Of the many controversies in free software, this is one that I have long found to be interesting.  People seem to define things in different ways, which leads to confusion (and arguing) when one person calls a system a "GNU/Linux" system and the next calls it just the "Linux" system.  Too often, I have found people saying "You [...]

Since 1996, when I was introduced to the concept of free software and the GNU/Linux operating system (in the form of Slackware), I started to take a look around and found myself amazed at what was the free software community then. Watching it build massively amazing pieces of software that are second to none in [...]

Once upon a time, adequate space was a rare thing to come across, and so many UNIX and UNIX-like systems set aside an allocation of space reserved for root when a filesystem is formatted. This usually is done as a percentage of the filesystem—by default with ext{2,3,4} file systems, that is 5%. This tends to [...]

This post is a bit of a “brain dump” of sorts for some thoughts that I have as to replacing AllTray with a more versatile, powerful, and robust tool to handle various needs of users when it comes to taking applications and docking them to the system tray. Why? I’ve used AllTray for a long [...]

Alrighty, so I wanted to play with Mono 2.0. I thought about packaging it up, but the packaging for Mono in Debian and Ubuntu is extremely complex, and would have taken me a lot of time that I simply don’t have. So, instead, I wrote a BASH script that pulls Mono 2.0 and friends from [...]

No, not the PlayStation. PS1, the shell prompt variable. This prompt should work on any system that has the lsb_release utility installed. If you don’t have that installed, then you can change the OS_RELEASE variable to match whatever system you’re using, by hand. Append the following to the end of your ~/.bashrc (if you use [...]

An article over at “Works With U” has an interesting thing that I have run into a few times before: And here’s another ironic twist: Consumers may actually prefer to pay for Ubuntu — rather than get it for free. No joke: Many consumers don’t like free software. They fear it. My brother in law [...]

I haven’t forgot about UUBP that Brian and I started a while back. I had tried (somewhat unsuccessfully, it would seem) to work with Ubuntu directly instead of trying to duplicate work and keep yet another point of contact for users that are interested in a slightly moving desktop environment. I have come to the [...]

For whatever reason, I have stayed away from DVD-RAMs as useful disc types, and pretty much ignored them. However, I am coming to find that they are very useful and extremely flexible—and cheaper per gigabyte than USB flash drive storage, too. Now, the road to this discovery was actually fairly short, though it took a [...]

Ubuntu’s latest release is out today—the Hardy Heron. If you’re from around these here parts of Georgia, GA Tech has it already, and is serving ’em up at about 1 MB per second.