Alejandro Escalante Medina's Weblocked

Hace unas horas, una banda de asaltantes armados, al parecer con ametralladoras, robó una joyería, aquí nomás en la céntrica avenida Madero. Tras la balacera quedaron tendidos los cuerpos de cuatro clientes. Estimados regios: la próxima vez que vayan a decir con desprecio que la Ciudad de Mëxico es insegura o, de plano, un nido de criminales, piénsenlo dos veces…

Actualización al 15 de marzo

Al parecer no fue un asalto, sino una ejecución. Y los ejecutados fueron un jefe de policía, su esposa y otras dos personas que estaban en la joyería en donde los primeros intentaron refugiarse. Al parecer, este “coordinador operativo de la policía de San Pedro” fue responsable de varias acciones en contra del narcomenudeo, lo que lo hizo blanco del crimen organizado. Pero claro, no fue un par de vendedores de tiendida los que lo mataron. Los mensajes del narco no pueden ser más claros.

Dell is making a poll on what flavor of Linux should they offer preinstaled on their hardware. I think this is important for spreading Linux use, considering how popular is this brand. They are considering RedHat, Fedora, Ubuntu and OpenSUSE. The only one I can’t say a great deal about is OpenSUSE, since I haven’t tried it. And my choice would be obvious here: I would skip the RPM based ones. No dependency hell, please. That leaves us alone with Ubuntu.

May I say that Ubuntu would be a great choice?

O sea, qué padre que el internet esté facilitando la exposición de los músicos independientes a un público más numeroso. Qué bueno que un sitio como MySpace sea gratuito y dé espacios y el radio en línea y todo eso muy bonito.

Pero también hay que ver la parte fea, que es que este sitio tan de moda esté respaldado por herramientas chafas y generen contenido que nada más funciona correctamente con ciertos navegadores, como Internet Explorer. En Firefox, por ejemplo, la mayoría de los sitios se ven de la fregada. Y claro, seguro nada más es una cuestión de arreglar el HTML de las páginas default pero… ¿a poco no es una #$%&!! que de entrada no jalen bien más que con Internet Expĺorer? ¿Pues quién hizo el sitio ése? ¿Más jueguitos monopólicos?

O a lo mejor no es culpa de MySpace, y yo nada más ando viendo moros con tranchetes. Quizá nada más son los usuarios inexpertos que generan mal su sitio. Pero si este es el caso, ¿cuándo han visto que un weblog como los de blogspot o blogsome de entrada no se vean bien más que en IE? Las herramientas deberían ayudar a aquellos usuarios que lo necesiten, ¿no es así?

Now that long time user and Open Source advocate Eric S. Raymond has finally decided to dump Fedora in favor of Ubuntu, it is a good moment to say that I did a similar move of my own.

As you can see in this very same weblog, I was a happy Gentoo user. But then, I was. I guess that the feeling of power and control of having a completely customizable (to the detail) Linux distribution finally wore out. I was stuck with an installation that demanded so much attention that it made me feel anxious every time that new updates were available. They started to pile up waiting for my free time, which was very little. Finally, when it was time to upgrade to modular X, I knew I just had enough.

Contrary to Eric, I found out long time ago that Fedora, with its nightmarish dependency management, thanks to the RPM contraption inherited from Red Hat days, was no way to go. And I knew about Ubuntu, a fresh distribution based on the venerable Debian, was making its way into a lot of old and new users. I had installed Debian once and felt puzzled by the whole process, it was just too geek and non friendly. But anyway, Ubuntu seemed to be different and promised a lot.

And here I am: a happy Ubuntu user, not looking back! The first thing that comes to my mind about Ubuntu is “it just works”… almost. I mean, we’re talking about computers, right? operating systems? Linux? But then, Ubuntu is the closer experience to a plug & play distribution that I ever had. The installer is nice and easy, package management is a breeze, the destop works and looks great, has lots of nice programs available, good hardware support… It even works with my iPod right out of the box!

Now let me tell you a word of advice about hardware before you ditch whatever you have installed and come to the kingdom of Ubuntu. After all, this is not heaven in any way, and problems do exist. Some of them are not to blame on Ubuntu but anyway, I think that new users should know.

Stay away from ATI video cards with Linux. You better go and pay an extra for an NVidia card. You’ll be happy and grateful. It is not that ATI cards do not work at all in Linux, they do and I have one right now working on Ubuntu. The problem is they won’t work easily. For instance, you have a good chance for the Ubuntu graphical installer to choke on it and refuse to work. And you would have to go for the non appealing text mode installer. And then, with every update of the driver you will have to follow a long and strange upgrade recipe in hopes that all will end up good, with some image on your screen. So long to your user friendly experience. And I don’t mind, but I know that most users have had enough of terse user interfaces.

If you are an audio fan, be sure to check a compatibility list before buying that nice audio interface. Particularly, stay away from the new firewire ones and use internal. You might hav luck but you better check the list…

As a temporary conclusion I would say that every distro has its place, and for me, the geek factor and tweakability of Gentoo was nice for a moment. But right now I’m going through a phase where I need to have a good, non demanding distro that at the same time allows me to be not too far from the bleeding edge. If your needs are in some way similar to mine, give Ubuntu a try. You might be staying for a while.

Radio Paradise is my favorite Internet radio station, and they are running a story about the new attack from the RIAA. It’s all the same: they want more money, and this time they want it from the Internet radio. Please, support Internet radio. I think it is a necessity for a rich, cultural, diverse modern society.

read more | digg story