Dissociated Press

Actually, Thunderbird 1.5 isn’t quite soup yet, but it’s very close. If you’re interested in new features and goodies in the 1.5 releases, check out this piece on NewsForge that I wrote. I may go ahead and compile my own, since they’re not releasing builds for AMD64 on Linux. If so, I’ll link ‘em here.

This is something I’m kind of excited about, not for my own use, but for others. I wrote up a short piece on Debian’s GUI installer for Linux.com. It’s not much different than the text installer for now, but I think this may remove one more barrier for new users who are a bit timid about installing an OS with a non-GUI installer.

I’ve been running Ubuntu Breezy on my laptop and secondary workstation for some time now, but I’ve resisted upgrading my main workstation because I didn’t want to chance any problems with the upgrade. I was pretty sure all would go smoothly, but I was still a bit hesitant to muck with my stable machine that I use for almost all of my writing and editing.

But I can only stand running an outdated machine for so long. So, today I did a major backup to an external USB drive and took the plunge. Copying the data to the drive took longer than the actual install… I opted to do a fresh install rather than doing a dist-upgrade. I usually leave the /home directory in place, but decided that I wanted to re-arrange the partition scheme, so /home had to be zapped along with the rest of the data.

After finishing the install, I copied over the bulk of my data and set to work. Smooth as silk (knock on wood…) and everything is going fine. I also took the opportunity to install the xubuntu-desktop package, so I’m using Xfce right now, and enjoying that. I’ll probably install the kubuntu-desktop package tomorrow.

I’m really curious to see how the Dapper Drake release will turn out. Only five more months or so…

Another recent article, on netcat is up on Linux.com. I wrote this after getting overwhelming feedback to my sysadmin toolbox in favor of netcat. Definitely worth a look if you’re not familiar with netcat.

I spent some time with the Flock “social browser” a few weeks ago, and the review is up now on NewsForge. Check it out if you’re interested. Overall, I liked it, and I’m looking forward to the next set of releases and additional functionality.

I’ve set up a PunBB bulletin board for discussion on the site, and wrote up my experiences with PunBB for NewsForge.com. Overall, I liked PunBB quite a lot. It’s well worth a look if you’re in the market for a simple bulletin board for your website.

If you’re interested in running Windows applications, but under Linux, one option is Win4Lin Pro, an application that runs Windows XP or Windows 2000 under Linux. I wrote up a review of this software recently for Linux.com.

Overall, not terribly impressed with Win4Lin, it could use a lot of polish.