Yeah, I know that I should be writing something about Hardy Heron here. But after I made the switch from Ubuntu to Linux Mint, I just don’t have a reason to go all ga-ga over Hardy yet. Once Linux Mint - Elyssa is released, THEN I’ll be fawning over the best release of Ubuntu to date. 
Ubuntu Hardy Heron
Linux on Desktop: Cool Desktop Applications(Part 2) : 25 Small and Simple Games for your Linux/Ubuntu Desktop
I tend to be a little cynical about list articles. Most are just trolling for links to try to drive ad clicks. And I am pretty certain that this article at Linux on Desktop is doing just that. However, the list given is actually pretty cool. There’s a lot of games in the list that I hadn’t heard of before. I can’t wait to give them a spin, especially Open Invaders (I was a huge Space Invaders fan back in the day) and Abe’s Amazing Adventure.
really cool games and emulators thatyou can install on your Ubuntu 7.10 Gutsy Gibbon Desktop (Am giving installation instruction to Ubuntu since it is one the most popular Desktop distribution right now but if you want to install these games in other distribution you can do so with little modification to the installation command/instructions ). Most of the games discussed in the article are simple and small so they should run flawlessly on computers with pretty modest configuration .
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Linux Mint
I finally found some time to play with a few different Linux distros. I had mentioned here that I tried Sabayon Linux, which looks absolutely beautiful, and was kinda fun. But Gentoo is so far out of my comfort zone that I decided Sabayon wasn’t worth the time that it would take to re-learn things.
I’m not a Red Hat/Fedora, so I didn’t even consider any distro derived from it. That left me with Debian-based distros. I’ve been using Xubuntu for a long, long time, so I figured I would try something with Gnome as the main desktop. I was listening to LUGRadio, and they had an interview with the Linux Mint guy, so I figured I would try that out.
Linux Mint is actually very cool. There are mostly subtle differences from Ubuntu (codecs installed by default, compiz active, different/nice theme). But a couple of the huge ones are the Mint Menu (modified version of the Slab) and Mint’s control panel. The Menu is very cool. I normally launch apps either from a terminal or via ALT+F2, but I’ve found myself using Mint’s Menu pretty frequently.
Mint’s control panel is pretty handy, too. It’s well laid out, and seems to give more options than the standard Gnome control center. But I am not a standard Gnome user, so that could be totally wrong.
Mint also comes with some pretty good default applications. OpenOffice is the office app, of course. Firefox is the web browser. Interestingly, Thunderbird is the email client. As much as I want to like Thunderbird, it just isn’t flexible enough for me. So I switched back to my standard mix of mutt (remote) and kmail (local). Mint uses Amarok as its music player (a most awesome choice, and an obviously sign that Mint is not Gnome app specific), Totem for video playback, Pidgin for IM. And it is packaged with a few really good games (OpenArena, Singularity, a Worms Armegeddon clone, and more).
The first thing I did was to test-drive the standard Mint install. And Linux Mint makes a surprisingly good desktop OS. For someone who just wants to sit at their computer, surf the web, watch videos on YouTube, send and receive email, play games and use a word processor, Linux Mint is perfect. And it has a good amount of eye candy, with compiz-fusion turned on.
Of course, I am not the type who uses an out-of-the-box Linux install. So I did an aptitude safe-upgrade to make sure I had the latest version of Mint. (Mint includes a custom application named Mint Update, but I’m an aptitude kinda guy.) Then I installed my “can’t live without” suite of applications:
- openssh-server
- gnu screen
- links2
- mutt
- slrn
- slrn-face
- centerim
- kontact
- liferea
- logjam
- (And a couple of others which I use all of the time but cannot remember now.)
I was able to take a shortcut by copying over config files and my bin directory from my Ubuntu install, so I was able to test as soon as the apps installed. And I have to say, I was extremely impressed!
Linux Mint actually performed better than Ubuntu (gutsy) on the same machine. This is almost definitely because of cruft on my Ubuntu install, though. I’ve gone through a couple of major upgrades on my Ubuntu install without trying to weed out applications that I no longer use. I had a couple of different XFCE installations, and numerous other applications that I compiled myself. And I had done a surprisingly poor job of separating apps that I compiled from distro-provided stuff (I really need to remember the –prefix=/usr/local switch for configure).
But no matter, the fact is that Linux Mint is extremely fast on my machine. I notice that in day-to-day work, and I especially notice it in 3d accelerated games (e.g. OpenArena). I really didn’t expect this kind of performance gain! I am quite happy about it.
There were a couple of downsides to Mint. The first was difficulties with my soundcard (Soundblaster Live! 5.1 Gamer). The card was detected, but the mixer settings were all wacked out. It was trivial to use alsamixer to correct this, but a n00b would’ve been lost. I don’t like the choice of Thunderbird for the default email client, though I would prefer that over Evolution.
Those are mere quibbles, however. I am actually quite happy and very impressed with Linux Mint. Enough so that I moved Mint over to be my main OS.
Yes, we can. Yes, we can change.
“We know the battle ahead will be long. But always remember that, no matter what obstacles stand in our way, nothing can stand in the way of the power of millions of voices calling for change…
“We have been told we cannot do this by a chorus of cynics. And they will only grow louder and more dissonant in the weeks and months to come…
“Yes, we can heal this nation. Yes, we can seize our future….
“And, together, we will begin the next great chapter in the American story, with three words that will ring from coast to coast, from sea to shining sea: Yes, we can.”
Vote Obama
links for 2008-02-10
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Alexandria is an application for Linux allows you to sort and track your book collection
links for 2008-02-04
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The OpenStreetMap (OSM) project is well on its way to producing a free, user-editable street-level vector map of the world. OpenAerialMap (OAM) is similar in scope, committed to building a free, bird’s-eye photographic map of the world.
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dhtmlxGrid is a JavaScript grid control that you can use to create an AJAX interface to a relational database server. The grid view provided by dhtmlxGrid offers actions that one would expect from a desktop grid control, such as sorting by columns by clic
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Despite some commentators deploring the state of Linux video editing tools, I continue to believe that somewhere out there is a non-linear editing program that is feature rich, intuitive and stable for the Linux platform. Maybe I’m deluded, but I would se
links for 2008-01-17
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I’ve settled on KMyMoney as a capable free-as-in-freedom bookkeeping replacement. It doesn’t do everything that I was able to do in Money, but I can live with that while hoping some of my “wants” find their way in to later versions. And in the mea
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Like most of Xfce, Clipman strikes a reasonable balance between customization and responsiveness for most people, but, like wmcliphist, it is usable only in the graphical environment for which it was designed.
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In one sense, given the scope of its changes, KDE 4 succeeds remarkably well. Although it includes some inconsistencies of design, those can be addressed later. What really matters is that so many sweeping changes seem to have been added with a minimum of
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If you know people that are MST3K-curious, please let them know this– that the original cast of the show has landed here and are making a shimmery new movie riffing experience.
I am a big-time computer geek. I loved the Amiga when it was still viable, and I love Linux nowadays. I guess I just like superior OSs that are off the beaten path. :) I'm also a TiVo zealot, an iPod fan, and a Futurama freak.Expect to see lots on this blog, along with lots of information about Ubuntu (my distro of choice), XFCE (my desktop environment of choice) and anything else geeky that tickles my fancy. 
