I'll interrupt my usually ideology-free programme, and devote some of my time to this section again. Recently, there was some major flamage between Béranger and the Arch Linux community. The post that started it is on Beranger's blog, then discussed on Arch BBS. It was regarding Arch's compliance with GPL.
Okay, so what's the deal? Is that yet another FUD, or is it for real? Yes, it is for real, and yes, it's stupid. I will explain both below.
Okay, so last time I talked a bit about what some of my close friends think about the Command Line Interface (CLI). This time, I'll try to introduce some of you Linux newbies to the art of CLI.
I'm not one of those people who use organizers extensively, but I do appreciate a quick and dirty entry into a calendar. The easier it is for me to make an entry, the more effective it is. Since I'm also mostly using the "black screen" called terminal, I also wanted an app (or a collection thereof) that would allow me to do so.
While I was thinking of writing a simple Python script, I've discovered that someone's already done the dirty work for me. Someone, who obviously thinks like me.
Have you ever thought how the only time you ever use your keyboard is when you use Firefox, and how it would be nice to have a browser that could both display graphics AND be used only with keyboard? Well, you could simply use
Vimperator, Firefox the way I like it: Vimperator is a surprisingly faithful Vim-like interface on top of Firefox. Best of two worlds!
I've used a total of four CHM viewers up to now. Although I've seen people who read it by first converting it into plain HTML or even PDF, I have one very important reason why I prefer to see a vanilla CHM. Indexes and searches. The CHM format, albeit Microsoft's child, is really a great format for reading docs. It has everything you need to quickly search through a doc file and find what you need.
Chmsee, my CHM viewer of choice: Chmesee is one of the more pleasant CHM viewers under Linux.
When you meet Vim for the first time, it's very difficult, especially if you come from one of those GUI editors or IDEs. Now, Vim is as powerful as people say it is, but all that power means nothing if you can't even do the basics. For a Vim newbie, it is important to build the comfort zone and make learning advanced features a simple excursion out of that zone.
Ripping a DVD usually involves a GUI application like dvd::rip or thoggen, or something similar. For me, HandBrake put a stop to all that GUI thing.
I've been doing some networking homework (at home, obviously), to improve my understanding of *nix systems in that area. I honestly wanted to set up a working gateway / server / media station kind of thingy on my hardly-ever-used desktop box. I have a small home LAN consisting of one desktop and two mobile boxen, so I thought converting the desktop into a powerful firewall system was a nice idea. Picked up FreeBSD 7.0-RELEASE and here's how it went...
So, it's been about a month since I'd migrated to tiling window manager called awesome. I've learned a lot of tricks, and got used to the kinda-text environment. (I'll share them with you in a few days.)
Meanwhile, my desktop almost made it to 25 days of uninterrupted uptime, but I had to power it down to fit it with anohter ethernet interface. So I went on to tinker with it after booting it again. It's the good ol' KDEmod... but something's weird...
Ever since I've decided to become a coder, I couldn't get enough of that open-source spirit (it's just like Christmas, but for programmers). I use something, find a bug, report it, and usually establish a very friendly communication with the developer. That's I think more important in an open-source project than what most people say. It's not about some big company getting that new Linux server (sure, that's important, too), but the way people interact, freely, sharing code, opinions, and experiences. That's the essence of open-source — it puts open in open-source.
