ubuntu

to keep the warranty ok on my laptop i decided to install linux on an external usb drive.

the choice of linux isn't really a factor for me anymore. i've been using it long enough that i only really need to get used to vendor specific tweaks (or quircks for that matter)

i liked the whole idea behind ubuntu and even though it's based on debian if figured i'd give it a whirl.

first problem was finding out the information needed to install it on an external usb drive and actually get it to boot. i wanted the process to go fairly quickly and after googling around i found ubuntusb

you have to pay for an "install key" but that was a minor inconvenience. it installed in about 15 minutes. rebooted, all my hardware was recognized and x came up fine.

i'm not all that impressed with support from the site. i had a technical question that got answered about a day after i got my install key, which also took about a day. i misplaced my install key email and i emailed the support to see if i could get it resent. i found it soon afterwards, but as far as they know i've paid for product i can't use. i still haven't received a response.

i like the clean x interface ubuntu has but i'll probably add a few more window managers.

my only problem with any debian distro is their insistence on using stale software. ubuntusb is based on dapper drake and the version of vim installed is 6.4.6. version 7 has been out for a while now. with 135+ patches. all those patches are bug fixes so there is no logical reason other than maybe laziness that version 6.x should be on any linux distro.

ie7

microsoft has pushed out ie7... and a bunch of you drooled like there was an actual advancement in browser technology...

um, there isn't. ie7 can be safely ignored

linux blogger clients part II

spent a little more time searching for blogger clients that would run on linux. i had to give up early on ms spaces clients...pretty sure that's not gonna happen anytime soon.

anyway i found drivel for linux. specifically debian, but as per usual it was out of date (in the debian world "old and buggy" = "stable" go figure...

i updated from the drivel web site manually, but...

blogger is forcing an upgrade to their new version, so rather than be forced at an inconvenient time i decided to do it now. and that immediately broke drivel. so now i'm doing this via blogger itself...

there's somthing to be said for the simpler way tkblog does things :)

linux blogger clients

didn't seem to be an ms spaces linux client, so i think i'll probably have to do that one manually.

seems like qumana the cross-platform blogging tool (written in java, insert appropriate snrk's here) doesn't have a linux version.

tkblog of course requires no changes to work under linux... the only thing you might want to do is change your paths in the tkbog.cfg file. oh... and you need tcl/tk installed. nobody has ever asked for a linux binary but i could provide one if anybody needed one...