Archive for December, 2007

Christmas day is full of surprises and this years was finding a joke in my cracker that I think is the all time best Xmas joke.

What is the most common wine at Christmas dinner?

“I don’t like sprouts…”

Mint…!

Santa was nice enough to drop off an iPod touch this Xmas. So far I am over the moon. As the purchased device its a mp3 player with a web browser and some eye candy for searching albums, but after jail breaking this beauty it comes into its own. Its a PDA on steroids. After a bit of searching I even managed to get it mounting under Linux mint using sshfs so I can now sync it with amarok so no need for Itunes at all.
Favourites apps so far are: IMAP email client, rss reader, etchasketch (where you shake it to clear like the real thing)
I wish safari mobile had flash support and I am still looking for a nice off line blog writer for wordpress.

Oh and it will play videos through the sat nab screen on my impreza… Now that’s mint.

After having a look at PCLinux OS then the latest Linux Mint KDE edition, I came to the conclusion I don’t like KDE.  I know there is a lot of discussions about kde and gnome, but in my opinion it does not look as clean, the file managers, dolphin and konquerer just don’t cut the mustard for me.  I know kde is “more configurable” as they say, and does some nifty things like having amorak plugins to the file manager so it’s always at hand, but I just think the whole thing looks more cluttered and after several attempts could not get the font rendering to look any good.  It’s all a matter of personal preference….

I finally settled on Linux Mint (Gnome version) which has all the benefits of ubuntu, which I used for several months but has some nice enhancements.  The Mint Menu is superb. It’s simple, uncluttered and allows you to have favourites. The inclusion of most codecs working out the box in mint also is a benefit and getting compiz going was the easiest process of all the distros.

1) install restricted-manager
2) enable ati driver
3) install xorg-server-xgl

It just works.

If you are coming from windows and moving over to linux, I heartily recommend Linux Mint (not the KDE edition though it’s still a bit buggy).