pie chart

James Lawrence Powell writes:

I searched the Web of Science for peer-reviewed scientific articles published between 1 January 1991 and 9 November 2012 that have the keyword phrases "global warming" or "global climate change." The search produced 13,950 articles ("Why Climate Deniers Have No Scientific Credibility - In One Pie Chart").

mint and snow

Blogger Arindam Sen loves to look at Linux distros, and posts interesting reviews at Linuxed - Exploring Linux distros. He writes, "Personally, I don't get tired of installing Linux distros as it is my hobby and I install 2-3 new distros to my systems every week and uninstall the older ones." By reviewing these installations, he provides a great service to the Linux community.

Sen uses Linux Mint on his main machine. I stopped using Mint some time ago, but it's a great distro -- there are good reasons why so many people prefer using it instead of Ubuntu, which Mint is based on. Definitely worth a look, in my opinion.

Check out Sen's latest review: Linux Mint 14 Nadia Review: Is it better than Maya? The author takes a good look at the new Mint release, and compares it to Mint 13 (Maya) as well as to Snowlinux 3.

Snowlinux is fairly new, and appears to be another good distro. Its DistroWatch description:

Snowlinux is a set of Linux distributions based on Debian's latest stable release and featuring four different desktop environments - GNOME, KDE, LXDE and Xfce. It aims to be user-friendly, incorporating many useful tweaks and carefully selected software applications. The project also develops a separate, Ubuntu-based edition featuring the MATE (a GNOME 2 fork) desktop.

These days, I prefer to use Debian Stable and Ubuntu's LTS releases rather than any Debian or Ubuntu spin-offs, but I had great experiences running Linux Mint, and Snowlinux looks quite enticing. I can imagine myself taking a fresh look at both distros sometime down the road -- especially as the Cinnamon desktop continues to mature.

35 years (!)

Can't believe it's been 35 years since Earth, Wind & Fire came out with the All 'N All LP!

Beautiful album -- perhaps EWF's best.

Well, I stumbled upon this interview with Larry Dunn over at the Atlantic: 'That Groove Was Undeniable': Making Earth, Wind & Fire's 'All 'N All'

good distros

Opinions will vary on what makes a "good Linux distribution," which, I guess, is why there are so many distros out there. You can probably go to DistroWatch and pick any distro from the list and find users who say that distro is the "best" one out there.

Some factors here:

- The distro doesn't have to be super-easy to install, but I also don't want to have to work too hard. I want to be able to boot into a desktop right from the start; I don't want to have to install everything on my own, or to have to do it all from the command line.

- I want the distro's documentation to be good enough that I can find information without having to ask questions at the distro's forums.

- I prefer a well-established distro -- one that's been around for awhile, and one that I'm confident will be around, say, five years from now.

- The distro should have a strong development team. So-called "one-man distros" are great for the Linux world, but sometimes going with a distro that has a single developer or a small group of developers turns out to be less than ideal.

- Package management should be sensible and not too difficult, and the repository set-up should give me access to most of the apps that I want or need.

- The default desktop environment isn't real important to me (I can always add what I want later), but it's nice to have a choice of DEs/WMs at installation time.

- I prefer a distro that puts out releases that I can stick with for at least a couple of years. It doesn't have to be a "rolling-release" distro, but I think those are nice, at least in some cases. I can live with doing a fresh installation once a year (I prefer fresh installations over an upgrade path, for various reasons).

- Communication from the developers. I want to know what's coming, have a sense of what direction the distro is likely to go in, and of the general philosophy behind the distro. I want to have a feel for the commitment level of the developers to keep the distro going forward into the future.


For other people, some or many of these factors aren't important, and would be replaced by others; I'm not trying to describe "what makes a good distro," only "what makes a good distro for me."

Right now, I've settled upon Debian, Ubuntu, and openSUSE. With Debian, I go with "Debian Stable," although I sometimes install the current "Debian Testing" a few months after Testing is "frozen." With Ubuntu, I normally use only LTS ("Long-Term Support") versions.

And, to spice things up a little bit, I'm also running a couple of more "cutting-edge" distros -- Fedora and Sabayon. These might be less "stable" than the three I mentioned above, but they seem to be fairly solid, put together well, and not excessively prone to "breakage." They're both also quite pleasant to use.

All of these distros fit the criteria that I've outlined above, more or less. All are "good distros," in my opinion, but no doubt there are many, many others that a user can be happy with. And, as always (as the expression goes), "Your mileage may vary." :)

chromium from packman

Saw this posted at the openSUSE forums:

Dear openSUSE users,
Since this morning, the Chromium browser will no longer be maintained on the openSUSE OBS, nor will it be provided together with the openSUSE distribution. Instead the Chromium browser will be build on Packman and be available for the already supported openSUSE versions. This new version will replace the chromium-ffmpeg package that was already delivered through Packman. In the next days, I will delete the Chromium package from it's home location network:chromium and also send a delete request to openSUSE:Factory. The reason for this change is that ffmpeg support is becoming more and more integrated with the browser itself, making it very hard to remove the ffmpeg related sourcefiles and still keeping a workable browser. In the last few weeks, I tried everything to keep Chromium part of the openSUSE distribution but unfortunately I failed. And as we all know ffmpeg is one of those packages that are not allowed to be present on the openSUSE OBS. Therefore the only logical decision was to move Chromium completely to Packman. The new package will be a full enabled Chromium with build-in support for ffmpeg. The new version 25.0.1329 is already available from Packman and should be installed automatically as that it replaces the chromium-ffmpeg package. If not, please check manually in order to get the latest version from Packman. This should be a one-time manual intervention. RegardsRaymond Community Maintainer for the openSUSE Chromium package

Here's a link to the thread: http://forums.opensuse.org/english/other-forums/news-announcements/announcements/480649-chromium-pulled-opensuse-repos.html

Now, I'm still an openSUSE rookie. I didn't quite know how to proceed with this, but managed to stumble through it all. It took me a few tries, with a few mistakes along the way. I stopped a couple of times, went away from the computer for awhile, let it rest, then came back and started over. In the end, here's how I switched to the new Chromium version 25.0.1329 from the Packman repository (it all looks so simple now!) (no doubt an openSUSE "pro" would have done all this with zypper from the command line):

To add the Packman repository, I started up YaST. Clicked on "Software Repositories" > clicked on the “Add” button > selected “Community Repositories” and clicked on “Next.” This gave me a list of repositories. I selected “Packman Repository.” Clicked “OK.” Then, the “Import Untrusted GnuPG Key” window came up. I clicked “Trust.” This added the Packman repository.

Next, to get the new Chromium version from Packman. Back in the YaST Control Center, I clicked on "Online Update." The default for "Show Patch Category" was "Needed Patches." I changed this to "Unneeded Patches" using the drop-down list, and saw an update for Chromium in the summary listing. I clicked on it, and a list of packages showed up in the package list: chromium, chromium-desktop-kde, and chromium-suid-helper. At the lower right, I clicked on the "Versions" tab and selected the newer version from the Packman repo. I did that for each of the three packages in the list. Then I clicked on the "Accept" button.

This took me from Chromium 24.0.1290.0-1.19.1-i586 from openSUSE-12.2-Update to Chromium 25.0.1329.0-2.1-i586 from Packman Repository.

For more information, see the following:

- openSUSE Documentation: "Package management"

- openSUSE Documentation: "Additional package repositories"

- Packman website

spacefm ppa

I've never felt completely comfortable about using PPAs in Ubuntu, and I've never used one in Debian before, but I added the SpaceFM author's PPA in both Ubuntu 12.04 and Debian Wheezy. For instructions, see http://igurublog.wordpress.com/downloads/ppa/.

So far, so good. In Ubuntu, I did have to alter one of the commands shown. I had to add sudo in front of apt-key add in the following command:

steve[~]$ bash -c 'gpg --export -a 01937621 107165A1 | sudo apt-key add -'

Other than that, no problems. I'll see how things go.

new compose window in gmail

I'm not sure exactly when I started using Gmail, but the oldest messages that I still have are from early 2005. Gmail was first launched back on April 1, 2004 (it was "invitation only" back then); I think I got an account very soon after that.

There's been lots of criticism of Gmail and Google over the past 8 years. I perfectly understand why many others refuse to use it or are wary of it, but Gmail has worked out great here.

Gmail keeps getting better and better. You can check out some of the stuff they recently rolled out at Google's Official Blog. The biggest thing for me, though, is the new compose window, which is described at the Official Gmail Blog. Seems to be a nice time-saver, and I think it's a nice improvement.

Note: I'm not trying to convince anyone to use Gmail; that's up to the individual to decide. Use your own brain, be aware of what Google's all about, do what you think is best for you.