It’s me, live with it

Everyone that make software agree that publishing their software in a P2P site is a bad thing. It’s practically stealing their hours of building it. And I’m not just talking about the legit software company. Heck, look at this screenshot:

Yeah, that is RELOADED, complaining about P2P users publishing their crack.

Granted, they seems like the lone, hated group from the scene, but still, They worked for their release, and pissed of when someone put them on P2P.

I’m kinda shocked about this. For all these years of seeing (and using) cracks and fixes made by them, I thought they are the one who put it on P2P. I guess I was wrong, then.

Which brings us to today’s topic: What can you do if you can’t pay for your softwares?

Well, you can always use free software (both as in beer and as in speech). There should be almost anything you need in the free world. Need a good OS? Linux, or BSD should do fine. Word Processors? Openoffice, KOffice, Gnome Office, LaTeX will do all of them. Multimedia? A lot of choice you can choose from.

Most of the software I mentioned above can be had for nothing. You can use it as you like, get a free community support, free updates, and you can freely redistribute it, Like selling your own PC brand with free software loaded into them.

But is that it? You use the software, made money with it, and walk away?

Let’s not do that, shall we?

There are a LOT of ways for you to return what free software gave you. For example, you can hang out at the community forum, providing support for others, you can help translate the software, you can help track their bugs, and, of course, you can help them build it.

To give and to receive is a beautiful thing.

So, I’ve been thinking these past few hours.

I’m going back to using purely Linux.

What makes me decided to do this is the fact that my last few posts was about upgrading hardware, mostly for gaming. It is not a bad thing, of course, it’s just that I’ve been playing games too much that my campus assignment was a bit neglected.

Besides, upgrading hardware for pc games will be a never ending circle. You buy a 4850 today, you will find something stronger in a short time. Hardware upgrading costs quite an amount of money, so I don’t think everyone will be able to follow it. I will keep following hardware development, of course, so this blog will keep on running.

What about my upgrade marathon plan?

I’ll continue it. But now, instead of focusing in performance, the upgrade will focus in functionality (e.g. Larger hard drive, etc.).

My Linux distribution of choice is, unexpectedly, Mandriva. I was a happy OpenSuse user for quite a while, but the latest release somehow dissapoint me, so I’m moving. Why not Ubuntu? Simple, I hate it.

Now I’m curently downloading Mandriva’s latest release, 2009. Hopefully it will be done in the morning.

I’ve told you before that I migrated entirely to linux. in the same post, I mentioned that I’m using linux Mint. In this post, however, I also mentioned that I don’t like Ubuntu. Now, after fiddling around with Mint, I remember why I don’t like Ubuntu. And you’re going to read it all here.

The first thing I do after the installation is finished is, like all normal geek, go to nvidia’s driver download page adn grab the latest linux driver. I installed it the hard way, instead of using envy. I did that because the driver installed in envy is version 100.14.23, while the newest driver is version 169.12, which is far newer, and should be better. I tried using the earlier version, but it just somehow kills the X server.

The next thing I know, driver installed succesfully, compiz works well, no problem with screen resolution and refresh rate. For one happy day. The birds are chirping happily, rainbow in the sky, credits rolling.

The next morning, I fired up amaroK, tried to play something nice, and I get a nice arts error, it said that the audio device is being used by another application. O…kay, It’s no problem, something just screwed up in the system. I rebooted the machine, to find that it doesn’t recognize the graphics card and monitor. Oh, boy….

Now, the sound bug never showed itself anymore, and I actually think that I was just unlucky enough to ever seen it. But the graphics driver thingy shows its ugly 60Hz-640x480 behind everytime I rebooted the machine. It annoyed the hell out of me. I don’t reboot the machine often (it’s on torrent duty), but I’m also not really into installing graphics drivers everytime I reboot the machine.

Those things above drove me to take drastic measure. I downloaded my one-and-only favourite distribution.  Where I learnt shell programing. Where I first see the desktop cube. The OpenSuSE. I only downloaded the KDE live CD, but I’ll work my way from there somehow.

Now, those Linux Mint problem might show up because I’m a noob and don’t understand how to install the graphics drivers correctly, but then again, I followed every steps necessary, and still end up screwed. Well, not to mention the possibility that since I don’t like Ubuntu, somehow its descendant hates me back.

But don’t let this rant stops you from using the Ubuntu family. It’s a good distribution. All those people who likes them can’t be wrong. But I’m sticking to OpenSuSe.

This, ladies and gentlemen, is the screenshot of my current desktop:

 Aww yeah…

Isn’t she pretty? Isn’t she elegant and classy? 

No, I’m talking about the girl in the wallpaper. if you want the wallpaper, and other linux mint wallpapers, good luck searching them. I only find this, which doesn’t have the above wallpaper. I’d love to post the wallpaper itself here, but I’d feel guilty to the author, so no.

And I think the desktop and general theme are nice, too. Especially with compiz fusion installed.

No, I don’t keep my windows partition. I’ve planned my total migration to linux. I’ve searched some ways of installing windows games in linux. and that will be told in my next post.

Okay, so you have decided to try linux, but not sure which one to choose. Been there, done that. There are currently 354 linux distributions listed in distrowatch.com, not counting other distributions people made in their free time. I won’t be surprised if the number reaches tens of thousand, really. Not to mention a distribution me and my friends are building. It’s already messed up, after all.

Yes, there are guidelines that will help you choose, but they are not 100% accurate, either. Take this list for example:

Ranking Distro H.P.D*
1 Ubuntu 2353
2 PCLinuxOS 1553
3 openSUSE 1419
4 Mint 1353
5 Fedora 1353
(taken from www.distrowatch.com at 10 May 2008, 19:33 GMT+7)

Now, most people would agree that, after looking at the above list, Ubuntu is a very good choice and should fit you. It’s not true, for me at least.

I don’t really like Ubuntu. Maybe I’m just not used to it, or maybe it’s because I don’t like brown-ish colour all over my monitor.

Instead, my favourite distribution is OpenSUSE, which is currently listed at number 3. I specially love the YAST control center In OpenSUSE, It lets me tweak anything I want without needing to touch the commandline. I prefer using a sleek-looking window and a mouse to typing the command on terminal using my keyboard. It’s not that I hate commandline, I have no problem if I have to use it to install graphics driver, or changing xorg settings, to name a few.
 
Anyway, like I said before, There is no surefire way of picking a linux distribution, your best bet is getting recommendations from more experienced linux users. Learn everything you need to know about a distibution. Is it easy to use? Is it heavy? How does it look like? How’s the support? And so on.

What about my recommendation, you ask?

Well, if you are a soon-to-be linux user, I’d reccomend Linux Mint to try. It’s a derivative of Ubuntu, but I quite like it. It’s easy to use, it’s pretty, it somehow comes with my favourite set of software. It is distributed as LiveCD, so you can try it first.

If you already tried Linux and want to try another distribution, then I heartily recommend OpenSUSE for the reason I mentioned above and the fact that it looks sleek, clean, yet beautiful to me. OpenSUSE comes as a DVD so you can pick which software you want to use, though the default set is acceptably nice.

If you already tried OpenSUSE and don’t like it, then by all means try something else, maybe Fedora, Slackware, Gentoo, or Dreamlinux, the last I just downloaded and about to try.

EDIT: to stop people from calling me hypocrite, I’ll say it: I’m currently running Windows, for gaming purposes, at least until I get my harddrive back from service.