sidux 2009.2
On July 15th sidux 2009.2 was released. I was looking forward to this release because it’s the first one with KDE4 and I didn’t wanted to go through the hassle of updating from KDE3… For those who haven’t heard of sidux: it’s a Debian sid (the unstable branch of Debian) based distro and 100% compatible with Debian sid. In fact it uses sid’s repositories together with sidux’ own repositories. The latter provide bugfixes to some broken packages in sid, sidux artwork, some tools unique to sidux and of course the sidux kernel (which might update quite frequently). sidux has a rolling release cycle which means, you may update to each next “release” by just updating through Debian’s apt-get. As the homepage says: sidux is “Debian hot and spicy!”. But most of all it makes running the unstable Debian sid quite stable.
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Vanilla kernel for Debian Lenny
The default Linux kernel of Debian Lenny is of course very stable - but a little outdated. If you’re the more adventurous type (or just need support for newer devices) you might like the idea of installing a more recent vanilla kernel? Debian makes this task quite easy and you’ll end up with real Debian kernel deb-packages! I’ll provide a small HOWTO here which you might follow and a small script which will automate everything. I gathered most of the information given here from the official Debian documentation (have a look at this and this).
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Lenny: VirtualBox 1.6.6 & current kernel 2.6.29
Debian is one of the best Linux distros out there (if not the best). The latest stable version called Lenny was released about a month ago, but as always, Debian never ships the latest software or kernel versions. So I decided to install the latest vanilla kernel (2.6.29) from kernel.org (I might provide a howto for this task later… ;-) ). This work’s really great - most of the time… I ran into one problem installing Debians (rather old) VirtualBox OSE 1.6.6 though. As I don’t run Debians kernel I needed to compile a suitable kernel module for my kernel 2.6.29 using Debians module-assistant. But compiling the module bailed out with errors: ‘struct task_struct’ has no member named ‘euid’. Luckily I found a solution for VirtualBox 2.10 on VirtualBox Forums. Of course the provided patch didn’t work for VirtualBox 1.6.6 but from there on it was easy to build one. If you run into the same problem, well, this is how it worked for me.
Fedora desktop with Dust theme and Murrine svn gtk engine
Running Ubuntu 8.10 on my laptop I enjoyed it’s Dust theme a lot - not officially part of Ubuntu 8.10, but you can get it here. So I wanted to install it on my desktop machine running Fedora 10.
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Switching from mp3 to ogg
When it comes to multimedia software most Linux distributions have one thing in common: no proprietary codecs - and this might include MP3 playback. I have no deeper insights in the license terms of the MP3 codec, but there is a whole website about it by THOMPSON, the company claiming to control MP3 licensing: mp3licensing.com. There are other proprietary codecs as well, i.e. “aac” which I think is the default file format for Apple’s iTunes and devices by Nokia and Sony. Wouldn’t it be nice to not care about this crap? The open source alternative is “ogg vorbis”, providing great quality audio files and high compression at the same time. So, how can you switch from mp3 to ogg?
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