The Dark Secret of Ubuntu is thus:



For all of the technical polish...

For all of the community...

For all of the organizational coherence...

For all of the claims...

(that it lives up to!)

For all of the hype...

(that it lives up to!)



... Ubuntu is still desktop Linux.

Alright, I'm getting annoyed at the strange contortions and cognitive dissonance that is required to pretend that cygwin provides a unix environment on pc hardware. It's time to take my work machine into linux country.

So, by way of background: I used to run redhat for my desktop back in the early 00's, and that was alright. (I remember, for example, the unbelievable hassle it was to get a PPP connection to work properly, and when it wasn't laughable to wait for the next release of the enlightenment wm.) After that I ran debian (stable, I think?) for a little while, but it was too much of a PITA to make the system halfway usable. (That may reflect more about the level of effort I was willing to put into it, but whatever.) I've used (exclusively red hat) linux servers for years, and performed non-trivial admin tasks on them, though I wouldn't call myself a linux admin, per se.

My hardware is nothing special, a pc that was modern in 2003 or 2004. The only driver complications I can think of would be the usb keyboard, wireless card, and dvi port (diamond stealth s85), and I would like a distro that will not give me a bunch of bullshit about them. Basically, I want a distro that won't be an entire hobby unto itself to run, yet whose package archive isn't three years out of date. I gather that that's basically Ubuntu, but I'm open to suggestions or corrections.

I'll be throwing this all on a fresh drive, so partitions and whatnot aren't really an issue.

In the interest of doing some browser testing, I dragged my old PC kicking and screaming back to life. Well, it was actually a lot less traumatic than that, but I did consume a can of compressed air in cleaning the thing out.

Man, the thing's still running win2k. Ah, those were the days, weren't they? A gentler, simpler time. A time before 9/11, before Peak Oil was in the common vernacular, before Windows Product Registration... Ah, good, good times.

Of course, this only hastens the inevitable linux-installation-and-three-months-of-aimless-time-wasting-while-hunting-for-random-device-drivers-and-obsessively-customizing-my-window-manager, but there ya go.

Oh, yeah: Spanish. I need to learn basic conversational survival Spanish within, like, two months. I currently know essentially nothing. Any recommendations? I'm looking for programs, groups, good streaming Spanish audio to listen to, whatever.

This is cool. Some Linux advocates are putting together a grassroots ad campaign and plan to start airing ads on KLBJ (590 AM)...

Lobby4Linux, in cooperation with myfirstlinux.com and featuring PclinuxOS; announce the first commercial advertising effort for the Linux Operating System. We will advertise a free system, not the boxed-sets for SUSE or RedHat you see on CompUSA shelves. The residents of Austin Texas will soon hear of Linux on their radio stations. For six days a week, two to three times a day and for 24 days, Linux will become a “known” product via a professional 30 second radio advertisement. According to hundreds of responses to a recent Lobby4Linux blog of helios, it is an effort well past its time.

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