It’s no secret that many people’s first Linux experience these days is on Ubuntu; yet as they — for one reason or another — find themselves needing to branch out into the wider Free OS world, Debian is often the next stop along the road. Having introduced a few Ubuntu users (in real life or [...]
The big news in the Debian world this week is the liberation of the The Debian Administrators Handbook, which, thanks to donations from a crowdfunding campaign, has now been released under free-as-in-speech licenses. It’s even been packaged up and placed in the Debian repositories, so it’s a quick “aptitude install” away. I spent some time browsing [...]
Not so long ago, I posted about my attempts to bring my old DAW system back to life with Lubuntu. Emboldened by my success, and eager to get it on a nice firm LTS-release foothold, I tried to upgrade it to Precise Pangolin a few weeks ago. Sadly, the results were not so great: after [...]
Michael Meeks, a Suse developer who is instrumental in the LibreOffice community, has posted a good article on his “Stuff Michael Meeks is doing” blog summarizing the differences between OpenOffice and LibreOffice. Ok, granted that he’s a LibreOffice guy and it’s a little biased, I think it’s nevertheless a pretty good, factual summary about the history [...]
Ubuntu 12.04 is nearly upon us, and probably will be by the time anyone bothers to read this post. With all the excitement and general hubbub around it, I imagine it will result in a lot of people unfamiliar with Ubuntu or GNU/Linux trying it out for the first (or first-in-a-long-) time. There is a [...]
The Amiga. If you weren’t of computing age during the Bush Sr. administration, you may not have heard of this legend wrapped in an enigma wrapped in a white case. The Amiga inspired frenzied superlatives from its users (including, notably, pop artist Andy Warhol) in a way that only certain fruity computers do today. In [...]
Following on the heels of my google search hotkey in awesome, I decided to tackle expanding the functionality of the run prompt. Awesome’s run prompt, by default, is basically a command-launcher; it chokes on any input that doesn’t represent an executable file. I wanted it to behave more like the run prompt in other desktops, [...]
I’m back to using AwesomeWM on my work desktop; not sure what brought me back, but I will say that overall I prefer the way it handles multiple monitors and multiple desktops a little better than how KDE does it. That, and KWin’s tiling mode is still useless with dual monitors even in 4.8. Something [...]
After conversing a bit with one reader of my kiosk how-to, I was reminded how tricky it can be to really lock-down a modern web browser for kiosk use. It’s so tricky, that for my own needs I ended up writing my own browser. Well, I figure it’s time to stop being stingy, so I [...]
Finally got some time last night to do a little recording on my Lubuntu/ardour setup. I wasn’t doing anything serious, just wanted to lay down some sounds to experiment with software, workflow, and getting a good sound out of my new cajon. The result is here. No sequencing or drum programming going on (obviously), just [...]