to clean up my account. I found asisaid.com's logs were about 20 megabytes and FaithTree.com's were taking up a pretty good amount too (although I had started those over about two months ago), so I compressed 'em to start fresh. Thanks to the powerful bzip2 compression tool, I was able to take about 30 total megs of logs and shrink them to about 2 megabytes using bzip2's best compression mode.
So that leads to two points: (1) If you tried to post here and couldn't, please try again — there's room now. I think this may have been the problem with CS-FSLUG too, so CS members should try reposting as well. (2) Try bzip2 if you haven't previously.
And the moral of the story: watch out for runaway log files!
iTunes for Windows: Slick.
While the Aqua-like look within iTunes for Windows doesn't look quite as good as it does in Mac OS X (IMO, but I guess you hope it wouldn't, otherwise all of Apple's work on Quartz would have been for naught), it looks very nice. Most everything works the same, save some adjustments to make it act like a Windows app (like a different configuration window that is less iconic).
The really amazing part was getting my iTunes Music Store music onto the system. It was absolutely painless. I went into my Mac's iTunes preferences, enabled music sharing (shares the music within your subnet), and presto all of the purchases appeared in a folder named “Timothy Butler's Music” on iTunes for Windows. After that, it was just a matter of typing in my Apple Account's username and password to authorize the computer and the music started playing! Impressive!
(And, as if you wouldn't have guessed, the music sounds much better on the PC with its SB Live! driving a 5.1 Logitech speaker system than the iMac's two little built in speakers.
)
Eye See, Can You?
Alias, the makers of Maya 3D rendering software, have a fun little challenge — can you tell the difference between real photos and 3D renderings? Test your self at Fake of Foto.
(I got 9 out of 10.)
Well, There's Always Next Month
[Update: Since I quoted the text that would have gone on the blog if it had been up, I took Kevin's advice and backdated this entry.]
Up until yesterday I was proceeding along well with my goal to blog at least once a day for an entire month (previously I've never gone for 15 days without at least a one day pause). Unfortunately something took down at least a good portion of the datacenter my site is in, thus preventing me from continuing my attempts.
Unfortunately something else [other than yesterday morning's Slashdotting] has taken down my sites, all of my clients' sites, and my hosting company’s site for the last three or four hours (must be something bigger than a simple Slashdotting or such, since they have 20 or more servers and they all seem to be MIA at the moment). sigh I’ve been trying to post a blog entry every day this month, so I guess this comment will have to count as one because it certainly doesn’t look like my server will be back up any time soon.
At first, the obvious solution seemed to be to just do a post on Sakamuyo, but its on the same company's systems as asisaid, so that didn't work either. Oh well.
Name Game
Timothy is the #27 most common male name.
0.64% of men in the US are named Timothy.
Around 784000 US men are named Timothy! Butler is the #91 most common last name.
0.091% of last names in the US are Butler.
Around 227500 US last names are Butler!
source namestatistics.com
Found on Neil's World.
Rebate!
A few months ago I purchased Roxio Toast 5 from CompUSA for my iMac. I got it for $100 with a $40 rebate and $10 instant savings, so theoretically it was a “mere” $50 when I got done (quotes around mere since it cost nothing and required no effort to get the same external burner working on my GNU/Linux box). At any rate, that was okay.
But, things couldn't be that simple. I got a post card from Roxio that says that I didn't purchase the software during the eligible time (actually, I did buy it during the eligible period)! Worse, calling the phone number on the post card yields no way to get to a live person, and attempts to e-mail the rebate processor have resulted in no response in over a week. sigh
Hrmf.
Got Purpose?
Here's something for those of you participating in the 40 Days of Purpose… My “Got Purpose?” wallpaper, based on the similar design by PurposeDriven and Outreach Marketing for signage. It's on a GNU/Linux (or actually, KDE) art site, but it should work on any OS. It's not terribly fancy, but I thought I'd just mention it — you can get it here.
Blogrolling down still?
Well, most blogs seem to have their blogroll back up, but mine is still down. I wonder if not all of the rolls are restored or if my blogging software (which modifies the blogrolling output a bit) is the problem? Hmm… I guess I'll worry about it tomorrow.
