CURSOR 1,1; PRINT “Another Blog Entry”

In the last week, i’ve been playing around with a lot of different programming languages, and it’s been a lot of fun.
I started out looking at Scheme – a variant of the no-so-famous language LISP – the language looked fairly good, but i found that it was almost solely used for hobbyist projects, and weren’t used in any mainstream applications, i began looking for something else.
I stumbled upon Ruby. Ruby had a syntax somehow similar to the one of Scheme and Eiffel. Ruby sure is a great language, and i might very well look further into it. One thing struck me about Ruby: It lacks good, accessible documentation.
The Pickaxe is a good place to start, though.

Since yesterday, i’ve been looking at Python, and it sure looks like a good language.
I’ll post my Python experiences here, along the way.

I hope i didn’t bore you too badly.

-Bjerrk

Subjective Linux on the desktop

EDIT: Now this is annoying. NeedHost deleted Morten’s website, without any good reason. That’s why the pictures are all gone. I’m sorry.
You often hear the question “Is Linux ready for the desktop” being asked. I’d say that Linux most definitely IS ready for the desktop.

To “prove” my point i’ve brought a couple of screenshots. I took those screenshots myself.

This one is a screenshot of my Laptop running Slackware Linux ( http://slackware.com/ ) with the KDE desktop:

Click image to enlarge.

This is a screenshot of my Laptop (still running Slackware) with the Gnome desktop:


Click image to enlarge.

And, finally, this one shows my server (it’s doing some local ftp services, and i use it as a desktop at the same time) running Slackware again, with the KDE desktop (KDE is my favourite) :

Click image to enlarge.

I hope you enjoyed it!

Kind regards Bjerrk

Enlightenment

In the last couple of days i’ve been using the development version of the enlightenment desktop. It’s called E17, and it’s still in a pre-alpha stage of development. It’s totally different from it’s predecessor E16. As one of my friends stated “E17 and E16 seems like two seperate worlds”. I find this statement to be a fairly good description.

E17 features a very beautiful desktop, with a good amount of customizable modules such as a laptop battery plugin, a temperature plugin, a calendar and lots of other stuff. While featuring a lot of eye candy like fading menus, icons that “zoom” as your mouse moves over them and the like, E17 still runs remarkably fast. E17 is far from finished, and therefore, the desktop that is available now is only a small “sample” of what it will look like.

Here’s a screenshot of E17, running on my desktop PC:
http://rapidshare.de/files/13123636/e17-1.jpg.html (just press the “Free”-button at the bottom of the page to view the screenshot)

Currently i’m very satisfied with E17, and looking forward to the final release.

Kind Regards Bjerrk

Laptops and typos

I’m sorry for all the typos in my last entry. I bet this one won’t be any better.

I’ve been having some problems with my laptop lately. Very strange problems. If i disabled ACPI (power control) i couldn’t use the drivers for my graphics card, because the drivers wasn’t able to find the IRQ (hardware address) for my graphics card.
On the other hand, if i enabled ACPI my ethernet card didn’t work (for the same reason. Not finding the IRQ). Luckily, i (and mjjohansen, a person i know from from http://linuxin.dk) found a solution to the problem.
The solution was looking through the kernel .config (the file that defines how you kernel works) and then forcing Linux to get the IRQ’s from the BIOS. That helped, to say the least. Then that problem is out of the way.

-Bjerrk

An update, at last.

Hi. Back again.

A lot of things has happened since my last entry.

Firstly, since september i’ve been using Gentoo GNU/Linux ( http://www.gentoo.org/ ) and i’me very happy with it, though there are some silly things about Gentoo.
The special thing about Gentoo is that all software installed through Gentoo’s package system (called portage) is compiled from source code. This makes it possible to optimize the binary’s (programs, libraries etc) created, to your very CPU. though some reject it, it DOES make your system run a wee bit faster, but not enough to make all that compiling feasible – in my opinion – since compiling complex programs can take several hours.
Another thing about Gentoo is that it gives the user good control over the system. You configure the system through text files. Gentoo has taught me a lot of what i know about Linux and the BASH shell.

Wow, i’m tired.

Goodnight.