durbn.net

My wife has an old iBook G3 800mhz laptop that hadn't been used in years because the power adapter was missing. So I spent a couple bucks on ebay and bought a generic apple-compatible one for cheap. I powered it up and had to endure the horrible apple 'ping' and logo while it booted into an operating system designed by and for pre-schoolers. I still don't understand what the pull is to apple. The hardware is nice and nice looking as long as you ignore the glaring usability issue of a one-freakin-button mouse. The software on the other hand, while based off of the pure raw beauty (and security) of the Mach BSD kernel, falls all the way short when you get to the gui.

I had an unused cheapo Belkin wireless USB adapter lying around that I thought would be a nice addition to the iBook. Unfortunately it was not supported by MacOS. At least not natively. There were drivers for MacOS 10.3 and up but not for the 10.2.8 that I had. Bah. I decided to shelf it until I got linux up and running.

After trying to teach MacOS how to play nicely with standard file sharing protocols I managed to back up all the data. Even their valiant attempts to make things simpler failed as I started to find files strewn all over the place. I suppose that can be added up to user ignorance though.

I had my freshly burned copy of Debian 'Lenny' Testing ready to go as soon as the last file was copied safely to my Linux file server. Of course before I could boot off a cd I had to look up how to actually boot off a cd under a mac. Not quite as intuitive as you think. They say you just have to hold 'C' but I ended up holding Shift + Ctrl + Option + Delete until it worked. Silly boot process.

So I took the plunge and decided to update my laptop's Edgy Eft Kubuntu install to the new Fiesty Fawn beta. I tried out their new updater tool which automatically went out and fetch the packages I need to update. The whole process went really smooth. Fiesty Fawn is very very slick. The new network manager is great for laptops with WiFi, K3B is now at v1.0, and OpenOffice is at v2.2. Kernel 2.6.20 is working great too.

Remember: April is the official release month for Fiesty Fawn, so check out www.kubuntu.com today!

It's no secret that I've been using the Linux operating system on my main desktop computer exclusively for that last 2 years. Before that I had the Debian distribution running on numerous servers around the house. When I bought my laptop in the summer of 2006 I made the natural move to the Ubuntu distribution which is based directly off of Debian. More specifically I moved to Kubuntu which is the KDE version of Ubuntu (I have tried it, but I don't really like Gnome personally). Of course I loaded the standard Firefox/Thunderbird/Openoffice/Azureus programs that run on all platforms (windows too if you must) since I've been using those since my windows days. Recently I've been toying with the native KDE applications instead and I've fallen in love with them. Read on to hear all about KDE!