Adventures In Open Source

The Weekly Rewind

Phew it’s hot today. As Robin Williams said in Good Morning Vietnam “It’s hot!! Damn hot!!”. I’m sat on the sofa doing very little and still sweating like an overweight tourist. I’m not in very good shape, so sweating for me is a common occurrence but I’m not THAT unfit! Sitting down is not usually considered strenuous enough to make me sweat. So, onto business. It’s been an interesting week, let’s get into what’s been going on…

It was my 29th birthday on Monday, my twenties are rapidly fading away but I’m not quite over the hill yet I hope. We did our usual Linux Outlaws live show in the evening and it was something of a bloated birthday special. I say bloated not because I’d eaten too much cake (though I may have), but because it ran to 2 hours in length. Nevertheless people seem to enjoy the longer shows on the whole and I’m glad of that. I don’t think we’ll be making a habit of 2 hour shows, but every now and then it’s nice to have a blow out. The show was released on Wednesday as normal after a mammoth editing session by Fab, hat’s off mate. Read the rest of this entry »

KDE 4.2 Desktop

Today I’d like to take a quick look at a distribution still in the early stages of development, but one that, in my opinion holds massive potential. That distribution is Chakra Project and it’s based on Arch Linux, which I reviewed not too long ago. According to their own website the idea was formed one night, in a dark corner of the Freenode IRC network where KDEmod developers linger. The idea to try and create a liveCD to display the virtues of Arch and KDEmod is a noble one. I tried out alpha 2 this week to see how they were getting on…

Vital Stats:
Distro base – Arch Linux
Packaging – .pkg.tar.gz (Managed by Pacman)
Linux Kernel – 2.6.29
Default Desktop – KDE 4.2

Introduction:
This won’t be my typical in-depth review because Chakra is only in alpha, and I think it’s a bit unfair to hold it up against other finished distros just yet. Like any software in the early stages of development it has it’s bugs, I’ll talk about them of course but I’d rather focus on the features and potential. It’s more of a distro preview than a review of the finished product I suppose. With that in mind, lets get into it. Read the rest of this entry »

Jamendo Rocks!

I received an email this morning informing me that Jamendo (the music sharing website) has won a place in the CNET Webware 100, basically a list of websites CNET recommend. I signed up and voted for Jamendo a couple of weeks ago but I’d forgotten all about it, until the email prompted me. If you haven’t tried Jamendo before I really recommend it. They promote Creative Commons licensed music, and everything is free to download and share. In this age of large corporations suing old grannies over alleged piracy, I find that refreshing. I regularly discover great new music on there, and I’ve even hooked many of my music anorak friends on it too. The likes of Professor Kliq, The Rinky Dinks and Arthur Cravan, amongst others, are popular with our group. Read the rest of this entry »

The Weekly Rewind

Weekly Rewind time again and it’s been an eventful week, so I’ll waste no time in getting into it. It all began as usual with Linux Outlaws recording on Monday night. The live show went well and was enjoyed by all who took part I hope. Episode 93 “Danish Weekend” was then released on Wednesday night due to some sterling editing work by Fab. On Tuesday we passed the 1000 member mark over at the Linux Outlaws forums. Thanks in part to much promotion by me on recent podcasts but that’s beside the point. Considering I was the one who wasn’t even sure starting a forum was a good idea in the first place, I should probably stay quiet. I was worried that with so many other Linux forums out there already we’d just be adding to an already crowded space. I have to admit though I was totally wrong. It’s really taken off and I’ve made so many good friends on there, it offers a great place to interact with people if you’re too lazy/busy (take your pick) to keep up with IRC. Thanks to everyone who’s taken part and helped us build such a great community. It’s very much appreciated. I also re-installed Chakra Project on Tuesday and did a lot of research on that between writing and other general admin jobs. I published another Jargon Jam article later in the day. Read the rest of this entry »

TLLTS

…someone decides to make a program just to track what you’ve been eating and post it to a Google Calendar It seems that’s what the good folks from the Linux Link Tech Show have done. I was told about this a week or so ago, but forgot to mention it. There’s been something of a running joke between the shows that Fab and I post too many pointless messages about food on our microblogs. I thought it was pretty funny, and then I was sent a link to this calendar:

Best Pic Of Them I Could Find

Apparently the guys have made a script that scrapes our food posts from Identi.ca and adds them to the calendar. Madness, but brilliant nontheless. Thanks guys! We love you too I should also take this opportunity to congratulate the guys on their 300th episode, which is coming up next week. They’ve been around since before the dawn of time… ahem, sorry I mean the dawn of podcasting. They are certainly the longest running Linux podcast in the world. Back when we started Linux Outlaws Pat, Dann and the other guys were immediately supportive and promoted us. I’ve never forgotten that and it really helped us onto the podcasting ladder. They’ve expanded their line up of hosts lately and just seem to go from strength to strength. So keep up the good work guys and here’s to another 300 episodes. Pat also recently started a MythTv podcast (a precursor to going solo? Who can say hehehe), check it out if you’re interested in making a Linux media centre or PVR, it’s very cool.

Right, that’s it. Just a quick post as I wanted to share that calendar. I’m also off to see Billy Bragg in Liverpool tonight and I’m ridiculously excited, a musical and political hero of mine. I’ll report back on that on Sunday. I’m also writing this message in KDE4.2 on Chakra Project, more on that very soon.

Take care all,  see you soon

Dan

Jargon Jam

Time for another quick Jargon Jam article, as it occurs to me I haven’t done one in a while. I’ve already talked about the words Linux and Distro, so in keeping with that theme I thought today I’d go for “repo”. A word I use a lot, and something new arrivals to the Linux may find confusing on their first encounter. Read the rest of this entry »

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