Dissociated Press

Anyone who’s interested in running a Fedora Core guest host, check out this announcement from the Linux Users Group of Cleveland: Fedora Core 1 Server Installation UML Image Released

If you use Gaim for instant messaging, there’s a patch you need to grab for a recent vulnerabiilty. If you don’t compile Gaim yourself, check to see if there is an updated package for your Linux distro.

Just in case anyone at Yahoo happens to stumble over this page: Quit changing the bloody sign on or whatever. If I have to choose between using the “official” Yahoo client (which is clunkier than Gaim) or not using Yahoo for IM, I’ll simply choose not to use Yahoo. It’s annoying to be forced to use a different client for each IM protocol. It’s about time that AOL, Yahoo, MSN and all the other folks get together and learn to play nice. Geez.

The more press this gets, the better. SecurityFocus has this piece, “Comcast targets Internet `abusers’ but won’t reveal limits”

Essentially, Comcast is sending out threatening letters to its users telling those users that they need to “cut back” on downloading — but won’t tell them how much they’re actually downloading, and won’t tell them what the limit is.

I use Comcast at home, and they billed the service as “unlimited” at the time I signed up. If they had a specific cap for bandwidth that was reasonable, it wouldn’t be too bad — so long as they provide tools for their users to monitor their usage and to allow them to know when they’re reaching the “limit.” But placing an unknown and arbitrary limit on the service and refusing to give users any means to monitor their usage is ridiculous.

I find this policy extremely troubling because I use quite a bit of bandwidth downloading Linux ISOs and such during any given month. Not 100 GB as mentioned in the article, but almost certainly 40 GB to 60 GB a month.

Comcast needs to come clean and provide a clear policy for its users. This secrecy and harrassment are unnecessary.

Little Boxes is a page with some very nifty CSS tutorial-type information. Wunnerful. Give it a look if you’re interested in Web design. Found it on the WP help forums.

I’m doing a preview of KDE 3.2rc1 for Linux Weekly News and I’ve been quite impressed with Konstruct. I like to be able to test bleeding-edge releases without endangering my current setup. Konstruct is excellent for building a test release of KDE and related applications without displacing the current stable build of KDE that’s included with whichever distribution you might happen to be using.

It does take a while to build an entire KDE release, but if you can let the build run overnight while you’re not using the computer, it’s a perfect way to keep up with the cutting edge.

One of the reasons I really love WordPress, is it comes with a “bookmarklet” that I can simply click on in Mozilla when I’m on a page that I want to blog about. This is amazingly useful. Just wanted to share… Oh, and it’s GPL’ed, which makes it much more attractive than Moveable Type or other blogging packages that are under restrictive licenses.

For years, I’ve maintained that having a ton of Linux distributions is a good thing. I still believe that — but it’s getting damn hard for me to keep up with all the various and sundry distros that are good for this and that. I love SUSE’s distro on the desktop, and I’m also a big fan of Mandrake… for different reasons. I also like Xandros’ latest offering, even though it’s not really my cup of tea. And there’s Debian… I feel like I should be keeping up with Debian “stable” and “testing,” not to mention Fedora. And there’s my old favorite: Slackware. Then there’s KNOPPIX, GNOPPIX… and there’s OpenBSD, NetBSD and FreeBSD…

At this point, I need about twenty different computers to keep up with all the distros. And I have a ton of computers for testing and so forth… however, I’d also like to be able to compile a package once and create an RPM or Debian package and be done with it…

What’s the solution? Is there one?