Monthly Archives: May 2011

Back to Slack

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I migrated my desktop/server back to Slackware Linux yesterday. I have been using various distributions on and off recently, from Debian to Arch to Gentoo, and now back to Slack. I’m not really sure what came over me, but I just felt the call, and I had to respond!

Slackware is the oldest currently maintained Linux Distribution, and it’s aged quite well. The Slackware team did a really great job on the latest version (13.37, released April 27th of this year). The distribution comes bundled with KDE 4.5 as its primary desktop environment, but that’s not the only option for users! I’m really liking KDE on my desktop because it has a decent graphics card and can handle some of the nicer desktop effects without slowdown, but more frugal users can install Fluxbox, Windowmaker, or a handful of other slimmer window managers.

It’s sort of nice to step away from the rolling release distributions like Arch and Gentoo occasionally. When I used Arch, I was updating my packages every day (with pacman, the greatest name for a packaging tool on the planet), and 98% of the time everything would work flawlessly. Once in a while however, an update would break, and I’d have to go through and figure out what the hell happened :-P Non rolling-release systems like Debian and Slackware are more difficult to keep bleeding edge, but you know that when a new version comes out, the packages will more-or-less work well without too much fussing. This is especially true for Debian’s stable branch :) Of course I’m not trying to offend users of rolling-release systems, everybody has their preferences, and you should use a distribution that suits your needs. Slackware does that for me.

One nice thing that separates Slackware from other distributions is that it does not do any dependency tracking for you by default. This may seem like a royal pain in the arse for installing software, but one nice thing about it is that at any given time you can know exactly which programs and libraries are installed on your system because you put them there yourself! I keep all software that I’ve installed on top of the base system in a special directory, so that way I can see exactly what I’ve added to my system. It’s a nice feeling to be in total control.

In conclusion: I’m glad to be back with Slackware. It’s always been one of my favorite distributions.

 

Return of the Beard

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It’s back! In celebration of the triumphant return of my face-warmer, I’ve updated my programming blog. Check it out if it interests you!

But the second coming of the beard was not without its tragedies. This morning a Cogeco (my ISP) brownout somehow caused my wireless bridge network to stop behaving properly, so I spent most of this morning and afternoon re-flashing and reconfiguring my DD-WRT router.

Home!

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I’m home from my Florida trip, and I’m more tan than ever. I’m still waiting for my beard to grow back; I had to take it off to avoid getting a hilarious tan line, but it will be back by the end of the week. Then and only then can I update my programming blog, beardedcodewarrior.net.

It was a fun trip – nice and relaxing. I even left my laptop at home so that I wouldn’t be distracted. And it worked! I was completely detached for a week. No emails, no programming, nothing, just sand and sun (and some frisbee). Chelsey took a lot of nice pictures with her camera, and I’ll post them once I get a little bit more time later on this week.

Over the week I also dove into my new copy of The Haskell Road to Logic, Maths, and Programming, which was awesome! I should write a review for it one day if I have a few days off. But right now it’s time to hit the ground running again. There’s work to do in the lab!