Category Archives: Uncategorized

Awesome Window manager: my thoughts after the first month.

August 29, 2011 , 2 Comments ,

For years I’ve been a die-hard KDE fan; while I’ll admit to temporarily jumping ship during the tumultuous 4.0 through 4.2 release cycles, and routinely trying out other desktop environments just to see how they schoon, I’ve pretty much stuck with my pal Konqi since back around 3.4.

Screenshot of Awesome window manager

Awesome window manager. Not much to see, but that's kind of the point...

For my desktop, especially at work, KDE still runs the show.  But KDE doesn’t seem to enjoy running properly on my laptop, and frankly does a better job of getting in the way of my workflow than accelerating it.  After some time with XFCE, LXDE, Openbox, and even IceWM, I think I finally found what I’ve been looking for in a desktop environment: Awesome.

(more…)

Posted in: Free/Libre Open Source Software, Technology, Uncategorized , Tagged: , , , ,

Reviving your old PC with Linux, Part III: Understanding Linux distributions

August 27, 2011 , 4 Comments ,

Now that your hardware is reasonably in order, and you understand the potential issues involved there, it’s time to look at the software side of things. You want to run some kind of Linux distribution on your system, but you don’t know which one to pick.

This is the point at which a lot of people would just lob a lot of funny-sounding distro names at you and expect you to check them all out and blindly try them all. Well, I’ll eventually get to lobbing those names out; but first, let’s to try to understand “lightweight Linux” — and Linux distributions in general — in a theoretical way. (more…)

Posted in: Free/Libre Open Source Software, Old computers, Technology, Uncategorized , Tagged: , , , , ,

Debian comes of age

August 16, 2011 , Leave a Comment ,

Jaw saw it coming down the RSS pike: Debian turns 18 today!
I feel like installing Debian on something just to celebrate.

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Website mini-overhaul

August 15, 2011 , Leave a Comment ,

Well, as long as I’m doing stuff to the site, that main page needed an
overhaul BAD!!!!

So I rearranged the menu, created a new stylesheet, and removed all the
fanboyish anti-IE nonsense. The site looks pretty consistent in IE9,
and if you’re using older versions of IE you’re probably going to have
to get used to things looking like junk.

Because frankly, if a browser doesn’t support border-radius, box-shadow, or text-shadow, I can’t be bothered to go make jpegs or do some javascript nonsense just to make things pretty for old-and-busted browser. Sorry.

Posted in: Blogging, Technology, Uncategorized , Tagged:

Testing Emacs

August 15, 2011 , Leave a Comment ,

Just testing my ability to post from Emacs. Test test test.

I’m posting via weblogger.el, but there are some bugs involving timezone offsets that mess with the publishing time.  I’ll see if I can sort those out somehow….

Posted in: Blogging, Free/Libre Open Source Software, Technology, Uncategorized , Tagged: , ,