Let me tell you about my trials and tribulations of attempting to install the newest Arch Beta (VooDoo) that occupied my day yesterday. A friend of mine suggested that I give it a shot as it was in the past a super OS to install and to update. Well in the spirit of linux open minded thinking I downloaded a copy of the base install and burnt it to disk, everything is going well so far.Now the system that I was planning to use is a Compaq with a Celeron 2.80 processor and 1.5 gigs of memory, a 80 gig harddrive, and a generic sound and video card.

I popped the cd into the player and rebooted the machine, thinking that this was going to be a piece of cake as I was told. I started things by following the on screen prompts and started to think that jeeesh this was a easy install. How wrong a person can be it turns out.

After a quick update of their package manager (pacman) along with a few updates that were included with that I had a base commandline setup, okay this is normal and had to play a little to get a internet connection once again after the update. Now to me this was a early warning that things were going to be a little less painful than I thought. Well I attempted to install the KDE packages to use as a desktop. Now this was my first major boo-boo, after installing it, opps no internet connection and no booting into the GUI. Okay edit a file here and there and things went from bad to worse. Can you say kernal panic! Okay I was told by my friend install fluxbox and then we could “repair” the kde bug later. Sounded like a plan so I did just that. Fine download and install and reboot. Guess what? Once again no internet connection, and the ugliest kernal panic known to man, I shutdown the machine and did a complete reinstall.

Well to make a really long and curse filled day a short story, things went from bad to worse and after 5 hours I formatted the drive and installed the new Mepis 32 Beta 4 20 minutes later I was up and running. What can I say about the new Arch? It is a huge bug ridden version and as it turned out others have had even worse problems with it, all I can say is I hope they get the repositories repaired and the bugs repaired before the next beta. Would I suggest this to anyone? Not on a bet end of statement and I am sorry to see what was a good OS take a turn for the terminal worse.

Today is; Australia Day, Hey they invented their own day!

Quote of the day; People that are really very weird can get into sensitive positions and have a tremendous impact on history.

Dan Quayle (1947 – )

Today in History; The Dental Drill was patented. (1875) Now this is a day of pain that we all live with.

1955- Eddie Van Halen, singer, rock band

1958- Ellen DeGeneres, actress, talk show hostess

1961- Wayne Gretzky, Hockey’s “Great One”

Have a good day and a better tomorrow folks.

toybuilder writes “A Reuters new article reports the development of the world’s densest memory circuit at Caltech & UCLA. The circuit has a bit storage density of 100Gb/cm^2; about 100 times the density of today’s memory circuits. Interestingly, this new design places memory cells at junctions of a tic-tac-toe-like grid of wires, somewhat reminescent of core memory of the past.”

Source: World’s Densest Memory Cells Created

How many times have you encountered a Linux-related problem and turned to Google, Clusty, Yahoo or any other search engine for the answer? It happens more times than it should. The results snippet shows you a question hauntingly familiar to yours being asked and a link to an answer resides right below. Your heart beats wildly as you anticipate applying the deathstroke to this persistent problem…

Source: BEAT TeH L33T – Challenge some of Linux’s Best With Your Most Nagging Problems

Liberty Alliance, the global identity consortium, has unveiled the openLiberty Project, a global initiative formed to provide resources and support to open source developers building identity-based applications, the company said. With today’s news, Liberty Alliance has launched a portal where developers can collaborate in the openLiberty Project and access tools and information for ‘jump starting’ the development of secure and privacy-respecting applications based on the widely deployed Liberty Federation and Liberty Web Services standards, the company is quoted to have said.

Source: Liberty Alliance Seeks Open-source Adoption

The KDE project today announced the immediate availability of KDE 3.5.6, a maintenance release for the latest generation of the most advanced and powerful free desktop for GNU/Linux and other UNIXes. Significant features include additional support for Compiz as a window manager with Kicker, session management for browser tabs in Akregator, templating for KMail messages, faster frame rates with video chat in Kopete and new summary menus for Kontact making it easier to work with your appointments and to-dos.

Source: KDE 3.5.6 Released with New Features, Translations and Fixes

Themis Computer announced Thursday a joint project with Terra Soft Solutions to develop a complete Linux distribution to run on the TPPC64, Themis’ new line of 6U VMEbus single board computers based on the IBM PowerPC 970FX superscalar RISC processor. The TPPC64 is a high-end computer built around a next-generation single-board computer, featuring an advanced 64-bit architecture and 90 nm SOI technology. The TPPC64 is designed for use in harsh operating environments and can sustain up to a 30G shock load.

Source: Firms to Develop Linux Distro for High-End PCs