Beryl and I
Posted at 17:49:00
on Fri, December 29th 2006 by graham
in:
linux
Blog Posts in "linux"
Living on the Edgy
I've just done upgrading my system to Ubuntu 6.10 (The Edgy Eft). So far, so good.
None of which has any bearing on anything, but I thought I'd tell you all the same.
Ubuntu for Christians
You will, I'm sure, be aware that I'm a big fan of Ubuntu Linux. It's replaced Windows on all my machines and, gaming aside (which I don't do much of anyway) is, for me at least, an infinitely better operating system than Microsoft's offering.
One of the great things about Open Source Software is that it allows people to take a project and tweak it in whatever way they see fit, tuning it for an audience who might not ordinarily have bothered with it.
Which is why this tickles me a bit:
Ubuntu Christian Edition Ubuntu Christian Edition is a free, open source operating system geared towards Christians. It is based on the popular Ubuntu Linux. Ubuntu is a complete Linux-based operating system, freely available with both community and professional support.If it gets people to use the system and, more importantly, gives them a good user experience then I'm all for it. I shall refrain, however, from making ctrl+alt+God jokes; that would just be in poor taste.
...
Although you've got to wonder... What are they going to do about commands like 'kill' and 'killall'? Are daemons going to be called angels now? Or...
Sorry. I'll be in the back...
Not The 9 O'Clock News: Macs are safer than PCs
Posted at 16:01:00
on Wed, July 05th 2006 by graham
in:
computing
in the news
linux
According to BBC News, experts are advising people to switch to Macs in order to avoid nasty things like viruses and malware. No mention of Linux, of course, which is to be expected; it can be a beast to install and offers even more of a culture shock than a Windows to OSX switch would under most circumstances.
Still, you'd think that at least some people would want to know that there's an alternative to paying $arm+$leg for a Mac, wouldn't you?
Just saying.
Bad Blocks
Looks like the great hard disk problem of '06 is due to some bad blocks that my hard drive, not having been fscked in a while, didn't know about and so couldn't avoid. I'm running e2fsck -c now to update the list. Once that's done I should have a healthy partition again (I might also set it to self-check every once in a while, how's that sound?).
Whilst we're on the up-and-up, I managed to get some writing done (cue cheers, applause, thank-yous to all and sundry, etc.). It wasn't much, just 500 words or so whilst Sarah was taking a bath and before I'd figured out how long e2fsck was going to take to run (which is a hell of a long time, by the way). It was based around what I thought might be the idea for the next novel, but I'm pretty sure it's not going to stretch to much more than 30,000 words or so, maybe much less. Anyway, it's something, and if I manage to pick up the pace of the story a bit it might even work first time (or near as dammit anyway). We'll see, won't we.
Oh, and without realising it I named the main character after an English sportswoman. But not an obvious one, which is why I didn't realise until I was reading something else altogether later on. I think I'm going to leave her as she is, though. It's a nice name.
