Well, I haven't voted for the last three or four years, I think. Maybe even longer. There have been quite a few elections lately, but I just don't believe in democratic processes. It's not just my country. It is failing everywhere.

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.

Until recently, I thought it was uderstandable that people are afraid of CLI, and that GUI apps were easier for most average computer users. But now I've learned a few things about some (minority of) computer users that made me change my mind.

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...

I see a lot of articles about Linux on the Internet. Mostly written by experienced users, they, almost as a rule, either oversimplify things (so people get disappointed) or include too many details (so new users get overwhelmed). I will try to write something here that is not necessarily aimed at new users, but will certainly try to clarify certain details that are good to know.

Tux: the Linux Mascot: Tux is a friendly penguin, Linux' mascot.

I recently purchased an Acer Aspire 4315 laptop that came with a Linux distribution on it. Well, so to speak... I was very excited. So much so, that I had to write a longish letter to Acer. The letter I present you here.

I've always been against flash. To a certain point, I avoid flash-based sites. However, I've never been able to formulate clearly why. I know it's not a good solution for web. Intuitively, that is, based on countless encounters with both flash and non-flash websites. But I thought I needed an articulated explanation.

So, good news for all open-source software distributors is that you can distribute Adobe Reader with your distribution or whatever. You can, but you don't want to do that. Really. I'm 100% sure you don't.