August 19, 2003
GRUB!
Was playing around with GRUB today on my notebook getting a boot splash screen up and running :)
Debian still ships with Lilo when using the Woody installer, but the installation of GRUB went fine, and with some of the freely available splash images out there can look quite nice!
Next up is to get the Linux Progress Patch working :)
August 17, 2003
AFL finals starting soon!
Its getting down to the business end of the season in the Australian Football league. The ladder shows my Dad's favourite team, Collingwood, on third with a good chance to take out the premiership this year.
I sense Collingwood fans out there will be extremely happy if this happens, because that will leave Carlton, Collingwood's long time arch-rivals on the bottom of the ladder :)
Linux will have 20% desktop market share by 2008 ?
Newsforge are running an interesting article about a project conducted by Siemens Business Services to test out Linux on the desktop with non-technical people.
Their resulting statement "Linux has matured as a desktop and will quickly vault to the #2 most-installed OS in the world".
Also interesting is another quote about Linux and the Ximian Gnome desktop - "...Linux will save 20% to 30% in administration costs, 50% in hardware costs, and 80% in licensing fees".
How will the commercial alternatives compete against that ? :)
Rhythmbox!
Version 0.5 of Rhythmbox has been released. It's a music player/organiser for Gnome modelled after the iTunes package for MacOS. Looks great, and there's heaps more features to come :)
August 15, 2003
Gnome Desklets!
While reading the debian-gnome mailing list, I came across Gnome Desklets, little pieces of eye candy you can add to your desktop with an embedded application in them. There's also a MacOS X style cycling menu bar available, with full transparency. Some of the screenshots (1, 2, 3, 4, 5) look great :)
August 12, 2003
Back from Toulouse!
Arrived back from visiting Sylvain and Stefano in Toulouse over the
weekend! Had a great time talking about all sorts of things like
Cocoon, Avalon, Apache, etc.
On top of the great conversation we had 40 degree heat every day, but luckily, Sylvain has a pool which allowed us to cool down :)
We also spent some time travelling around southern France, taking a look at the old city in Toulouse, and to Carcassonne castle, which was really great.
Many thanks to Sylvain and his wife Claire for their hospitality :)
Looking forward to seeing everyone again at the GetTogether in Ghent! :)
August 08, 2003
Off to France!
Later on today I'll be heading off to Toulouse to visit Sylvain, and his family in the south of France. Luckily, Stefano will also be there at the same time, so I'm sure we'll be having lots of talk about Apache, Cocoon, Avalon, and Java development in general! :)
Really looking forward to it, I haven't seen Sylvain since the GetTogether last year, and are yet to meet with Stefano (almost happened at a Frankfurt Stammtisch, but a (minor) car accident got in the way while he was driving up from Italy).
Apache really is an international community! :)
August 04, 2003
Enemy Territory!
Last week I started to get back into playing 1st person shoot-em up games like Quake 3 Arena and the like. A good friend of mine then pointed me at Enemy Territory, a free online game built upon the Id Quake engine.
I don't normally play many computer games, but after playing a bit of Enemy Territory online I'm addicted! :)
It's quite a cool game, with a lot of strategy and thinking involved to complete the various team objectives. It's also a lot of fun, and the graphics and detail are great! :)
August 01, 2003
Microsoft deploys Open Source products!
Microsoft has deployed some open source and free software tools including Apache, Linux, and others in a test lab in an attempt to better understand their 'competition'. More information here.