As the title says, thank you, Mark Shuttleworth, for being a crazy dood and for supporting the development of one of the coolest operating system efforts in history. Thank you, man, for supporting Linux with Ubuntu. What you’re doing is crazy and respect shoots your way, man. To those who have never heard of Linux or of Ubuntu, you don’t know what you’re missing. Take the plunge. You’ll like it in here. Its warm.
Got successfully installed a Reiser4 Gentoo Linux with X.org 6.8.2 (3d working but in need of tweaking), Windowmaker, and Firefox. I’ll be writing a page with my install story and its steps, so that others can replicate my experience. I’m running on 2.6.14-nitro2. If you want a responsive desktop system, I’d recommed nitro or cko sources. The scheduler is the thang. Next is to tackle mplayer and perhaps Xine (as I’ve never really got into using it with all formats). Then, onto browser plugins! Woohoo!
Check it out!
Well, not really, but sort of. 
I recently was contacted by someone from California who has the distinction of having the same name as me. We didn’t quite follow the same paths in life (that would be spooky), but still have more in common than the name. It seems that Mr Corey thompson, father is none other than Ken Thompson who, along with Dennis Ritchie and Douglas Mcllroy, invented the operating system that is the backbone of todays technology, Unix.
As you may have noticed, I’m a bit interested in using lightly hacking Unix-like operating systems like Linux and BSD. What a coincidence.
My namesake is a veterinarian in Northern California. I wanted to be a veterinarian at one point! Interesting…
As you may have guessed, my username at Linuxquestions.org is Vectordrake. Why? It just so happened that I had Vector (3.0, I think) and Mandrake (9.0) installed on my system. I’ve been following Vector for quite some time - long before the days of broadband for Corey. It had a romantic draw because of its small size and the promised lean completeness. At that time, www.linux.org’s distribution list touted Vector as “A slimmed-down but complete Slackware.” Well, they were sorta right. I found that installing Vector and then trying to upgrade packages with Swaret from Slackware sources simply broke my nice default install. So, I didn’t get Slack without pain, for sure.
Life goes on and so does everything else. Vector recently release SOHO Version 5, which is a gorgeous default install with KDE and lotsa goodies, making it ready to use on most office workstations out of the box. That was nice, but I didn’t have enough disk space at the time to really explore it to its fullest (and Gentoo was missing me).
Well, now I have 4GB free for a spare OS adn there has been a recent release of Vector Linux Standard Edition version 5 (beta 1). I couldn’t resist. Here I am, posting to this blog in Firefox, decked out with all the plugins, on VL5.0 standard. I must say, its pretty well put together, as far as I can tell so far.
The default desktop is IceWM with a really nice theme along the same lines as the SOHO version was. Windows users would not feel to far out of place, as there is the familiar taskbar with a “menu” button, off of which various programs can be launched. I haven’t booted to the XFCE or Fluxbox desktops yet, but I’m sure that they are as polished as in previous versions. The login screen is simply fantastic, by the way. You are greeted with a windowmanager/task/user login chooser on a background that ripples like water if you mouse over it. There are also cute little penguins flying around on the screen (we won’t tell Vector, etc that penguins don’t fly…)
Here is a screenshot (click for a 1024×768 version):
There is nothing in this shot that isn’t in the default install. Cool, eh?
So far, I am impressed enough to play around in it between my interludes in Windows (gotta get through that MSOffice tutorial!). As I use it, I may come up with a better review, but, for now, I think this thing is pretty groovy!
WARNING: Geek Rant Ahead!!!…you’re on your own from here…
/rant on
I don’t know how many people read my musings, but for those who do, I bet you’ve realized that I’m a bit of a Linux fan. Right now I run Gentoo, not because its a geek distro, but because its easy to maintain and relatively crashless (I say relatively because someday it may crash, really, it may). There’s only one problem that I am finding right now. I’m sure that its the same for any of the testing or bleeding edge branches of any distro (like Mandrake Cooker or Debian Sid). I run testing so I get all the new stuff. Its not that Gentoo’s got a problem. Its that X.org has a problem. For some reason, after the 6.8.0 release, they stopped supporting hardware accelleration, in favor of composite, which, although neat, is resource-intensive and only good for pretty screenshots, IMHO. Since I run testing, I get the newest software that’s proclaimed stable enough for human consumption, which means it tries to update X.org every time I emerge --sync It overwrites my /package.mask file every time. I guess that I’ve gotta read the forum and how-tos to find out how to mask a package on update instead of editing a file.
/rant off
