Digit's first blog

hi. i tend to forum it rather than blog it, but my rambling about linux is overspilling even forums about linux.

been using computers since my spectrum and nes as a child. also had a couple of really old somethings, with old green radiation gun monitors... yeah, that old.
then we had the family computer in 96, a 133mhz with 16mb ram, 1.3gb hd, n it was the tits in the day. even had a triple cd tray thing. it got upgraded a few times, and then i got my own in 98 or something, a 700mhz athlon with 256mb ram and a geforce1. kitted it out with a wacom graphics tablet shortly after, around the same time i added more hds and dual boot 98/2000. when everyone else was on xp, was moving back to 98... when everyone was still moving to xp, i was thinking the world had gone mad... in 2003 i started looking around for an alternative... i came across linux.. i came across gnu, i read up on loads, iespecially took to the philosophy, andi immediately reccognised it's worth to society, how it presented a real measurable boost. many eyes, shallow bugs, assurances on your software from community checking it out. good science. pace and bredth of progressing software, informed public, informed userbase, all users seamlessly can become developers, the software can be developed with maximal flow and allowance of evolving... all very lush idealism. when i first stepped in, i think i went with downloading a knoppix and suselinux9.1personal. maybe a couple others too. debian and something else. but when it came to it... after seeing my flatmate at the time's struggles with performance on his new high spec machine running xp, i upon the epic backup of all my stuff, i was going to dual boot, but just then felt the boot of windows' direction push me that little bit farther n i decided to go purely linux only. mmm. n it was goooood! yast was the most wonderful welcome to linux.... i've been keeping apprised of suse's direction, and i'm not impressed at all... not the pleasant wonder it once was. bloat creeps in and infests open source too it seems. so after getting off the suse linux train sometime around 10's arrival, i went a surfing. it was a furious blur of operating systems for a while... all the while keeping suse9.2 pro (which i bought with week's dole) as my primary backup admin os... a new machine comes along uhh... i forget when .... 2005... 2006? with windows(xp) tax on it, and then making its way through various states, i came across what was what i still consider my geatest discovery saikee's multi boot threads. http://www.justlinux.com/forum/showthread.php?t=147959 & http://www.justlinux.com/forum/showthread.php?t=143973

astonishing revelation lead me out of the realm of double boots and triple boots (which had been all i was searching for a the time), and my still new dual core 64 bit (which for ages i thought was dual processored and dual core... but its not, misleading wordage on bios and ebay seller who was long gone after getting possitive feedback. :p ) but its a beauty of a machine. it got a second monitor, and then eventually i had three monitors, two on it, and one on my old 700athlon (long since upgraded with more hds and grfx card etc). two pcs is a glory for when u want to distro surf, as is, i'm sure you can appreciate, having spent a solid week in serious study of the saikee-ness (and tbh, probably a month of refresher to be sure), having a well managed mulitboot grubbings, mmm. i think my most did peek into more than 20 distributions installed on one machine. and as i surfed and surfed, filled a stack of distros, it was a long time before suse9.2pro got knocked off from primary. sabayon crept in, and stayed a while when i was using studio ubuntu as my primary for art (which is after all what i mainly use the computer for), (i'll refrain from mentioning more distros or i'll be listing them off for a while).
so then what made sabayon do it? it as the first to come along to ever make double screen effortless, and included pretty much everything i needed out of the box, and had the drives applet in the pannel in gnome and kde, and had the help icon on the desktop leading to the sabayon help chat, and was setup up beautifully out of the box. sabayon 3.4 was anyway... i hear previous were too, buti didnt see them... 3.5 was .... ugly. they got prettier again, but stopped doing the "FULL" which i really liked them for. also... it was gentoo based. well configured, and gentoo based? i mean, gentoo, bless them, awesomest of metadistros, but their default out-of-the-box configuration is "middle of the pack" to put it mildly (and generously). so sabayon really really stood out of the pack, heads and shoulders above the established big names.
so while enjoying the lushness of sabayon and in true gentoo philosophy, not having my operating system (and it's nigglesome non-working aspects) getting in the way, i was free to go off and explore more about the software, more software, more tips, and so on. my time with sabayon has been among the most productive time i've had with an opperating system. not to say it wasnt completely without hiccoughpants. :D but that was all the better for the teaching. ;)
like i had been using my suse9.2pro for even while multibooting, i was then using my sabayon installation for virtualisation to facilitate distro surfing. virtualisation i feel has kinda dumbed me down... its almost too convenient! i set up loads of partitions for other distributions, and although i've already found a few worthy candidates, i still havnt used them.
so then a year or more ago, i got a tablet laptop, with windows(2005tabletedition) tax on it. it still has it on it. ugh... and i just realised, sorry to say, i am actually using it for writing this just now. got it set up looking probably almost identical to how i had my old 98 system setup... if i had the screenshots i'd be able to show how similar it really is.
so anyways, i'm only here after being badgered to play some games with windozers. i had a wubi ubuntu install setup on here for a while.. was set up gorgeous... if theres one thing i've learned after years of use, it's how to setup a nice desktop. (: .
);p
so these days after having done a little more distro surfing with my growing collection of usb pendrives, i now use crunchbang linux. it's gorgeous. a really pleasant painless experience, and no gnome or kde! thats right. a well configured openbox! lush. ubuntu based, so a hefty repository and a familiar pile o other stuff from ubuntu too... just no gnome (or kde)... all lighterweight. n it's sweet! as sweet a find as slitaz linux was.
and now... after having remastersys'd once or twice, made a couple of slax distros, a handful of slitaz distros, a couple of suse distros (nooo! boycott! what am i doing!?!!), and some other ventures in other directions.... i'm going to be getting to actually unleashing some of my creations to the public, and also starting up a couple projects welcoming true open source community contribution.
so anyways, i'll use this blog to ramble on about all the stuff and any of the stuff i like to ramble on about. it might not all be strictly linuxy, but it is here for the linuxy. :)