So, I finally remembered to return to the cozy oak-beamed rumpus room that is SYS

In other news,

- CC2510 Digital Logic is one of the more evil subjects ever invented, and manually finding the solutions to simultaeneous linear equations using the scaled partial pivoting gaussian reduction procedure is fun. Fun! :p

(Incidentally, after discussing it with my friends, we have concluded that the above is the most intimidating-sounding mathematical process we know of. Apart from the Gram-Schmidt procedure for transforming sets of orthogonal n-dimensional vectors into orthonormal bases. Imagine, say, 11 axes, all 'at 90 degrees to each other'. Great for tripping people out at parties :p )

- I'm all fully linuxed now! XD I've ditched Ubuntu though, because it's policy of 'Stability Through Fossilisation (tm)' kinda irked me when i wanted new shiney stuff. I'm using Arch Linux now, which has less good community docs, but actually has workingness and isn't half as frustrating.

I even have beryl - compositing 3D-accelerated desktop manager . I have a spinning cube for a desktop (howZAT!) and transparent glossy everything, expose-like windowpicking, and graphical effects that take Vista to the brick wall and slam it ten times around. (It's actually not just eyecandy - the cube is much easier to keep track of than regular virtual desktops, and expose craps all over a taskbar list for selecting the one particular window you want out of the dozen you have open. Ask MBT about it )

The other joys of linux : it's so much easier to do cool stuff - for example, me and a few friends set up a shared backup server with 2x 80gb drives in RAID0, which appears on my computer as just another directory (/mnt/reliable/) -With the glory of sshfs, with no need for any software but an ssh server on my webserver, the webroot of caradoc.jcu.edu.au/ is just ~/caradocwww/ (and it's an RSA encrypted tunnel!). It's freakin' *sweet*! (so much easier than farting around with FTP (File Trampling Protocol in my experience), or Samba, it's evil cousin.)

- Growing up is fun! Just ignore the frequent kicks in your emotional balls. Other People (esp. of the opposite gender) are the real path to happiness, but you have to take the risk of being reduced to tears, else you'll never get the really worthwhile relationships that make life exciting and worthwhile.

In accordance with 'given a choice between two evils... choose the one you haven't tried before!' , and given that i've spent the majority of my life in a shell, it seems to be the time for exposing myself to the full glory (and pain) of life. Hasn't been good so far, but karma has a funny way of feeding back at the least expected time. (just hope my balance is positive right now.)

kk, enough rantage now I'm go shower and sleep, evil evil 9am class on a friday. Who *does* that? :p
-lws

Well that all sounds as though your ice cream is still balance on the cone... way to go!

And why not post a screenie of that desktop of yours? It sounds kinda cool.

Beryl rules!  Wish I had a system that would run it.  Outside of Leopard, any linux running beryl would be my favorite OS.  I totally agree with you, it's more than just eye-candy; completely intuitive access to virtual desktops.

Makes me *ALMOST* wish Microsoft would get a clue.  I finally got to play around with Vista Home Premium on a lab-mate's HP laptop.  It's graphics (alpha-transparent fuzzed window borders and buttons with glows that extend beyond the button borders) are REALLY pretty, but rather than aiming for intuitive operation and function, it looks like MS adopted it just to try and look better than Apple.  MS's Expose rip-off is total crap in comparison to the real thing - it's not a tenth as useful or easy.  Beryl correctly imitated, and thus has a highly usable rendition.

ArchLinux gets your recommendation then?  I've not tried it, but I still feel coddled by Ubuntu's universality and comfortability factor. 

Vista makes me seven different kinds of angry - roughly 90% of my computing hatred is directed at it, because I'm the IT Support for my college and I have to bash it into submission, all the time.

WRT Aero : It's all very pretty, but it doesn't really *do* anything for making the computer easier to get around. I can't work without virtual desktops anymore - it's the next best thing to having multiple monitors. It's really handy to have, say, programming references open on one VD, your IDE running in another, all your chat windows and stuff living on another... I wonder how i got along without the kind of separation and quick-access virtual desktops bring you. (Altdesk doesn't count - gladiators did the best they could without actually messing around with the way Windows fundamentally works, but it's an awful messy hack with nowhere near the level of usability of linux VD's.)

The flippy windows thing is cool, but limited. It doesn't really provide a way of providing you a parallel overview of your windows - it's more or less a prettier version of alt-tab, you have to cycle through all your windows until you get the one you want. Works fine for < 6 windows or so, but you really need expose. (I often have a dozen terminal windows open - i have the top left corner set to 'expose current application only', which makes picking terminal windows easy and fun )

I'm waiting for OSX to start shipping with virtual desktop style paging and beryl-esque uberprettiness Aqua/Expose is already based on the same principles as beryl or aero - representing windows as textures in graphics memory. Concievably, if apple wanted to, they could do similar things to Beryl just by extending what they already have (NB : i haven't looked at leopard, so i don't know if this has already happened.)

--

I've actually taken to carrying a portable XWindows server/client on my USB drive (Xming) and X forwarding a linux desktop from my computer to whatever random lab computer I'm at, merely because the software on the lab computers is broken half the time (kthx, Novell Delivered Applications) and I don't have access to any of my documents or my heavily customised system.

No beryl over X forwarding, though It's cool though, because for normal desktop use X forwarding feels nearly exactly like you're sitting at your own computer - no lag to speak of! Unlike VNC (which basically sends a stream of video, in badly compressed jpeg form) X forwarding allows the remote computer to say 'well, there's this window here with these buttons inside... kgo and draw it yourself', which uses far less bandwidth. It's always fun watching people gawk and ask how you made the lab computers look so pretty :p

* NB : the other 500% of my computing hatred is reserved for Windows Live Onecare, Norton AV and Java. XD

--

WRT my favoured linux distro : Arch is *not* for total newbies to *nix. You have to do a lot of manual config (the installer doesn't do autoconfiguration of X11 or install a ready-to-use desktop environment for you.) On the other hand, though, i found that when using Ubuntu it'd do all kinds of frustrating things with autoconfiguration (like nuking my network config every reboot) - you see most of what Arch is doing, mailny because you're often doig it yourself (or at least manually approving things.)

Unlike ubuntu it doesn't have discrete 'releases' - the package version numbers continually increment all over the place instead of being frozen in time every 6 months c.f. Ubuntu. It's great, because instead of having to wait six months for new software, or compiling my own (gets messy), I just do pacman -Syu, and magically all my software upgrades to the newest and shineyest there is.

If i was asked to summarise Arch, I'd say it was much like gentoo in that it doesn't hold your hand as much and gives you more control and the absolute newest software, all the time - except you don't have to sit around for hours waiting on thing to compile.

When it comes right down to it, if you want linux that's easy and Just Works, without necessarily wanting the newest and shineyest of everything, then Ubuntu is for you (and one of the greatest strengths of Ubuntu is the community support - people write guides and howtos for ubuntu as a near-standard, and the forums are smeggin' awesome.)

My server boxes are all Ubuntu, because i know that when I get any given problem with any server software, at least 100 others have already been there and written a guide telling me how to fix it. (caradoc.jcu.edu.au is ubuntu dapper server 6.06 )

I like to tinker, though, and Ubuntu's slow-moving software updates and autoconfiguration tend to combine to make tinkering frustrating and not fun, hence arch

Wellcome back Wes...Long time no see

That's DANG cool!  I've tried VNC in the past but abandoned it because of said lag.  Great idea!  Thanks for posting this; you just solved an entertaining problem for me


Good advice.  I'll be sticking with Ubuntu and darnSmallLinux for the mo', as they each do the job fine and I'm more than pleased with either.  Perhaps some day I'll step further into it and give Gentoo or Arch a try.

It's awesome. It doesn't feel like you're controlling a remote computer - it feels like you're *sitting* at a remote computer. Makes me happy in ze pants!



Linux of any kind is better than windows, no? :p

Incidentally : KDE is smeggin' sexy! I figured that since I'm not trying to run a minimal desktop with openbox and just the gnome-panel anymore, i might as well try the full blown KDE3 suite.

The level of integration between the different bits of KDE is simply mind-blowingly awesome. Things Just Work. Unlike GNOME, KDE hasn't bitzed at me about things it doesn't have. It integrates with beryl. The panel (kicker) is far superior to gnome-panel in both looks and functionality.

Oh, and Konqueror is a *kickass* file browser (and not half bad as a browser either, though you can't use mozilla plugins with it ). It's like a hybrid of xplorer2 (dual paned), OSX Finder and an image viewer, all at the same time. For a long time i've been using thunar (which is much like explorer.exe), but I'm not going back

Announcing to several forums that I prefered KDE a number of years back, you'd think I was coming outta the closet or something with the amount of back-lash received (SacRat was one of the loudest detractors).  Why does it seem everyone prefers Gnome?  I found the reason to be pretty retarded: LICENSING.  Sounds like KDE isn't completely open.  Not a big matter to me, personally... I like the interface, I like the integration, I LOVE its customizability.

BTW: Hearing you on Konqueror!  Mi favorito managerito.  When in linux I end up using it more than firefox as a browser, too.  Renders really nicely.  But the file-management!  Oh!  The file-management!  It's better'n anything on Windows or Mac OS X for file-management.  I tried Thunar for a bit, and it's very good in a minimalistic sense, but Konqueror!  How it makes Trinoids2.0 drool!

Actually, only zealots who can't get with the times try to object to KDE on licensing grounds now W hile back trolltech GPLed the Qt libraries that KDE uses, so now it's just as FLOSSy as GNOME

Thanks for clarifying   You don't know what a relief it is to find a professional who enjoys KDE. 

Well, seeing how long this thread has been going on, let me be the last to say welcome back littleweseth

ty, haxer.

For what it's worth : I'm chillin' in Mount Isa, a nice lil' mining town in outback northwest Queensland. It's about 1000km from townsville (where i go to uni). The centre of the place is the xstrata mine, which pulls out copper and lead mainly. The 100m tall stack on the lead smelter is a darn impressive sight! (it's there so all the nice lead vapours are put into a different layer of atmosphere than what mount isans have to breathe - instead, Indonesia gets half of it ) My brother works there as an electrical engineer, and I'm staying at his place for a while.

You don't realise how FRICKEN HUGE australia actually is until you drive across about a quarter or so of it!!! It's a lot different out here compared to townsville - more or less desert, with the grass persuaded to be semi-green by recent rain (rarity) and sprinklers, if you're rich. Right now it's winter, so we're getting temperatures in the < 10 celcius range at night (32-50F, i believe), which for australians classes as 'fricken freezin'!' Also there's a lot more hills and rocky outcrops - townsville is pretty flat and tame compared to this place.

I'm learning how to drive, too. It's so darn complicated! Any of the actions on their own are simple, but the combination of steering and gearstickking and clutching and braking and accelerating and indicating and the other 11ty million things you have to do in order to keep your car moving, plus following the road rules... not trivial. I already pranked wes' car reversing, too (a little incident with a guide post 'streamlined' the passenger door a little...)

Also, this computer has windows vista on it. It's unbelievably frustrating! I don't want to have to fight my computer just to look at running processes, or install things, or... pretty much everything. Linux handles superuser/user privilege separation much more elegantly (i.e. without a whole-screen fade to black that hangs the computer while it's in progress, just to present a yes-no i-am-not-a-dummy dialog.) And it runs like a dog. Thank your lucky stars you're on OSX, Win XP, or Linux

That's me, out.
-lws :wq

there are settings you can mess with to keep from fighting with it when you install. I've never used lunix, so I can't comment about that, but I can say it [vista] is an improvement over XP for sure.