Throw away holiness and wisdom,
and people will be a hundred times happier.
Throw away morality and justice,
and people will do the right thing.
Throw away industry and profit,
and there won't be any thieves.
If these three aren't enough,
just stay at the center of the circle
and let all things take their course.
link
How far from the Tao they stray. At least someone has the right idea:
"So the whole, 'We have a list and we're not telling you,' itself should tell you something," Torvalds said of Microsoft's stance in the Fortune story. And for good measure, he added: "Don't you think that if Microsoft actually had some really foolproof patent, they'd just tell us and go, 'nyaah, nyaah, nyaah!'"
Sounds like Lao Tzu was on to something; and the center at this point seems to be in the open source movement. Let all the zaniness dies down, and then do what you will. For now, I'm going all F/OSS all the time.
Was getting kind of sick of Ubuntu; don't get me wrong, it's a wonderful distro, but just felt like I had nothing more to say on it, and started looking for something a bit more challenging.
Yep, going back to a distro I tried oh so briefly before, SabayonLinux. Every time I install a new distro, I swear to myself that I will make a separate partition for my home, and always end up just wiping the whole drive and doing a install over it all.
I was actually going to that again this time, but ended up in an odd place; initially I installed elive 0.6.8, as I've been Jones'ing for some Debian goodness, and after a brief tour using the liveCD a couple of weeks ago, thought I'd do a complete install.
Using a liveCD is quite a bit different then installing the distro as it turns out, and in this case, quite a bit more pleasant. elive supported my wireless card out of the box, and even though I was only to get it going using WEP (my normal wireless encryption is WPA), during the install process itself there were several pleasant surprises.
The installer offers several choices of partition managers; ncurses, gparted, and fcdisk. As I was familiar with both ncurses and gparted, and knew gparted to be the superior partition manager, I went with gparted. Halfway through partitioning, I remembered my ages-old promise (I think elive actually gave me a menu prompt suggesting it) to keep a separate home folder.
The swap portion from my Ubuntu install I left untouched, instead partition the rest of the hard drive into two ext3 primary drives. elive recommends reiserfs, but as I knew I wasn't going to keep it, I went with ext3. gparted also offers ext2 and xfs as well.
Installation was flawless, and the desktop appeared shortly after reboot, a very quick startup, comparable to its liveCD mode. The thing that bugged me about elive was not the wireless WEP only deal, it was that everything was a bit too intuitive for me; loads and loads of tiny icons, and nary a bit of text around. You had to actually click everything to find out what it was, and that was a bit of a hassle. Breathtakingly beautiful as a desktop, but more of a work of art than a sensible working environment.
OK, so elive was out; what was it going to be? I've got a couple dozen liveCD/install CDs lying around, and after the last couple of weeks of fluxbox/Ubuntustudio dark looks and sombre tones, I thought I'd go with something very bright.
The brightest distro out there has to be Mandriva One, and that was what I chose. It was the diametrical opposite as far as text-help files; whenever I tried to get something going (wireless), it sent out a message like 'the regulatory daemon was not found in libfirmware, and off I'd go to get my thumb drive to install the daemon in that spot. I still have some playing around to do before I get it going, but from what I tried of it, it's a really nice fit for my Thinkpad.
One note about installing a dual boot system; be sure that the first system you install does install GRUB to the Master Boot Record; if you don't (i.e., install both to their root directories), then the hardware won't know where to look to find a startup system.
That's the one-half of my dual boot, and the other is courtesy of SabayonLinux, though this time from the mini-install; last time out I used the liveDVD and it was a beast, installing over ten gigabytes (Vista is twelve!).
The mini-install comes on a liveCD, but you have the option of just installing from the startup, and skipping the liveCD portion of it, which I did. When it came to the choice of what window manager to use, the choices were between KDE and Fluxbox, and as I'm kind of KDE'd out after using Kubuntu for so long, I went with Fluxbox.
The recent happenings of open source making huge gains, and the rantings and FUD of the Nazgul (Linux doesn't exist! Mmmkay..), plus the contrast of the two sides of the dual boot I just installed, brought to mind the symbol most associated with the Tao, the Ba gua.
And no matter what anyone says, the worst part of a new install is not getting back your bookmarks (or your files, which you should back up regularly anyway); it's all the spellings in the Firefox spelling dictionary! How can it not know snark? And tons of other web'isms, besides. Oy.
Here's some of that Mandriva One in action: