1966

Back in 1966, undefeated Michigan State and undefeated Notre Dame played in that historic game that ended in a 10-10 tie.

In the article "The End of College Football As We Know It?", Michael Weinreb wrote:

But 1966 wasn't just an argument about Notre Dame and Michigan State and what it means to win a championship when no one wins at all; this was also an argument about the South and what it was failing to become.

"With their size and strength … the Irish and Spartans were the wave of the future of college football," wrote Allen Barra in The Last Coach, his biography of Bear Bryant. "Alabama, with its undersized, all-white team, was a relic of the past."

That year, the Crimson Tide were the only undefeated, untied team in America. Yet, for reasons that encompassed the social and physical and historical, they were considered an inferior product. They lost the Argument. They finished third in the polls.

How times have changed!

secure boot stench

Jesse Smith writes about his experiences with Microsoft's Windows 8 UEFI Secure Boot mess in the Questions and Answers section of this week's DistroWatch Weekly.

Troubling situation for Linux users. As Smith writes:

In short, to get to the point where we can attempt to boot an alternative operating system we need to know our way through six steps:

- Boot machine while pressing F10
- Find Secure Boot in the menu tree, ignore warnings
- Disable Secure Boot feature
- Enable legacy boot options
- Enable specific legacy devices, such as USB devices
- Save and reboot while holding down F9

To the more technically minded, this might not seem so bad, but keep in mind these steps are performed without documentation, with no hints and with big warning pop-ups letting the user know what a bad idea disabling Secure Boot is. This is not something the average user is going to know how to do, nor will they likely want to follow through if they read the on-screen messages...

What a pain.

Well, I'm set for awhile, with my main desktop pc and two notebooks (my spare computers). Hopefully, Linux folks will find easy ways for users to get around this Secure Boot crap. But Microsoft has completely lost me as a potential customer. In any case, over the past several years any Windows computer I've bought new, the first thing I've done is to wipe out Windows and install Linux. But with this situation, I won't even bother to buy a new Windows computer again.

There are plenty of options. I can still get my hands on pre-Windows 8 machines -- used, refurbished, whatever. Perhaps better yet, I'd like to get a Linux computer -- I've done so in the past with great results, and there are good Linux vendors out there.

A third option is to build-my-own. I'll probably get around to trying that one day; a friend of mine tells me it isn't too difficult.

Screw Microsoft.

linux on a mac mini

Hm. Maybe I can get my hands on an old Mac mini.

In "Cheap and silent desktop Linux box!", blogger "LilFluffy" tells how to install Linux on these machines. The author writes:

Since the last two versions of their OS, there has been a glut of these machines showing up on eBay, going for as low as $130 to just over $150. I picked one up with a bad hard disk for under $80!

Replacing the hard disk is not too complicated [...] These make a GREAT Linux box, I'm writing this on mine right now loaded with Debian testing.

LilFluffy also includes detailed instructions for replacing the hard drive.

A look at the Mac mini "Core Duo" 1.66 specs shows "512 MB of 667 MHz DDR2 SDRAM (PC2-5300) memory." I like to go with at least 2 GB of RAM for Linux these days, but this should be fine for something light like Xfce.

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." :)