December 2007 Archives

Good day readers, I hope those of you that celebrate Christmas had a great one. I am going to be brief and short here. I have three links I would like to share.

If you come here often enough, you have already heard that I have been bitten by the Ubuntu Bug. I not only like it but am loving it to the point that I may well only keep one windows box around in the near future. If you are thinking of trying Linux, these three links may be of use to you.

Oh yeah, I was gonna keep it short.

Thanks again for sharing your brain Chris. And yes folks, I am a Chris Pirillo fan boy. I make no bones about it, I think he is a great resource.

I am not alone in being fussy and making a switch. This article is about switching to Kubuntu.

Before you upgrade - Some great thoughts from the Ubuntu Forum. Thanks Artificial Intelligence!

I have, over at my personal blog ranted and raved many times about the benefits of IRC. (Odds are if you are coming to an Ubuntu blog, you already know what that is... just in case it is short for Internet Relay Chat.) It may not seem to fit the theme of this blog but, in my humble opinion, it does. I have been in and out of the Wyldryde IRC Network for, I believe, right around a decade now. I should make it clear that Wyldryde is not one of those "Age, Sex, Location" or "hate war" communities. They are very clear about and very fair about enforcing their rules. It is nothing like alot of the other networks out there. It is a community of mixed individuals but, in my opinion, it is the best place to talk tech or get tech help.

I have been double blessed in IRC of late and one of the blessings is directly related to this blog. Before I continue though it is only fair to direct you to the official IRC channels for Ubuntu. There are lots of them on this list; even localized by country and state. I am not writing this to make any comment on the official network. I have not been to any of the official channels for Ubuntu until I made my switch to Ubuntu. Any comment would be unfair and I imagine they would be at least as helpful as my efreinds over at WyldRyde.

I have learned much from the folks on IRC over the years and am greatful for many an evenings of tech troubleshooting, chats and education. I have learned a great deal in the "newbie freindly zone" that is known as the ubuntu channel on the wyldryde network. I am going to share with all of you, in future post, most of what I have learned.

Merry Christmas to All. You can get the MP3 here. I will get a feed up and runing for this Shortly after Christmas.

• We started the show off with Jingle Bells by Natalie Brown
• Special Guest - Santa Clause talking about the Santa Cam - Special Thanks to:
  
  • Wyldryde - for making sure the chat remains functional and safe
    
    • If you are feeling in the Spirit of the season you can Donate Here
  • Squirrel Cam and Databrokers for letting Santa use the workshop
  • Chris Pirillo who was nice enough to notice and show the santa cam to others
  • Ustream for putting Santa in front of so many this year
• Promo for Email Our Military
• Next we play something swirrel music - Rudolph the Red Nose Reindeer
• Podsafe Christmas Song by Jonathan Coulton
• Special thanks to Ewe Hermann for his excellent list (be sure and check out some of this 8-bit stuff)
• Next we played a few in a row:
  
  • We Three Kings by Derek K Miller
  • Three classics from this list at InCompeteTech
    
    • Little Town of Bethlehem - Kevin MacLeod
    • Silent Night
    • Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairies
• Closed with Blue Vista by Elvis, Chris Pirillo and McInTec

I am pretty certain a good number of you are here because of my rather risque post on my personal blog. Truth be told and being punnish, there is much truth to what I said. Here is the more to the story. It started as a little gag with some of my friends on IRC. I soon realized it was enough for a blog alone. That is how you and I ended up here. Myself scribing and you reading.

I do not tend to educate anyone on this topic. I am only hoping to learn and share what I learn. I think things are finally easy enough for me to give this OS a full time go and see if I can make it do what I want.

I used the term "easy" to describe my fears of non-commitment to this OS. I started out "PCin'" with a VIC20; a machine that seemed advanced because you could use a cassette or, at the time, a fairly expensive cartridge to load code. Making it do anything special involved BASIC, peeks, pokes and SYSing it... it was not pretty.

We did such things because there were no other options. If you wanted to make it do something that wasn't in a program that is what it took. Shortly after I upgraded to a C64, I met something called GEOS. I was convinced that, in the future, that would be the only way to go. Then came Windows. I was sold on GUI and wanted as much GUI and as little cli (Command Line Interface) as possible. Ubuntu seems like she may well fill that desire for me.

For years, I stuck with windows due to ease of use. I always kept my eye on linux and would build boxes just for it from time to time. I never felt secure enough to make the switch. I decided it was time to really think about Ubuntu. I began experimenting.

The first three boxes were either Feisty or Gutsy Ubuntu. I was still afraid but I set them up and played with them. I experimented with them, all GUI only, and liked them. I felt secure enough to venture on to studio.

Ubuntu Studio is best described as a customized package for audio/video work. I had to try it. I first heard about it when I was still trying out Feisty and didn't have a DVD burner. (Ubuntu Studio is a DVD boot.)

Welcome to my latest endeavor. It is time to do something like this when you find humor in the following:

sudo gobbledegook blah_blah -w -t -f
aWkward/ComBinationOf/mixedCase/underscores_strokes/and.dots

I both thought it cute and a good way to generate content to play with the layout for now.