I just found some cool new software. Someone on The List asked about a free / open source ftp program. This program was suggested in about 3 quarters of the responses. With that kind of support, I just had to download it and see what all the fuss was about. It is a very nice little ftp program.
Here is a screenshot of FileZilla.
I have not used the program for any really heavy up/downloads, but what I have used it for has shown that the program is fast and very responsive. It connected without a problem to my f2o account (something that other people can have problems with) and navigated through the different directories without much effort. It was enough to convince me to continue using the program.
http://filezilla.sourceforge.net/
According to an article posted yesterday on the Wired News website, Webmonkey is dead, or at least its parents company, Terra Lycos, has laid off all the staff, which pretty much means the same thing.
For many web developers Webmonkey was the site to go to to learn how to create the web. All of my first development projects were completed with a healthy dose of information acquired from the web site. When I was struggling with how to do something in javascript or css, it was the place to turn for answers.
It’s odd, but it almost seems like the end of an era with the closing down of Webmonkey. It really was a product of the web craze at the end of the 90′s and with it gone, it feels like the last nail has been hammered into the coffin of the dot com boom and bust. Although there are many other sites that I turn to now for help in web development, it was the first.
Good-bye Webmonkey.
A beta released of the next version of the open source Java IDE Netbeans has been released. Some of the biggest changes include loo-and-feel and navigation. Ya, ya, for more info check out the Netbeans website (link at the bottom).
I have installed Netbeans 3.6 on both my Windows 2000 desktop and my Windows XP laptop without any fuss. The biggest difference really is the look and feel. The program looks amazing on XP and marginally better on 2000. I have yet to really try it out as I am not doing much Java programming this semester so I can’t really offer up any real review of the changes. However, it looks really good. I have not tried it on Linux though.
Software link
This past weekend I tried to install SUSE 9.0 onto my Dell Inspiron 1100. The notebook is a very nice little unit that accompanies me almost everywhere I go. It contains a 2.2 GHz Celeron processor, 256MB of RAM, and a 30Gig hard drive. It also has integrated graphics and sound. This is where the problems begin.
At some point in time, Dell decided to “fix” the BIOS for these computers. As a result, it is very difficult to install Linux onto my laptop. The reason is that XFree is unable to tell the computer how much ram to use for graphics. This results in very poor graphics performance.
However, the open source community has created a fix for this. I have been successful in installing this patch in Red Hat 9, but not on SUSE 9. So for now, my notebook runs only Windows XP. Another weekend, another attempt, hopefully with better results next time.
So far, OpenOffice.org is the marathon winner. It wins the award for taking the most time to install — more than 24 hours in total. At one point in time, it was taking so long that I figured it had crashed so I restarted the process. It still took more than 24 hours.
Although the install seemed to take forever, it was worth it. You can’t do much with a computer without an office suite. One nice thing about the install is that, after restarting X, everything appeared in the Gnome menus. This makes everything very easy to find. Actually, everything appeared in two different menu entries — Office (which you would expect) and Other.
I saw this on slashdot.org, however the website is unavailable at the moment due to the slashdot affect. Hopefully, there will be rpms released for Mandrake in the next little while.
Read the slashdot article
As of Sunday morning, I have a fully working install of Gentoo. This includes XFree and Gnome 2.4. It took a full 24 hours to install/compile Gnome. Currently, I am trying to install OpenOffice.org onto my system. This is not going as well. It has been more then 24 hours and I have had to restart the process once already.
Overall Impressions
Although the entire process took just over 3 days to complete — from absolutely nothing to full desktop — I do think Gentoo is a very cool Linux distribution and I can definitely see why people like it. I have been installing software since Sunday morning and have never had such an easy time of it. In order to install something, you simply type emerge appname and the software is downloaded, compiled, and installed. The only needed on your part is a little patience.
However, Gentoo is not for people who simply want a working desktop up and running with a minimum of work. In order to install Gentoo you need to know that hardware that is in your system and you need to be unafraid of dealing with any potential problems at the command line. This is not a distro for the complete Linux noobie.
I am not sure how long I am going to keep Gentoo on my computer, however, it won’t be wiped out anytime soon — too much work went into getting it there in the first place, just to wipe it out. So, I am interested in seeing how easy it is to upgrade. I am also interested in how stable it will be over the long run. So look for another review of Gentoo in a couple months when I have had more time to play with it.
Now what distro should I dual boot on my notebook?