I hate to fangirl, but...

Zomg, the Ubuntu Dapper Drake LiveCD even detects my usb wireless card flawlessly. All I had to do was enter my WEP key.

The rest of it seemed really polished as well. Granted, I only looked around for ~15 minutes, but it was pretty darn cool. I'm considering taking Ubuntu for a spin on the new laptop I'll be buying sometime this summer--but who knows.

I don't do installations or check out LiveCDs that often, so it's exciting to find stuff that works beautifully when I do.

So, I've recently switched to Mutt for mail-reading purposes, and aside from it taking a motherload of all time to get all the necessary parts setup and configured properly having never done it before, I am so far extremely happy. It looks like it's going to be a huge timesaver overall once I have everything tweaked to my liking. Yay for Erinn giving me her super muttrc file which was incredibly helpful and neato. (Though I'm still tweaking the display colours in it: I agree, helix, I don't like yours. :-p)

All I need to do now is get my spam filtering setup in both procmail and the necessary hooks in Mutt, and add a few macros of my own. (And finish fleshing out my aliases.) Oh, and I need to fix some of my procmail rules, probably to sort by List-Id instead of ^TO, because I believe many of these lists are using bcc or something which breaks my list filtering. I haven't looked at it too much yet.

One of my friends gave me lots of digital pictures from various things:

Home-brewed Halloween fun: I was traumatized that I forgot my cross at home. I also apologize for any trauma caused by this picture. (Yes, all three of us are indeed girls.)

Edit: added in proper image thumbnail to not be evil.

From Newsforge:

What if Apple sells Mac OS for non-Apple PCs?

Imagine being able to buy whatever PC hardware you wanted -- or at least select a box from one of a long list of "approved" vendors -- and install Mac OS X on it. Suddenly Mac would be a viable competitor for Microsoft.

And desktop Linux would get lost in the crossfire.

Ummm... no. ... Probably half of all desktop Linux advocacy right now is devoted to saying, "Yes, there is an operating system other than Windows that runs on most of the same systems that run Windows."

If Apple wants to take on this burden, it's fine with me. I'll cheer Apple, loudly, if and when I start seeing ads telling the desktop-using public they now have a choice in PC operating systems for common, low-cost x86 hardware.

Thank you. Also, I seem to have started having dreams (nightmares?) about breaking/flooding Planet Debian. And am not even syndicated there yet, though am supposedly in the process of being soon. This is strange. <cough>

If CUPS support for this printer (and hopefully similar that come will inevitably come out soon from other manufacturers) emerges in the next year, then I so want to be bringing with me a laser printer to college. InkJet sucks, especially the 5+ year old one that I have now.

Open nautilus and attempt to browse the full, newly-released clip library from OpenClipart. About 85% of the clips are SVG. Guarantee you'll see a 'killall nautilus' as your computer goes into memory seizures.

I'd be mean and file bugs but am pretty positive that the GNOME team already knows how bad SVG rendering in GNOME is, heh.

I love how that now that there's no freeze, I can come home (at 8:15 PM, today) and install 20+ upgrades daily. There's just something euphoric about upgrading and apt. (Even though things are some upgrades from sid right now could very end up breaking things. Yay breaking things.)

Hanna Wallach and Máirín Duffy have recently started the GNOME Women project, similar to Debian Women, but obviously pertaining to involvement to the GNOME Desktop. Ignore the trolls, they always come.

Hopefully it will become successful - I have little doubt that it will given the founders. <grin> Go GNOME! My hands are currently tied with other projects at the moment to gain much more than IRC-lurker status there. Also... English final portfolio. Which I should be doing right now.

Sarge, a.k.a Debian 3.1, has been released, though the announcement hasn't hit the lists yet. Hopefully the tensions will go down a little now. Yay for Etch next up. Hopefully it won't take three years. <grin>

(Yes, this is a re-post.)

This is strange. I just opened up my browser to look at a local html file and all my tabs loaded… RoadRunner’s been going on and off all day (mostly off). Must be doing something on their end. Though it seems to work currently (though for how long, who knows).

So the project of the last day or so has been converting an existing fat32 partition of mine to ext3. No big deal, right? Here’s what I did:

1. Booted up into Windows (yes, I left this on my computer when I switched to Debian; there’s really no reason to wipe it currently as it’s up-to-date and isn’t costing me anything, so therefore is semi-useful for testing purposes when it does get used, which is probably once a month or two).
2. Copied everything from the fat32 partition, which was about 30 gigs of data, onto the NTFS partition, which barely squeezed it all, and even then after uninstalling several gigs worth of games that hadn’t been played in ages (and actually are not even mine, they’re my brother’s). Took a hot shower while doing this, and read a fair bit out of The Joy Luck Club, in another room to escape the goddawful grinding noise.
3. Booted off a KNOPPIX 3.8 CD that I had made before 1).
4. Used QParted to reformat the ~100 gig fat32 partition, after unmounting it. KDE’s actually got some pretty nifty apps for this sort of stuff, though my wireless won’t work off a vanilla KNOPPIX CD. Remounted it writable (mount -t ext3 -w /dev/hda1 /mnt/hda1). Copied the stuff back off the NTFS partition overnight, which probably took longer than before put was a heck of a lot quieter. Easier on the disk I’d imagine. Also remounted my Debian partition rw so I could fix /etc/fstab accordingly.
5. Marched in the local Memorial Day parade with the band.
6. Booted back up XP and deleted the backups. For some reason XP thinks the new ext3 partition is “unformatted,��? heh. Probably ’cause I didn’t make it from Windows.
7. Reboot, works fine.

Then, of course, I had to go through all the junk and make sure permissions were set correctly, etc. I like the new setup a lot better than the old one; though I now how to swap stuff to Windows on a floppy or CD if needed, the ext3 partition sure does work a lot better with Linux. One extremely visible effect is that thumbnails work correctly in Nautilus, i.e. they don’t take ages to load. And correct permissions. And lots more free inodes. And quick file-moving/copying, etc. I rarely have a need to switch data into Windows at any rate, and, unlike when I first switched over, I haven’t been afraid of doing stuff like manually mounting cdroms for a while now.

In other news, I’m probably going to be crazy sore tomorrow morning from the parade today. Gotta love out-of-season stuff like that. Though I have to admit, the baritones have it a lot worse than the mellophones do. Second worst!

...whoa. Playing MIDI files with TiMidity sure does gobble up CPU.

PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND 17908 christin 15 0 24404 16m 1940 S 18.0 3.9 2:27.63 timidity

I can see that massively choking on a machine with less power to spare, heh. And laptop batteries. <wince> A few points against listening to old game midis while doing other things...