Excited About Slackware 13.0

I'm becoming less and less excited about Ubuntu in general for reasons I hope to blog about later when I have more time. So for now I'll just announce that Slackware 13.0 has been released. The biggest feature is 64 bit support and updated packages. I can't wait to dowload it and put it on my main system.

Here are a few other features of the new release per the official announcement.

• kernel 2.6.29.6
• KDE 4.2.4
• Firefox 3.5.2
• Alternate Intel video Drivers
  

I hope everyone takes the opportunity to to check it out.

Redirected Domain

I love DynDNS. It's a great service. Using this service, I've registered cli.homelinux.net and redirected jaredandcorlee.com to that domain.

The new CLI domain better fits the subject matter on the site. If you haven't checked out the site, please give it a look over. Understand that it still needs work, but definitely stop by the CLI applications list which is the core focus of the site. Also, please send your CLI suggestions and site recommendations.

Hooked up with Google Voice

I got Google voice! I got Google voice!.... um, now what?

If you have a Google voice account, what are doing with it? How has it made things better?

Time with Slackware.

Since my last post regarding Slackware and Debian, I find my self booting into Slackware Current a lot more then Debian Sid. I had some problem with playing a particular video format in Debian, which I really didn't want to deal with at the time but Slackware handled fine. Other then that small issue, I can't really tell you why. I'm just drawn to Slackware for some reason and I'm really liking it.

Keeping the Current branch up to date was pain, until I discover slackpkg. Now it's a snap. Mind it's not as quick as apt in Debian (not by a long shot) but it's really no problem. I update slackpkg, then initiate the upgrade, do something else, come back to slackpkg and accept the changes and let it run. No big deal.

I guess now that my Slackware system is set up (finally!) everything just works and it works great and I swear it feels so much snappier, even more so then Debian on the same machine. Now some will call me crazy, but running KDE4.x on Slackware seems on par with Crunchbang Linux (using openbox) on another partition. Remember, this is an Intel Centrino 1.4 Ghz laptop with 768 mb of RAM.

So, am I a converted Slacker? Well, it depends. On my main system I run Kubuntu and I tend to upgrade with every six month release. There is no way in hell that I'm going to change out my Slackware that often, because it takes me 3 months to get everything set up and configured right. I'm not touching this Slack install for sometime, I worked to hard on it. Now that being said, I'm running Slackware current, so if I understand things right, if I keep it up to date, I should be running the lastest release anyway. Also, Slackware doesn't release every 6 months. Nevertheless, it comes down to time. How much time do I want to spent setting something up and how often will I need or want to upgrade the machine? My time is precious, so most of the time I'm going to use Debian or a Ubuntu variant, but I can definitely see when it would be beneficial to use Slackware.

This senario puts me in a certain mind set. I'm kind of getting bored with Debian now and I can see myself trying another distro in it's place and if I don't like the ways things are, I can easily put Debian back on lickety split, no harm done. As I mentioned earlier, I'm not touching my Slackware partition. So, as far as this laptop goes Slackware is staying, and for Debian.... well let's see what peaks my interest on Distrowatch.

My 5 Minute Review of MS Windows 7.

So yesterday I started playing with virutalbox and for some odd reason decided to try out MS Windows 7 in it. Actually, I do know why I was trying it out. First, I've heard alot of great reviews for it even from Linux users and was curious. In addition, it was suppose to have lower resource usage then Vista (which I've never used) and wanted to see how true all of this was. Finally, another reason to giving MS Windows 7 a test run was that I'm sure my wife would be eventually using it and I would inevitably be supporting it to some degree.

So, all this being said, here is my 5 minute review of MS Windows 7.

The Good
The installer has been simplified, which make Windows just as easy to install as most Linux distros. Good job Microsoft for doing some catching up. In general, it did seem to run "lighter" then even MS Windows XP. Finally, I like the KDE4 look and feel.

The Bad
The task bar. It's too big. I can't tell the difference between the quick start laucher icons and the minimized windows icons. Actually, I think if you launch a quick start app you don't get a new task. Minimized windows are icon only, no text. This made things frustrating because I wasn't familiar with the icons. I couldn't find an option to change this. Finally, I tried to install AVG anti-virus and it wouldn't install.

Well, that's pretty much all I had time for. If I'm bored I may boot up the WM again and get back to you with something a little more in depth.