brian hefele's untidy space

I've been using MeeGo as my secondary OS (well, my primary OS on my secondary machine) for a week, week and a half or so now, and I'm still pretty happy with it. Stability is not quite where I'd like it to be, the wifi driver randomly seems to crash (without notice, except that all network activity disappears), and Evolution is not sending mail properly (at all). Minor issues add up, and I would not feel comfortable recommending MeeGo to anyone who wasn't a hacker, or who didn't have extremely kind hacker friends. Yet, if you do have a bit of patience, it's still less of a struggle than any other desktop linux I've ever run, and its performance on weak hardware is nothing to sneeze at.

I was excited to learn that the OpenSUSE team had taken the Meego UI and applied it to a (theoretically) slim version of OpenSUSE. The result is, for now, at least, known as Smeegol. There are some very convincing reasons to try this out - Smeegol uses NetworkManager, which is an amazing tool. Far more packages are available, since OpenSUSE is already a strong distro. Also, additional social networks are available for the front page - including FaceBook (boo) and Flickr (yay).

Continue reading…

I have sort of quasi-permanently borrowed an EeePC with Windows XP. I have been using it a bit lately, and realized that I hate how slow Windows is to boot on such a machine (never been quick on any machine, though), I hate the aesthetics of pre-Vista Windows, and I hate the overall Windows experience (having no comfortable command line is a big fright). Since the machine is not really mine, installing a new OS (something in a BSD, please?) seemed like a pretty bad idea. First idea: Cygwin.

Continue reading…

I haven't been here very much lately. It's immeasurably hard to describe how hard it is doing nothing, having nothing to do. It's depressing and the depression makes it even harder to do simple, little things, like maintaining my little slice of the internet. Hopefully I'll be able to force myself back into it soon.

Until then, I think I owe it to two of the terminal emulators I previously discussed here to talk about a couple of updates. First, a while ago, iTerm was forked into iTerm 2. One of the promises was improvements to iTerm's positively abysmal speeds (and the devs' refusal to acknowledge such). The first release of iTerm 2 that I tested somehow managed to perform worse than iTerm. But more recent releases are much improved, and while it's still not the top performing terminal emulator on the Mac, it does hold its own against the competition. Plus, interesting new features are being added, making it far more worthy of download than the old iTerm was. Now all they need is to hire an actual artist to un-ugly their icon (hint… hint…)

In my previous roundup, I regarded ZOC very highly, despite some stability issues I was having. Fortunately this must have just been a glitch, as I have since updated and have yet to make it crash (knock on wood!). Interestingly enough, ZOC doesn't seem to have a modern system of update checking in place. Rather, after a given amount of time, it pops up a box saying 'hey, check out our website, there's gotta be a newer version by now!' which, admittedly, was true (actually by the time the box popped up, I was two points behind, so, can't complain I guess). So, ZOC, also better than I originally wrote.