Month: November 2004

It’s only November …

.. and we have Christmas decorations up.

The Meister Mom leaves to drive herself and the two granddogs down to the brother’s house in Kentucky on Tuesday, and then a few days later, she’ll be leaving to watch over the sister’s house in Texas. Since we won’t see her back here until January, when the sister gets back from serving overseas, it was decided best to get a jump start on holiday decorations.

At least, that’s our excuse.

Oddly enough, we saw two other local houses with decorations up already. Obviously all the retail stores have already replaced their halloween products with christmas supplies. Within weeks the mall should be done over in its usual non-offensive pastel holiday decorations as well.

Ubuntu test drive

Ubuntu Linux

I gave in to the temptation of trying out the 4.10 release of Ubuntu Linux (codename: “The Warty Warthog Release”).

The installation was mostly painless, with an installer that’s ncurses-based (ie, text versus graphics). It actually made me nostalgic for my first installation of Red Hat back in the 5.0 days. The only real problem I had was due to my wanting to keep the /home harddrive partition from my Fedora Core 2 install. There seemed to be a problem with the ext3 filesystem being sized incorrectly, so I simply told the installer not to use that partition and move on. After the operating system was installed, I added the partition to the fstab listing of directories and could use it just fine.

The install is relatively clean and lean, with the initial install consisting solely of a single CD-Rom, something that I’d not seen lately with the Red Hat / Fedora releases. There are a number of things for me to get used to, coming from years of experience with Red Hat and similar distros, most of them due to Ubuntu’s Debian base.

One particually interesting difference that’s particular to Ubuntu is the fact that the root account is disabled. The installer never asks you for a root password, because the first account you’re asked to setup is configured with complete sudo rights, which means whenever you need superuser access, you have to do it through sudo, rather than logging in as root. It’s different, but not as big a deal as I had thought, and I can see the security advantages of doing so.

Provided you have the internet access to make downloading and installing new software quick and painless through apt-get, and don’t mind getting down and dirty with some of the rough edges, it looks like a nice addition to the Linux family of distributions, particularly if you’re looking for a more cutting-edge Debian distro with a shorter period between major releases.

Cars

Pixar already has the first teaser trailers up for their next computer animated movie, Cars.

It’s not a great teaser, though, and doesn’t hold much funny. However, I’m personally going to wait until more full trailers come out before I get worried after some of the early Finding Nemo teasers, which never impressed me, that consisted solely of the two main characters floating at the surface of the ocean going on about whether they would find the son.

Ubuntu and Fedora

With all the good word surrounding it, I’m slightly tempted by the idea of trying out Ubuntu, one of the newest Linux distributions. Apt-get with a major release window of every six months is always a good thing.

However, I will stick with Fedora, partially because Core 3 is due out within a week, but mostly because its Red Hat base is the one I have the most experience with, and therefore feel most comfortable with.

For all the religious wars that go on between distro fanboy camps, when you come right down to it there’s little you can do with one distro that you can’t with another, provided you know how to configure it properly. That’s part of the reason why I tend to fall back on Red Hat based distros, simply because they are where I’ve spent the most time.