Choose the right distro

Ok, so by now you all know that I favor Ubuntu as a distro. However, there may be times when another distro would work better for me…say, I’m installing it on a PII 300 or something. Maybe I have other constraints. Which distribution would I choose then?

I ran across an interesting “test” to determine which Linux distro I should install. It’s called ….drum roll……

Linux Distribution Chooser

It asks quite a few questions ranging from technical knowledge to age of hardware. After you answer them, you get a number of results to choose from. I only took the test once and I was recommended Debian and Ubuntu

http://www.zegeniestudios.net/ldc/index.php

Dale

Network Manager Applet Tips

I know, I know…it’s been a while. I switched jobs and don’t have my T40 anymore. I was given a Dell Latitude D600 at my new job. This job is great..not a single windows server in the building I was setting up the network manager applet and couldn’t get it to see my wireless interface. It would just say “no connection” After poking around the Google for a bit, I ran across the solution.

It appears that if you’ve already accessed an access point, the nm-applet won’t see your wireless interface. The solution? Edit /etc/network/interfaces. Find the section that has the line with your access point followed by your wep key, if applicable, and delete them…yep just whack em. Right click on the nm-applet icon and disable networking. Right click on it again, enable networking, and you should be set.

I used automatix2 to install the networ manager, but you can also use apt….I think it’s just apt-get install network-manager but someone correct me if I’m wrong

A Beryl of Monkeys

I have been tinkering and googling for ways to get beryl to run on my T40. I figured it should be at least somewhat capable of running it. I’ve seen posts where folks have it working, but alas, I just can’t get it to come up. It always shuts down the X server or just won’t launch the x server. So I punted. I have other boxes at home. One is a P4 2.4 or something like that with about a gig of ram or so. It has a matrox card in it. I installed Dapper and gave it a go. No luck there either. Crazy.  So I thought to myself “should I bite the bullet and put it on my beloved main desktop box?”. Granted the beloved box is a few years old and not as fast as some of today’s powerhouse systems. But it’s got plenty of ram and a cool Quadro 980 video card. What the hell. I downloaded the latest nvidia driver and got it installed. When I checked glxgears, I was getting something like 7000 fps. Wow, I thought, that should do it. I followed all the instructions for installing beryl and emerald-themes, rebooted, crossed fingers, opened terminal, typed beryl-manager, crossed fingers again, gently pressed enter and then…….beauty revealed itself. I love it. I mean it’s a lot of eye candy and some if ain’t all that necessary, but it is REALLY cool. The transparency that is actually transparent and not just a duplicate of the desktop background. The neat little wiggle when you move things around, the effects when  you minimize and maximize. Oh and the cube. I’ll admit that I thought the cube was stupid when I saw the screenshots. Once I used it, I started using multiple desktops more often. It really is nice. I’m learning some little trick about the interface all the time. If you stuff the mouse pointer in the upper right corner, you get thumbnails of all your open windows, similar to os x f9. Alt-Tab is pretty cool and a little 3d-ish. I can’t wait to get familiar enough with it to quit oogling at it and do some real work

Dale