In a nutshell, Digg got a story that had a key that allowed people to make a copy of virtually all DVDs published to date. It got to the front page. The HD-DVD consortium sent Digg a cease and desist letter. Digg pulled the story. HD-DVD is also a sponsor of Digg. The Digg users saw the story pulled and assumed that Digg was censoring them. In protest, a storm of submissions developed with people encouraging each other to digg anything that had the HD-DVD key.  I shot a few diggs for all my peeps at digg. Funny stuff. Digging cuz i give a damn.  Kevin Rose, owner of Digg, finally waved the white flag. Free Speech and Piracy wins.

<h2>HD-DVD lost the code and won the format war.</h2>

The real outcome of all of this I believe is that Sony loses the HD war. HD-DVD wins. Blue Ray Loses. With the ability to copy HD-DVD content, users will flock to HD-DVD when they need to make that decision. Just like they did with VHS over BetaMax. Less than 1% of all users will ever copy a HD-DVD I’m betting, but it will take over. Didn’t cost them anything either, just the legal fees for the cease and desist letters so they can put up a “reasonable effort” at protecting the content. It was the smartest move they could have ever made to win the format wars.

However, I had been disappointed by the fact that I still hadn’t gotten an X desktop set up. I’d tried doing that before, but I didn’t want to blow up my LCD this time or spend 3 days getting it to work. I figured it was time to find a linux distribution that would meet my needs:

1) Free – I’m still me after all
2) X desktop configured for me
3) Decent applications pre-installed
4) Contol panel must exist – I modify enough config files at work
5) Package manager – allows for install of new programs

I began my search…

I came across a couple different choices.

Slashdot had just done an article about PC-BSD and the screenshots were awesome. However it was still in a 0.5 beta state. I downloaded a copy anyways, but I probably won’t install it. I like BSD, but Linux has more apps right now and my mail server is already on Linux so it might be easier to duplicate my setup on another Linux environment.

There was also an article about Libranet and Ubuntu. Libranet’s free version is a little old, so I said no. The current one requires you to give up some cash. Ubuntu looked pretty good, so I downloaded and burned a copy.

Sun released a free version of Solaris 10recently, so I started to download the DVD, but it is still going. Wow is that slow. We use Solaris at work and it is a nice environment, but I don’t care much for the Common Desktop Environment. Also there is no control panel that I know of. Not like in the Debian Linux distros.

Finally I found Xandros Linux. It is positioned as a Linux for Windows users. It comes with a ridiculously simple installer, pre-configured desktop, Windows-like control panel, a bunch of Web plug-ins already set up, and a graphical package manager. It can even run some Windows applications if you buy the CrossOver plugin. They have some pay versions, but they also have a nice free version. I downloaded that one and installed it. In fact, I’m writing this entry from it now.

The install was so simple. I had thought I was going to spend a good part of this weekend setting it up, but it only took about 2 minutes to go through the install screen after booting from the CD. Then I left while it was formatting. When I came back, I rebooted the machine without the CD and just logged into my new Linux desktop. It is an incredibly polished environment. I changed the screen resolution my normal way. Right-click the desktop and go to properties. The control panel was a little different, but I found the resolution section easily. Then it restarted my desktop and I was in 1280×1024 goodness ( the max for my LCD ).

The graphical package manager makes installing stuff ridiculouly easy. However, Xandros lists their own supported packages separately from the general Debian packages. I added the general Debian package source to the manager and it is still downloading package information. Dang those Debian Linux package makers have been busy.

Once the debian package list is complete, I can start the transfer of my mail services over to the new Linux machine. It’s a Dell SC420 I bought a few months ago for $300. It’s so quiet and fast. I wish I had some more memory for it, but oh well. When it’s ECC unregistered DDR Ram, it’s kind of hard to get that specific kind. I’ll get another 256 stick sometime when prices come down.

I’ve set it up reasonably secure and now I get to add more features. I immediately added vim because a world with only nano is no world at all.

Here’s the entry in the ClamAV scan that showed me I had an intruder:
C:/Program Files/FilZip/unrar3.dll: Troj.BO-Server FOUND

Be careful if you have this program, you may want to uninstall it.

Here’s some good stuff I learned. If you install gnucash, you might as well install gnucash-docs because the manual is pretty well written and helpful in many places. It has lots of screenshots and other goodies to make the setup easier.

Gtk is a pretty neat windowing toolkit, for a free one that is. Quartz blows the hell out of it as does Win32. The themes stuff is pretty cool and it took me a little bit to set that up. It turns out you need gtk-pixbuf to make the gtk themes work. I think you also need the gtk-engines package also. I don’t really know since I only got it to work with both installed. I didn’t test each one individually. Basically all that got me was to be able to turn my buttons different colors.

If you need some themes, go to themes.org. They have the most for Gtk and most of the other window managers.

X11 is fun.

Linksys WRT54G wireless router is turning out to be a geek’s wet wireless dream. There’s an open source firmware update that lets people use every imaginable feature of the Broadcom chip. You can do WDS (mesh networking), boost the antennae power, set your own routing tables. It’s just nuts. Unfortunately, you have to shell out $20 if you really want to get some help doing it. Not too high a price.

Fink is cool, but can be hella annoying. I’m trying to install gnucash on my little iBook since I don’t have a recent copy of Quicken. This would probably be a nice piece of software to slap a web UI on and start bringing in some bucks. I’ll play with it and see if it is worth looking into.

My problem with it has been the damn xfree86 libraries. It keeps wanting to compile them, but the Apple x11 install is conflicting or something. It turns out it just wants the X11 SDK from Apple. I found it secretly hidden on the XCode Tools CD. After installing it, the gnucash compile moved forward. Now I’m just waiting for it to finally finish.

Since not everybody wants to download the whole XCode CD just for a 5 MB file, I’m putting that package available here. It works for me, so if it doesn’t work for you, there’s a 614 MB download you can get from Apple that also has it. This fixed my problems with needing a system-xfree86-dev as a placeholder package. Without it, you only see system-xfree86 and system-xfree86-shlibs. Without it, I had so many problems compiling anything that remotely used X11 libs. Incidentally, this is taken from the XCode Tools 1.2 CD.

Also, I really like Visual Studio .Net. It’s the best IDE in the world. Everyone else just tries to do what it does. Except for refactoring, other tools have that down better. But hell, VB is not exactly a refactoring delight. I love that the IDE lets you use so many damn languages. Plus the debugger is actually useful and doesn’t require a lot of crazy crap to make it work right. I had some nightmares with gdb I don’t want to talk about. overall, I think it really increases productivity and at the end of the day, you use what will help you push out lines faster and of better quality.

Good night all.

I also got a chance to re-partition my laptop drive. I’ve moved over to a one big partition format because I’ve misjudged the size I’ve needed for music and other files in the past. Although, this guy has a good idea for how to setup Mac OS X. I might follow his advice if I got a Mac desktop.

Spam comments, I banish you from this weblog!