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Linux is, without doubt a good operating system, although I feel more needs to be done to de-alienate it for the average user. I’ve been using Linux as my primary OS for the last 12 years. A few months ago I decided to give OS X a try and since then I’ve been spending more and more time using it.

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When one's computer becomes unstable, it's natural to think first of a particular app or the desktop. After that, one may tend to suspect the operating system. Finally one may find it turns out to be hardware at fault. This is what happened to me recently, and at the operating system phase, Debian became a last resort. At first I blamed Sabayon and tried Linux Mint. When Linux Mint seemed to also be crashy, I resorted to the newly released Debian 6.0. I thought if anything was going to be stable, it'd be Debian. Although I finally found and replaced faulty hardware, I've learned a bit about Debian on the desktop. I've used Debian on my X-less server for years, but never thought of it much as a desktop system. So, here is a summary of my Debian desktop adventure.

The 2.6.37 kernel I got from Liquorix has made Debian Squeeze a nearly perfect distribution. Liquorix tracks the kernel very closely, and as such there’s a new update every few days. Due to update fatigue, for now I’m “pounding out” the Liquorix entry in my sources.list. I have a good 2.6.37 kernel, and I want to stick with it for at least a little while.

Red Hat CTO, Brian Stevens, has defended the company's change to how it distributes the kernel source code in a blog posting. The company had changed its policy on how it distributed the source to its Linux kernel, a key component of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). Where it had previously shipped out a standard kernel with all the patches which needed to be applied to make that kernel into Red Hat's version, for RHEL6 it switched to shipping an archive with those patches pre-applied and details of the patches not explicitly listed.

In mid February there were news reports that Canadian government computers at the Finance Department, Treasury Board, Defence Research and Development Canada had been hacked and information mined by persons unknown, most probably operating out of China.

I’ve been experimenting with other flat-file blogging systems, including Blosxom and Ode. Both Blosxom and Ode are based on Perl scripts, while FlatPress is written in PHP.

Steven Rosenberg has written a little article mentioning various self-hosted blogging platforms including Flatpress, Blosxom, PyBlosxom, Ode and others. I wanted to address a couple of his questions about Ode.

Perhaps free market forces can work wonders but when it comes to FOSS, commercial interests usually break the software. Are RHEL's recently revealed "secret patches" an example?

I've been relying on Google Chrome in Windows XP/7 and Chromium in Debian Squeeze for much of my web use because it's way faster, less memory-hungry and generally more pleasant than Firefox/Iceweasel. But in the past few days I've run into a few problems.

FFmpeg can be considered the Swissknife of audio and video applications, with many options and possibilities. You probably already have it installed on your computer as a dependency of a program you use to watch videos or listen to music. In this article we will see some use from the command line without using graphics applications.

Weblog software (also known as blog software) is a type of application which is designed to help users effortlessly create and maintain weblogs.

The Wine development release 1.3.15 is now available. The source is available now, Binary packages are in the process of being built, and will appear soon at their respective download locations.

With the right skin (Simplicity), XBMC Media Center provides a highly polished (second to none) front-end for any media playing computer along with oodles of art, posters, ratings, trailers, lyrics, plot summaries, TV guide like functionality, and so many more bits of supplemental information that I cannot feasibly cover them all here.

Fuduntu 14.9 Release Candidate is ready for testing. We need testers to help validate the updates before pushing them to the stable repository and releasing "stable" media. Lots of cool stuff in this release like kernel 2.6.37.2, new wallpaper, compiz autodetection, AWN, and more.

Red Hat has changed the way it distributes Enterprise Linux kernel code in an effort to prevent Oracle and Novell from stealing its customers, making it more difficult for these competitors to understand which patches have been applied where. Some have speculated that the change is designed to make it harder for Oracle as well as the open source CentOS project to build their own Linux distributions. But Stevens says this is not the case. He says the change is meant to hamper Oracle and Novell's ability to offer support to customers who are already running Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL).

I'll demo how to "Install Windows7 over Ubuntu 11.04 Natty, using KVM with System Disk over VirtIO". Quoting the libvirt wiki "Virtio is a Linux standard for network and disk device drivers where just the guest's device driver "knows" it is running in a virtual environment, and cooperates with the hypervisor. This enables guests to get high performance network and disk operations, and gives most of the performance benefits of paravirtualization"

The economic news today was good: the U.S. unemployment rate is down to 8.9% and hiring is up in the private sector. For those who are looking for an IT position right now there is one thing the improving economy won't help: the sad state of technical recruiting today.

The Linux audio stack is mature now. What is needed now is a realization that your customers want Linux support. Note, the WINE support for Ableton Live is getting solid today, but it does have problems. On the latest Ubuntu, it installs and runs, which is a huge step forward, but it has some perf glitches (some things are very slow), and the audio doesn’t work. With Ableton supporting Linux directly, or via Wine, ideally both, these problems could easily and quickly get fixed. A free / GPL Ableton would be very nice, but a paid-for version of Ableton on Linux enables users to run a free OS, which is even better. Not supporting Linux is damaging to the freedom of Ableton’s customers. If everyone “hates” Microsoft, why isn’t their more support for the alternate? Microsoft continues to win because of the lack of vision or laziness of others.

Debian has better values, being a volunteer-driven project where decisions are taken in the open. In contrast, Ubuntu is a project managed and controlled by Canonical, and recent history has shown that Canonical had no problem imposing some decisions to the developers community

There is a monumental change occurring in the IT market. It is perhaps the biggest change since IBM unintentionally invited Intel and Microsoft to become two of the biggest technology gatekeepers of our time. Of course, every year there is someone proposing a major change in the industry. Trust me, it is really happening this time. The change I am talking about is happening in your pocket, purse, or belt clip. Yes, I am talking about cell phones, which by the way is becoming a really bad description of what these devices do. I probably use my “smart phone” as a talking device about 25% of the time. Then there are those pad things.