Mobile messenger apps
The thing about trust is it’s a very individual matter. For example I do trust Google (to a certain degree), however I do not trust WhatsApp or even less Facebook. There might be no logic in this, but fact is I always disliked that the latter had a copy of my address book whereas I didn’t hesitate storing it with the former. Also, I personally don’t trust Apple software due to the fact that their security bugs are not being fixed in a timely manner or their way of pre-configuring their OS’s in an insecure way (i.e. at least with MacOSX 10.x the firewall is still disabled as default). As company storing my data I’d probably trust them. That of course is my personal opinion.
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Manjaro Linux
Since I last posted about a Linux distribution it’s been a while and it was all about Arch Linux. Well, four years later it’s again about Arch - more or less: Manjaro Linux. This distribution is based on Arch Linux, is completely binary compatible with it’s ancestor but maintains it’s own repositories. During the last couple of years I mostly kept Debian based distros running on my laptop (it’s still this one :-) ), sometimes Debian itself and sometimes Ubuntu. I did not have the time to go through the Arch Linux installation routine which - by my last post you might have guessed - can be a little daunting. However, I do think that Arch’s “pacman” package manager and their build system is one of the finest out there. This is where Manjaro comes in handy: it provides a live system with a GUI installer which doesn’t take more than 10 to 15 minutes and it’s all done.
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10 years...
…well, kind of. I’ve started this blog 10 years ago but I did not contribute a word during the last 4 years. Beginning last year I moved from Wordpress to Blogger but I completed the transfer just recently. Don’t get me wrong: I think Wordpress is a very nice peace of software but I just didn’t have the time anymore to maintain my own Wordpress installation, keeping everything updated and configured neatly. So I’ve exported the MySQL DB and somehow managed to import it’s content to Blogger. To be honest, I don’t really remember how… I think I found some kind of Wordpress-to-Blogger converter. However, it took some time until I got all files and images back right - hopefully I did not forget anything. Anyway, I don’t want to abandon this blog and maybe I’ll add some stuff in the future again :-)
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Arch Linux
Though I was tempted to switch to Ubuntu’s latest release on my “main” computer I decided to give Arch Linux the promotion. Not that there’s anything wrong with “Quantal” aka “Ubuntu 12.10” - with the exception of the newly introduced shopping lens - but I wanted something different again. I ran Arch Linux some time ago and liked it a lot. It then came to my attention that it was missing one (at least for me) essential feature: package signing. There has been quite some discussion about this matter and I think it was this August when package signing became default for Arch’s package manager. Of course you can argue about the importance but I like to know that packages are as the package maintainer wanted them to be and that nobody messed with them while stored on all the different mirrors. However, I wanted to give it shot.
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Debian Wheezy
Recently the Debian project released the first beta of it’s to be Debian 7.0 aka “Wheezy” installer. Reason for me - of course - to check it out! So I grabbed the Beta 1 net-installer image and said goodbye to Fedora 16 on my Acer Aspire 5570Z. Fedora served very well but as soon as something works it starts boring me… ;-)
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