Short this time:

When I rated PC-BSD, I’m thinking I wasn’t exactly being reasonable: It has potential to be great. Unfortunately it’s not yet out of beta, and the number of available .pbi packages are few at the moment, and not entirely up-to-date, case in point the Firefox .pbi being only version 1.0.7, rather than the 1.5.0.1 that Mozilla’s up to. However, I’m still going to say that since it’s installers, and a removal tool, and the attempt is made to ask programs to keep their own shit together and not mess with BSD or KDE themselves, (and the wizards in PCBSD are everywhere and do everything right), that it’s got the very real potential to be better than any free operating system available today.

That being said, I just found out about something amazing.

Kompose. Linuxhelp.blogspot.com has a very complete article that links to the main website for the app.

Kevin was talking to me about how he kept telling me to try Fedora and how I kept saying “Hm, Sounds interesting and exciting”, and then running off and playing with Ubuntu instead, and hating my life. I find his point valid.

I’m giving linux another shot. Specifically, I’m giving Fedora a chance to redeem the linux desktop world for me. Now, understand that in reality, my experiences were nothing more than minor annoyances, which stacked to put me off of Ubuntu Linux, but the only thing i wanted to do the entire summer that worked without me doing anything was putting in a USB thumbdrive, and i was blown away.

I will be happy if Fedora does five things, without my begging and complaining and hacking, on its own, upon my asking.

I’m going to define the said five needs right now:
1.) Install must be relatively comprehensive and easily usable, though not necessarily at the expense of options.
2.) Connect to the int4rw3b easily and reliably. Under this category I’m also going to try to test a few wireless managers with my 128-bit WEP secured wireless-g router. This is broad, so will become further defined within a review.
3.) Ease of adjusting settings, particularly:

  • Video settings/Graphics settings
  • Sound settings
  • Permissions
  • Printer Setup/Options

Also under this category I’d like to rate the completeness of design, i.e., Could I come to expect where I would find things and how things would be laid out and be correct?
4.) Ease of installation/removal of software and packages, as well as how is the installation structure handled
5.) My drives should just work. I’d like to not have to mount cd-rom drives. I don’t mind having to mount a floppy drive because I can’t see a reasonable way around it, but it should be done from within GUI. Similarly, simple USB devices should be automatically mounted.

And finally, Fedora (and linux as a whole) can get bonus points if:
1.) I can play Guild Wars (this might require some kind of Dx9.0c imitation or something probably on top of wine with imported real WinXP .dll files and the nVidia linux drivers. I understand that there’s just about zero chance of this happening. I’ll need to research.)
2.) I can install and use my ATI TV-Wonder VE (oh god oh god please say I can! I know there are people doing media centers out of linux boxes, so this one actually sounds plausible to me)
3.) I can play Thief II (Please please please… It’s older, so… maybe?)
4.) I can use other non-standard programs that have no business working in Linux. It’d be real real nice if i could use iTunes… straight up iTunes… (if anyone knows how, let me know)
As I fully expect that these, if accomplished at all, will be accomplished by use of hacks, I promise to not resent the use of hacking. I heard something about a program that would let me play games like Full Throttle and the Curse of Monkey Island, I will likely be trying that out and if it works, that’ll be bonus points too.

I’ll download and install Fedora this weekend after replacing my power supply.

on a site note, I fixed my links (thread.ods.org is now krobert.net) and added a few more. Ruinous Works is a friend of mine who has both immense technical skill and knowledge, and a sharp analytical mind. He’s set to become a journalist upon graduation this year, on top of being an incredibly talented writer.