Dissociated Press

Sorry folks, I don’t have any Gmail invites to hand out at the moment, and I already have several spoken for — assuming I am ever granted any in the first place.

Interesting… taking my Gmail account for a spin, and I thought I’d try signing in using Opera for Linux, just to see if there was any difference between using Mozilla 1.7.2, Firefox 0.9 and Opera 7.5 with Gmail. The answer is… yes, there is a difference.

Moz and Firefox work with Gmail just peachy-keen fine, but Opera and Gmail don’t seem to get on well. At least the folks at Google don’t adopt that annoying tone that many sites have about their preferred browser(s). Google’s message to Opera users, “We’re sorry, but we don’t seem to be compatible.” Note the difference — not, “You must use the latest version of browser X because it’s superior in all ways to browser Y & Z,” but “we don’t seem to be compatible.” Puts the blame, such as it is, squarely where it belongs. Nice.

No biggie, since Opera isn’t my main browser, but for the sake of Opera users I hope they can get it worked out.

Gmail seems faster than Yahoo! Mail by a factor of ten, at least. I also use Spamcop webmail fairly often, and Gmail beats the pants off of Spamcop. Of course, I only have two messages in my Gmail Inbox, and they’ve got a limited number of users banging on Gmail right now as well — Gmail may well become slower than than a paralytic snail after they throw open the floodgates to anyone and everyone that wants a Gmail account.

The interface is fairly clean. I like it so far. More later…

Haven’t been posting links to stories I’ve written as of late, so I’m going to try to get back into the habit of doing that. The latest piece published is on UnixReview.com about Ethereal. What a wonderful piece of software! Don’t let the low version number fool you, it definitely rocks.

This morning, I finally broke. After holding out for several months, I finally gave in to the temptation to buy an Athlon64 CPU + motherboard. It just couldn’t be helped… a person can only withstand temptation for so long.

I ended up going with an Athlon64 3000+ and Jetway S755MAX motherboard. The price differential between the 3000+ and 3200+ made it a pretty easy decision which one to buy. The 3000+ was $172, the 3200+ was $218, a pretty hefty price jump. The 3400+ was right out, with a price of $349.

So, I’m waiting on my shipment from Newegg.com. It’s the first time I’ve ordered anything from them, so it will be interesting to see how quickly it arrives and how good their customer service is.

If anyone can hook me up with a Gmail account, it’d be much appreciated. Thanks!

[Aug. 24, 2004] Update: Tim Chambers was kind enough to toss me an invite, and I’m now a happy Gmail user. Anyone wanting to send e-mail to my spiffy new Gmail account can send mail to xonker at gmail.

It’s about time for my quarter-annual desktop switch… that is to say, I’ve been using the same distribution on my “main” Linux desktop for about three months now, and I’m feeling that it’s time to switch. Since I write about Linux for a living, I like to use different distributions from time to time to get a feel for all of them. I’ve used Slackware, SuSE, Mandrake, Stormix (remember that one?), Debian, Xandros, Fedora… I have Gentoo on my laptop right now, but I’m not sure which distro I want to put on my “main” desktop.

Thought I’d take a quick (and totally unscientific) poll to see what distro(s) people are using, and why. If your desktop machine runs a Linux distro, let me know which one, and what you like about it. I’d also be curious to know which desktop environment/window manager you use, and why.

Have recently been playing around with Gentoo…

So far, I have to say that I’m liking it, though it’s awfully time-consuming when it comes to emerging packages. I assume that once you have a stable system that is not so much an issue. But getting all the tools installed that I want is definitely taking a while.

Right now I’m emerging XFce 4.0.5 — apparently, xfce is still the 3.8.x series. Why, I have no idea.

Surprised to find that sound just works, quite pleasantly surprised as a matter of fact. Wireless is another matter entirely. Yeesh. I wish wireless were a bit easier with Linux. Damn wireless card manufacturers…