Thanks to forum poster msdark, I've run into a little project called wbar. It's a nice looking quicklaunch bar that could potentially find its way onto my desktop or laptop. I'll try it out in the near future as there seems to be a PKGBUILD in aur for both the program itself and a gui configuration tool written in python for some of its options. Definitely marking this one down as "to-do."

As far as those quickstart guides go, I'm probably going to take a little bit longer than expected. Possibly sometime this weekend they'll get some of the attention they deserve.

Long ago, in a galaxy far, far away...

I created a Ubuntu guide mostly for self-reference back when I was using Stumble Upon. I haven't updated it recently at all mostly because I've been using Arch, so my Ubuntu-foo is quite weak. However, after seeing the latest update date of the article itself, I decided I should re-saddle and try my hand at installing/configuring Ubuntu for the sake of keeping my article updated. Then it got me thinking: Why not do the same for an Arch guide?

The guides were mostly written to help transition a windows user to Ubuntu, so the arch guide will be to help transition Ubuntu -> Arch.

We'll see how quickly I get to those things... aka it might take a while.

I also need to update my color scheme for my terminals and such since I recently changed my OB/gtk themes. Oi... not to mention school work. There's not enough time in a day.

My roommate really has caught my interest with his Aleutia computer. I have a strong feeling that "green PCs" are going to become all the rage in a very short amount of time (see energy crisis), at least here in the States. Now that the Aleutia E2 has come out (their next generation in computers), I'm even more interested than I was before. The bill for one of those babies is around $386.25.

However I'm not sure that I could justify putting out that kind of money at this point. I'm really satisfied with my current desktop dual-booting Windows and Arch and I'd really like to save my extra dollars so that I can pick up the T-Mobile android phone due out in October. But I digress.

My roommate certainly does sacrifice the power of a more expensive desktop PC, but he's found a few programs that aid in the process of every-day computer usage. Not to mention he's found Micropolis. If I were using that low powered of a machine, though, I think there are some changes that I'd make to his normal lineup of programs.

For starters, he uses Opera. How he manages to do this and not loose his mind is beyond me. I would personally be running dillo or dillo2 (when it becomes stable, of course... late this month or next according to their website). He also uses Sonata to connect to our Music server in the room (which is running amazingly, by the way). Once again, I'd be using something more lightweight, such as ncmpcpp. He uses XFE which I would highly recommend for his build. Other than that I'm not entirely sure what else he's running (I think he's using feh for his wallpaper).

And as if this post wasn't unstructured enough, here's another little blurb: I recently saw that Wicd was updated in the arch repos. The new setup is nice, but they moved some files around. For example, their wpa_supplicant encryption files are now located in /etc/wicd/encryption. Not too big of a deal, I suppose. It just required me moving my University's wireless config from point A (/usr/lib/wicd/encryption/templates) to point B (/etc/wicd/encryption/templates) and then adding the name of the file in the "active" file. They had also changed the naming scheme around for the tray icon program (wicd-client) which I had to fix in my .xinitrc file. No biggy.

I do like wicd's new GUI interface. More options plus the choice to choose dhclient or dhcpcd. It figures they add this only a few days after I find out how to make both dhclient AND dhcpcd not mess with /etc/resolv.conf file. Oh well. The new version also adds the option to share a username/password across SSIDs of the same name which is a major time saver here at the University where I'd otherwise have to key in my passphrase in public places. Eeek.

I subscribe to quite a few tech blogs, mostly those pointing to open source and the development of the Linux kernel. Some, like kmandla's blog, provide really interesting real-life application and battle stories that are actually pretty fun to read.

For the rest of them, I must go through 75% without reading the actual article. Why? When I see the header "This Distribution is Gaining Momentum!" or "A windows killer? We think so!" or anything like that I automatically scroll past it in my RSS reader. I simply don't have the time or patience to read about how Linux is "lol omg taking off." News flash, kids: Linux isn't "taking off" in these mysterious spurts. People are trying it every day. Some like it, some don't. Saying that a certain percentage of computer users are running a Linux box is not news. News is that some new feature has been added to the kernel or some popular program got a Linux port. That's news, and that's what I want to read about.

Perhaps the articles do, in fact, contain useful information but are titled something like "Year of Linux on the Desktop has finally arrived because this many people use it now!" Stop saying it's arrived. Stop speculating. Do I have to rub your nose in it, too? Stop it.

For the sake of keeping my RSS reader chock-full of useful info and crap-free, stop posting these doo-doo filler articles.

Edit: And suddenly, my RSS feed was happy again.

So I gave chrome a whirl the other day while I was booted into Windows. I thought it was... ehh... It's was ok. The memory usage far surpassed that of firefox, which made me really disappointed. It's still a Google product though, so I will probably end up using it anyway. The only thing that I'm kind-of turned off by right now is the tricky Eula that everyone was complaining about and it now supposedly "fixed". We'll see.

Speaking of being booted into Windows, I had managed to grab a beta account for Ryzom. Holy cow is that game fun! I don't know what my friend was talking about... that game is as much fun now, if not more fun, than it was last year.

Also, college is happening, hence the lack of posting. This year's going pretty well so far. The mpd/nfs/samba/ssh server is up and running beautifully. My roommate and I pop open sonata and just share an equal sound system. No problems with that as of yet.

ALSO ALSO, I finally took the time out to find out how to keep my /etc/resolv.conf static from the hands of dhclient. All that had to be done was create a file /etc/dhclient-enter-hooks with
make_resolv_conf() {
echo "doing nothing to resolv.conf"
}
in it. Bam. No more wicd messing with my openDNS servers.

I've also been waking up early to run with my roommate. He's taking the Somethingawful Nike+ challenge. He's in the top 7 as of now, so that's pretty exciting. Not really Linux related, but I thought that'd be note worthy, as well.

I set up the NFS server the other day without a hitch. Everything mounts the way it should. Very nice.

Now I've got my eyes glued to the monitor for a new reason: A Google browser. Sweet fish sticks. Once more reason Google will rule the universe.