never buy a sony vaio

Saturday, 06 April 2002

Thanks tayl0r for my new wallpaper. Love that geocities theme :D

My love of Sorcerer Linux has diminished a great deal over the events of the recent month/s. After the author stormed out and two forks of the project were created, the future of the distribution is unclear. There is no doubt it will continue, there are a great deal of people who like the system and will spend a lot of time continuing it (the two forks would not have been created if those people hadnt felt they could continue the work). However, this just isnt enough for me, I’d had my doubts about the whole system as it is anyway, there is still a lot of work required to bring it up to a release state. So with this in mind, I cast (no pun intended) my gaze at a similar distribution, which as it happened just had their major first release at the time, what a great time to try it out.

Gentoo is developed by one of the writers for IBMs DeveloperWorks section, some very good articles which I’ve spent a few hours of my life reading. The package managment system for gentoo is based on the FreeBSDs ports system which has been in service for many years and is a stable and reliable system, regarded as the best package managment systems available. One of the other core developers is also working on the GNOME project, this is great for me, since I prefer GNOME and with one of the developers also tied to gentoo, I can be sure GNOME should be reliable as far as installing it is concerned. Should be fun, I’ll give it a good try I’m pretty sure I’ll like it, but I wont be changing all my PCs until I’m clearly satisfied.

While I’m playing with a new distro, I’ll be trying out a new filesystem, for me at least, from Silicon Graphics Inc, XFS (IBM article by that gentoo developer). A journaling filesystem, optimised for large files. I’ll be keeping my ogg’s and wallpaper on an XFS partition to give it a good test.

And finally, my site has been the same for a long time, layout wise, so I’m going to give it a minor tweak to try and make it more informative and navigatable.