Planet CrunchBang Linux

This is soOo cool!

I recently watched the Google Wave developer preview video, that is on http://wave.google.com. I had heard about it, but really only heard that it was “Email if it had been invented today”. So I was like “yeah…alright…sounds like a farse”. But, I can tell you, it really will be amazing. I am embedding the video so [...]

Bizarrely, you can’t update from Intrepid to Jaunty with a simple apt-get dist-upgrade.

I don’t understand why, but you can’t — you simply get the report that no updates are available:

0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.

What you need to do instead is install the update tool, which is, as far as I can tell, in essence a bash script which does the exact same thing as the apt version above.

The Ubuntu upgrade page describe how to do this:

Install update-manager-core if it is not already installed:sudo apt-get install update-manager-core

Launch the upgrade tool: sudo do-release-upgrade

That’ll download the packages, extract them, and update the system.

I recommend using screen if you’re going to do this remotely: ssh in, hit screen to start a new instance of screen, then run the update script from there. That way you can get out of the instance if you need to (Ctrl+a, then d, to disconnect). Bizarrely, the instance will run in the background even if you end the screen instance — I had problems reconnecting to the session from a different computer, something about a tunnel remaining open till the process closed, but could reconnect via screen -R at the original (albeit remote) computer.

So...
I got fired, well it's not official yet, and the negociations hasn't begun yet, but still...
And my vacation is about to start on on Monday.
Anyway, I already got a new job waiting for me, so it's not pitch black.
It's a small company that's been wanting to hire me for a couple of years, so I guess it's time to move on.
The salery will be better, but the privileges won't.
My current employer pays an extra 6% of my salery to a retirement insurence, the new one won't.
I have a brand new car with all expenses paid for(with a salery reduction though) at my current job, I won't have that either.
On the other hand the hours will be better, I will have more freedom in my work, and as I said a raise in salery.

I guess I shouldn't feel to down about it, there are lots of people getting fired that don't have a new job to go to.

Well, more time for creating art I guess!

Today, I picked up this article which argues that open source desktop software sucks.

In actuality, it’s a pretty well written article basically arguing that incentive for usability is reducing support costs.

And since open source software has, for the most part, no support costs anyway (b/c they don’t provide that much support), there’s no incentive for improving the usability of desktop software.

He writes:

So, if faced between spending time on the elegance of the implementation, or the intuitiveness of the interface, companies will optimize for intuition; open-source projects, for elegance of implementation.

That’s worth thinking about. I’m not convinced he’s completely correct, but he argues Bryan (of LAS fame)’s major point better than Bryan does, namely that desktop software sucks because there’s no incentive to do the hard work to improve it.

I got home today and found a nice package in the mailbox. I always get giddy when there is anything in there other than direct mail ads and bills. This time the giddyness was fully justified. It turned out to be my package of schwag from The SouthEast LinuxFest. W00T!

I helped out with some of the graphics for the conference and this was my reward. Honestly, I would have loved to attend but it was just too far for me. I am booking in for the Ohio Linux Fest this September though so hopefully I can meet some of the wonderful people in this community.

Congratulations to Dave Yates and the rest of his cohorts on what by all accounts sounded like a complete and utter success. Indeed the reviews have been so glowing that I would think they're wondering what they have to do to meet expectations next year.

Anyways, with yet another thunderstorm fast approaching, I decided to get my daughter to pose with all the SELF schwag for a quick photo. Kudos to all the SELF guys and thanks so much for the stuff, and for allowing me to help out.

Now I'll have a clean change of clothes to wear in Ohio!

If you have implemented Music on Hold on your asterisk box, you may want to listen to it, to know if it is working as you want, of course you can call to your IVR number and wait for the music on hold, but it is better if you create an extension specially designed to hear to music on hold.

This is how to do it, in the extensions.conf file add these lines in the context your extension is.
<!--break-->

exten => 1000,1,Answer 
exten => 1000,2,MusicOnHold() 

Now each time you dial 1000, you will be redirected to music on hold, and you will be able test how it is working.

I have been trying to write something on the blog for a long time, it was a very busy month, and the next one will not be any different, but I can not live without my hobby, and yesterday I run into a weird problem, my two computers showed the time four hours ahead!, I looked for an easy way to sync them and stumbled upon this way.

Openntpd, and from its webpage:

OpenNTPD is a FREE, easy to use implementation of the Network Time Protocol. It provides the ability to sync the local clock to remote NTP servers and can act as NTP server itself, redistributing the local clock.

OpenNTPD is primarily developed by Henning Brauer as part of the OpenBSD Project. The portable version is made by Darren Tucker. The software is freely usable and re-usable by everyone under a BSD license.

<!--break-->
I have installed it now in Arch Linux, Debian and Gentoo, and it worked flawlessly on the three of them.

Installing and running it

For Debian / Ubuntu

sudo aptitude install openntpd

For Gentoo

sudo emerge openntpd

For Arch Linux

sudo pacman -S openntpd

On Arch Linux you should also add the daemon to your /etc/rc.conf file, in the DAEMONS line, and may look like this

DAEMONS=(syslog-ng network netfs crond openntpd)

That will let it working for your basic needs, as is to keep you clock on time.

Now if you want your computer to also be a Time server uncomment the line

listen on *

on the /etc/openntpd/ntpd.conf

To make all your other machines to look at your new Time server just add this line to your /etc/openntpd file

server your.time.server.ip

as your first or only server line your conf. file.

At my local LUG meet I was shamed into admitting I’d never watched any of heathenX and Richard Querin’s screencasts about Inkscape.

So I gave it a go the other night. I watched this cool one about making a photo appear with 3D.

I decided I wasn’t going to learn anything if I didn’t do it myself, so I came up with this, not dissimilar image:

Pretty fun and surprisingly easy.

I’ve been thinking some recently about how I spend my time.

A few weeks ago, I has a short conversation with Brandon on Twitter, about calming our schedules down.

When I lived in Arkansas, I was busy almost every night. I didn’t work as hard when I was at work, but I had more on plate overall. Almost every night and every weekend was full of something, whether work or church related. Jenn and I rarely hung out with our friends — when we had some free time, we had to spend it with each other. It was the only time we had together.

When we moved to Illinois, I decided I simply wasn’t going to live like that. I just wasn’t going to do it. I have a few commitments, but only a few. And we have lots more spare time.

That’s on purpose — if community is important, you have to make and spend time with other people outside of programs. Saying no to possible commitments makes it possible to do that, something we never had in Arkansas.

Brandon was in process of simplifying his schedule, which I told him was a great choice for me.

But, I said, the trick is making sure you don’t waste the time you get back. Honestly, I feel like this has been one of my biggest problems with having such a free-er life: I spend a lot of time, particularly in the evenings churning through Google Reader, watching TV or playing around with Linux without learning anything.

My problem, I think, boils down to one of self-discipline and focus. By the time Jenn goes to bed around 11:00, I feel like my brain power is pretty much shot — I want to just take it easy. But that’s when I have the most time to myself. If I was doing right, I’d be using the time between 11:00 and whenever I was really sleepy (1:00? 2:30?) to create something, to learn something or to really challenge myself.

I offer myself the excuse that I just don’t have the energy. But really, I’m just being lazy. I think, if I put the work into it, I could train my brain to expect to really be challenged at night.

There’s a lot that I want to learn (to code, to do better web development) and to create (to write more, to be more creative musically). I just have to muster up the self-discipline to do it.

So yesterday I started playing with virutalbox and for some odd reason decided to try out MS Windows 7 in it. Actually, I do know why I was trying it out. First, I've heard alot of great reviews for it even from Linux users and was curious. In addition, it was suppose to have lower resource usage then Vista (which I've never used) and wanted to see how true all of this was. Finally, another

A while ago I covered netbooting/installation on ubuntu, well I’ve now found an even easier way to do this! It’s probably the easiest way to go about this as it really only involves editing one config file. Some of the info here comes from the official Ubuntu documentation on this, though my approach is actually easier, since you don’t need a separate tftp server.

The main piece of software you will need is dnsmasq, which you can install with the command:

sudo apt-get install dnsmasq

I already had this installed as I’m using it as a DNS cache for my network (which is also pretty useful). It turns out that dnsmasq is a bit of a ’swiss army knife’, it can do DHCP, DNS and TFTP all together and very easily. You should edit the config file:

sudo nano /etc/dnsmasq.conf

And add/uncomment/edit the following lines:

dhcp-range=192.168.1.3,192.168.1.50,12h # sets the ip address range and update frequency for the network
dhcp-boot=pxelinux.0 # set up network booting to boot the pxelinux bootloader
enable-tftp # enable built in tftp server
tftp-root=/var/tftpd # set tftp directory

Basically this sets up dnsmasq to be both the DHCP server for the network and push the PXE boot options out over the network. It also enables the built in TFTP server in dnsmasq and sets the directory to serve files from.

The next step is to get some files to serve, I got the PXE/netboot image from the Ubuntu cdimages site, and untarred the files to the correct directory:

wget http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/dists/jaunty/main/installer-i386/current/images/netboot/netboot.tar.gz
sudo mkdir -p /var/tftp
tar -xvzf netboot.tar.gz -C /var/tftp/
chown -R nobody:nogroup /var/tftp

The tar file of course is basically just the minimal install CD, set up for netbooting, so when you install you will need to download all the packages, for a simple cli install this doesn’t take very long, and you can use a package cache or something to help with future installs.

OK, now restart dnsmasq:

sudo /etc/init.d/dnsmasq restart

…and you should be good to go (make sure that your machine is the only DHCP server on the network). For tips on booting clients see my original article – btw, since I used the new version of Ubuntu I can now boot my Eee PC 901 over the network!

If you have any questions or problems with this I’d be happy to answer them, just post them below.

Bye for now!

After a period of time getting used to Zenwalk again I’m finding myself getting the itch to build my own packages. The Zenbuild system makes this extremely easy. Grab the existing ZENBUILD from an older package then modify it to suit the current source and new package’s needs.

This week I found myself building an up to date version of Midori from the git repos and a release candidate of the next version of Weechat. Some nice features in both programs and well worth the effort.

If you are interested both packages can be found here. Both are built against snapshot

Midori 0.1.7

Weechat 0.3.0-rc1

Because I couldn’t come up with any lamer name… :/ I was supposed to write about my Pekwm experiences (it’s still under work), instead I decided to make new theme. Little more colour than usually. :) I used BlackWhite as base of the gtk theme.

Download: SummerStripes (Takes to Box-Look.org)

• Wallpaper: Paisley by Miriam Moshinsky
• Icons: ALLGREY

EDIT:

Openbox theme – Still

I decided to create also a matching Openbox theme – Still. It’s not as soft looking as pekwm theme, but goes well with the GTK.

Download: Still (Takes to Box-Look.org)

• Wallpaper: Lotus by Miriam Moshinsky
• Icons: ALLGREY

A few days ago, I had a short conversation with whoever is running the Opera Browser’s Twitter account. I don’t remember what prompted me, but I voiced my assumption about Opera: that the money was in mobile/embedded aps, and the desktop was just a loss leader.

As it turns out, since they’re public company, Opera’s financial data is publicly available. And almost a quarter of their business in their desktop browser. Here’s the breakdown from the 2008 report:

• 18.47M in desktop
• 78.93M total
• 23% is desktop (other 78% is other: mobile, embedded, etc)

That REALLY surprised me — I didn’t figure they were making any money at all on the desktop (and I’m still not completely sure HOW they’re doing it).

And despite the fact that it’s not open source, I still think Opera is a great browser. I’d love to see them open the code, but until then, I still wish them a lot of success.

Here’s a really interesting article about online communities and how it can affect church structure.

He argues that our past church strutures have been built around the limitations imposed by our media (in the plural sense of ‘medium’, not in the TV/newspapers sense), that formerly, a Masters in Theology meant you were one of a few with access to both scholarship and education. But as online communities grow and more and more information (scholarship?) becomes available online, that Masters means less and less.

He writes:

Which brings us back to the online thing. The open, flat, collaborative, fluid dynamic that marks out online culture is a place that problematises a lot of the assumptions that feed the church as answer to scarce resources model. Put simply, we no longer need that kind of church or the denominational structures that were built to support it. If anything, that kind of church is becoming more an more repulsive to people of my generation and will be totally alien to digital natives.

I’m not convinced I agree with his conclusions. In fact, I’m not entirely sure what his conclusions are — he’s primarily just exploring the ideas.

Still, this idea of church structure being analogous to economics (read the article — that’s his argument) with similar consequences for out-dated models like record labels and newspapers is really interesting to me, whether or not the two line up perfectly.

Recently I recieved this picture in an email from a friend.

I’ve got to say, I totally agree. I feel the same way about that stupid printing press technology, too.

It’s enabled so much crap — if only we hadn’t embraced the printing press, only the really smart people would be writing stuff in the first place.

Stupid democratization of communication.

I saw an article today talking about Firefox 3.5. The said:

[Firefox 3.5 RC1 has] Support for new web technologies, such as HTML5 video and audio elements, JavaScript query selectors and downloadable fonts, have also been added.

Ok, that’s awesome. I’m pumped about HTML5, if it means we can start to wean the web off Flash. It’s not that I hate Flash (although I do), it’s just the fact that depending on a single, for-profit company for something as vital to the web as complex animation and video delivery seems like a really bad idea for the future.

I don’t know what Javascript query selectors are, but downloadable fonts, or rather embeddable fonts, is an awesome feature that the web needed a long time ago. Very cool stuff — good job FF devs!

Shortly after I got married my brother purchased the jaredandcoralee.com domain as a birthday present. We used this site as a family website to post pictures and other family related stuff until my wife discovered blogger. The family site got neglected as blogger took over the role and purpose of the old site. So, I still have the domain and decided to turn it into a Linux command line site.It's

You just gotta love a world in which you can add both Frogger and Asteroids to your website with a simple cut and paste of some html code.

Now if only there were faithful flash versions of Omega Race, Galaga, and maybe a Scott Adams adventure. Jeez, I'd never get anything done!

I got the code snippets for these games (there are others) from http://www.neave.com/games/

Hey Guys,

Well I haven’t done this in a while and to be honest a lot has been going on with me. I’ll just sum it up in a list:-

• Saw Chuck Finale (okay not a big thing but chuck is awesome)
• Became ECSS President
• Revised for and Completed my Exams
• Switched from Crunchbang to Ubuntu Jaunty
• Tried/Trying to get a job

A summer job might I add but considering how (how to put this nicely…) fucked up the economy and job markets are at the moment the pickings look slim and unfortunately 2 years of a Computer Science degree isn’t actually a qualification. So i’ve been focusing on my Third Year Project research and trying to cut down on some of the things in my “Idea Book”.

I’m going to digress and go onto what my “Idea Book” is and where it came from because as this blog is to do with me as I go through my degree, anyone interested can see how I work. So the book, right well its a book mostly full of diagrams and little notes and yes this is where I put all of my bright Idea’s. This isn’t just about Computers (however it’s pretty focused around that kind of thing). Just to give you an idea of some of the more recent things I put in there.

• A vegetable patch (a monitored vegetable patch that calculates the best places for each to be replanted based on past data, I was watching Jamie’s Kitchen at the time)
• PHP Framework to save myself time whenever I want to build a new Website
• Some Third Year Project Idea

So yeah by “Idea Book” is a to-do list of things I’d love to build during the year and usually save it for the summer because I don’t really have the time during the year. So Third Year Project, I suppose I should talk about that. Well basically it’s a 9 month piece of work that includes a full design project resulting in a piece of software. If i remember correctly such things as AudioScrobbler where created by Soton students that did this project. So basically mine is a

“Personal Learning Environment”

my general aim is to design an environment that takes advantage of the features of a computer over paper. I’ll go into it a little more over the next few weeks as I do more research!

Darius

The most common way to use an asterisk VoIP PBX is with an internal FXO card like Digium or Sangoma, but there are other ways, like using an external gateway like Quintum or Audiocodes to name just two of the options.

I am not an Asterisk expert, but I prefer the second aproach, as it may save CPU power on the Asterisk server, as the Analog to Digital and Digital to Analog conversion is now done in the external gateway instead of the Asterisk server.

Having said that, I will show you how to route calls to that external gateway, keep in mind that may be other ways to do this, and maybe better ways, but this is the one that worked for me.
<!--break-->
Create a SIP "user" for the FXO to log in

In the /etc/asterisk/sip.conf file create an entry for your FXO line.

[3580775]
type=friend
username=3580775
host=dynamic
allow=all
secret=1234
context=default
canreinvite=yes
qualify=yes
dtmf=inband

This is tested with an Audiocodes Mediant 1000, with 12 lines, you must create all the twelve users in your sip.conf file, and then create them in the mediant 1000 to make it possible to log into the Asterisk.

Once this is done, you should work with the /etc/asterisk/extensions.conf file, there create the routing lines for external calls.

Create the dial rules

In the extensions.conf file add that, in the context you want to have access to external lines.

exten => _XXXXXXXX,1,Dial(SIP/3580773/${EXTEN}) ; will route only lines with 8 digits
exten => _XXXXXXX,1,Dial(SIP/3580773/${EXTEN}) ; will route only lines with 7 digits

Of course you can create different dial patterns but those will give you an idea about how to do it.

For the incoming calls, I have enables automatic dial in the Mediant (Audiocodes), I have made it call to extension 300.

And in the extensions.conf file this are the entries for that extension

[from-IVR]
exten => 300,1,NoOp(Ellamada al IVR)
exten => 300,n,Answer()             
exten => 300,n,Background(message-ivr)
exten => 300,n,Background(silence/5)  
exten => 300,n,HangUp                 
exten => 0,1,Dial(SIP/102)            
exten => t,1,Dial(SIP/102) 

I will explain in another post how this works, but basically, the message says "Hi, thank you for calling, blah, blah, blah, if you know the extension please dial it know, otherwise wait for the operator", and yes, extension 102 is the operator extension.

I have been working these last days on an Asterisk over Debian, and I will be posting some tips I am learning about it, today I will post about how to record a voice message that can be used with the IVR menu.

The IVR (Interactive voice responce) is one of the most used PBX applications, and the best VoIP PBX (Asterisk) have a real good support of this feature.
<!--break-->
Create a extension for this in the sip.conf file.

[205]
type=friend
username=205
host=dynamic
allow=all
secret=1234
context=default
qualify=no

After that, insert these lines in your extensions.conf file

Exten => 205,1,Wait(2)
Exten => 205,2,Record(/tmp/asterisk-recording:gsm)
Exten => 205,3,Wait(2)
Exten => 205,4,Playback(/tmp/asterisk-recording)
Exten => 205,5,wait(2)
Exten => 205,6,Hangup

After that you just dial the 205 extension, and save your message, after that, you will hear it, if your al happy with it just hang up, otherwise, redial the 205 and start all over again, once your are happy with your recording, copy it to the directory where Asterisk can use it.

Then copy that message asterisk-recording.gsm file, to /usr/share/asterisk/sounds/ and you are now able to use it in your IVR configuration.

There's a Jared application. It's used to edit MS Windows registry. Okay, I wish it did something cooler, but I'll take what I can get.

In a second attempt to make more use of my Wacom tablet, and learn a little bit more about using the Gimp in the process, I sat down tonight and decided to attempt a little more sketching. I always liked doodling cars in my youth, so I did a quick sketch in the Gimp and one thing led to another and I ended up with this about two hours later (click it to get a slightly larger version):

There are a lot of problems with it if you look too closely (doing anything remotely attractive with the wheels is still completely above me) but it's a starting point anyhow.

I got all inspired today at lunch after checking out stuff like David Boyle's awesome portfolio, that has wonderful things like this.

So tonight I finally got familiar with using Gimp layers but I realized one thing:  I really need to study up on Gimp shortcut keys. I'm quite comfortable with keyboarding in Inkscape, but in the Gimp I'm pretty much hunt and click at this point.

If anybody does sketching like this with the Gimp and can give me any pointers, please grace the comment section with your wisdom.

I’ve mentioned before that my fascination with open source springs, primarily, out of my frustration with standard American business practice, with capitalism in general, which seeks to control the distribution of goods as much as possible in order to make as much money as possible.

Free software, on the other hand, provides a very different way of thinking about making money, namely relinquishing that control of distribution, which in turn, makes free software a disruptive force. That disruption creates an illustration, I’ve argued, albeit neither directly nor purposefully, of Kingdom economics or to put it more plainly, of grace.

The problem with that argument, though, is that free software is predicated one of the same principles as laissez-faire capitalism, namely of freedom. In fact, this ‘let the market decide’ approach contributes a lot to the quality of the best open source projects — good projects succeed and poor project falter because the market recognizes the good from the bad. If a project is forked, the fork succeeds if it’s better than the original.If it’s not, it falters and dies for lack of support.

So there’s this really strange, and I think fascinating, tension here between grace and compeition, between capitalism and distributed socialism, where the two are substantially less seperable than you first believe.

Which is, I think, why I find the whole idea really interesting. Instead of falling into one of two well established categories, free software integrates the two in a new and imaginative way. I can only hope that it’s imaginative enough to inspire people to imagine whole new economic models.

Its been a while since I’ve done a good hack article. so again I’m back onto my favourite topic of 3G modems. Thanks to the generous promotions at 3dongles4free I’ve been able to pickup a new Three dongle for next to nothing. As I’ve already got my E160G I didn’t really need this to be on the Three network.

After a quick search around and a few suggestions from existing mailing lists I’ve found out that a hacked firmware exists and these cheap and cheerful dongles can be flashed to allow any SIM card to be used. This should be a simple job of updating the software and using the new SIM card.

First of all, grab the software pack from Rapidshare, due to the questionable nature of this copy of the firmware no one has been willing to host it on their own hosting, and I’ll keep to that idea. Extract the files from the RAR and you should have a firmware upgrade, and a installation folder for the connection software. As the existing Three connection software is very limited, the software package includes the Telstra version which allows you to define your own settings.

Before you attempt the software upgrade, you need to remove any existing Three software, install the Telstra version and remove your SIM card from the dongle, then simply plug it in and run the firmware upgrade. This process will take around 15-25 minutes and once it’s done it’ll give you a prompt. During the upgrade do not power off your PC or remove the dongle from the USB socket. This will brick your dongle rendering it completely useless.

Now, put in your non-Three SIM card and plug it back into your PC, the Telstra software should start-up and try detect the device, you need to configure the software for your provider’s APN settings, but the PDF document included with the software package will give you all the details you need.

Remember, I take no responsibility for people bricking their equipment, you have been warned.

Jnthn has a really cool, brief post today on his blog about why Twitter is like the church, namely that,

Studies by Harvard & Nielsen suggest that Twitter has been better at signing up users than keeping them…The question is: what are we doing in the church to keep those people in the church, helping them become disciples of Christ?

It’s a quick fast read and worth thinking about.

There’s an interesting post about one of my favorite coffee-making gadgets, the AeroPress over on weeklyroast.com.

He recommends mixing and plunging upside down.

I like the idea — I’ve always felt like the AeroPress’ biggest weaknesses were:

1. too much water drips out too fast through the filter w/o any pressure
2. the good stuff rises to the top which then gets trapped in the filter/grounds

I just haven’t figured out yet WHERE to put my cup if I’m going do the whole rigamarole upside down.

Last night I installed rtorrent on Slackware current on my Pentium M 1.4 Ghz laptop and this is how it went.rtorrent is not a main Slackware package, so I went in search of a SlackBuild. I easily found the rtorrent SlackBuild and downloaded it and read the README file. It was dependant upon libtorrent ... no problem there was a SlackBuild for that too. libtorrent was dependant upon libsigc++ ...

The Language Log had this really interesting article recently about a case in Britain that asked whether or not a Pringle is potato chip.

On its own, this is only vaguely interesting.

But when you get to the end of the story, you run into the real money quote:

Conservatives like to insist that their judges are strict constructionists, giving the Constitution and statutes their precise meaning and no more [linguists groan here], while judges like [Sonia] Sotermayor are activists. But there is no magic way to interpret terms like “free speech” or “due process” — or potato chip.

This is an interesting idea — that there is not such thing as “precise meaning and no more”. Because language is always shifting, meaning is as well. This might be important for legal reasons, but the implications for philosophy, when you start talking about “Truth” should be pretty apparent.

The article itself lays this out substantially more convincingly — rather than repeat it, I’m just going to tell you to go read it.

In recent weeks I’ve been busy testing and using my recent little Ubuntu derivative project Gahm Linux. I’ve very much enjoyed using this system but something has always bothered me about it. Like its older cousin Crunchang (the best little openbox live cd distro I’ve tried) something has always nagged at me about using it. Principally this is its Ubuntu base. Why I have issues with Ubuntu could fill an entire other post and is based in issues that are well left behind. Still, overall I have enjoyed the last 8 months or so of using a distro that looked nothing like Ubuntu yet had the flexibilty of Ubuntu’s massive package base.

This week however I took a step back from my forum and launchpad responsibilities at Crunchbang and found myself using using my old p4 machine that runs Zenwalk again. Without the sense of obligation tying me to Crunchbang and Gahm I realised just how much I enjoy using this outstanding slack based distro. I first used Zenwalk back in ‘06 and have enjoyed watching it go from strength to strength in that time.

So today I decided it was time for a full time return to Zenwalk on my main production machine as well. I’ve had a great day and feel ‘back at home’ at last. Slack based distros just seem to be a perfect fit for me. While Crunchbang and Gahm will still get a run in a VM, it is Zenwalk that will hold my primary interest for some time to come.

Next on the list is to get back into making some new wallpapers (time permitting - very busy at work atm) for the Zenwalk art team that I’m a member of. An area that I’ve been neglecting in recent weeks/months.

I have an older laptop which I try to be very respectful of it's limited resources. Since I have alot of respect for both Debian and Slackware, I wanted to see which would provide me with the best results on this laptop. I like to have fairly up to date packages, so I installed Slackware 12.2 and upgraded to current. I also installed Debian Lenny and upgraded to Sid. Both are running on the same

OK, this a day or two late, but what the heck... ;-)
Linux Mint 6 XFCE RC1 is released, as you may or may not know, I'm a real sucker for this edition, it is in my opinion the best of the Linux Mint editions, too bad it isn't the default one.
Merlwiz79 has as usual done a great job in putting together a very complete package.
More information can be found here!
I really encourage you to take this baby for a spin!
Whether or not this is your first plunge into the Mint world, or if you're a seasoned "Minter" it will be a refreshing ride.
As usual it's the small things that sets Mint apart from especially "big brother" Ubuntu.
All the various mintTools that are there to make your life easier and the inclusion of for instance giver, a nifty little tool to make file sharing in your internal network a real no-brainer!

The application lists all the users and their computers currently connected to the network.
Drag and drop files into Giver and the recipient is immediately notified.


All the new features including illustrative screenshots, like the ones above, can be found here!
So, what are you waiting for?
Don't just sit there, download it from here and give it a spin!
Happy "Minting"!

I made a little – or rather quite big – BMPanel -theme. :D In case you want to use this, download the theme and extract it in /home/user_name/.bmpanel/themes/. As you can see I’m not much of a designer but I think it’s quite cute… I have positioned it so that it will be top of the screen but you can easily change the position to “bottom” in the theme file (/home/user_name/.bmpanel/themes/sky/theme), you can also change the font (BauhausMedium). Actually you can do whatever you want, like add there little grass. :P

• BMPanel theme – Sky

• Wallpaper: Elfin | Wallpaper

I did a bit more work this week, but not as much as I would like. The PSD is in a bit of a state at the moment, so I’ve cut out some details to show off, including some application windows.

Note the terminal tab at the bottom, so Linux power-geeks can change the desktop to something that lets them really get under the hood!

I’ve also allocated a little space that Google could use to display ads - I need two more, so leave suggestions in the comments. Winning suggestions will be used. :D

More next week. Enjoy.

See and download the full gallery on posterous

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