Penny Arcade Game

I just found out that there is a new game by the creators of Penny Arcade in development, and it looks like it's going to be hilarious, and fun to boot. I heard about it on linuxgames.com, so even better than it just existing, it will have a native Linux version! Check out more on the game and view screenshots at the official site here.

Desktop Environments vs. Window Managers

Many of you who are new to Linux have probably encountered the terms desktop environment and window manager, and might be thinking "what the hell are either and why do I care?" Well, if you're not running a brand new computer, you might have a lot of reason to care. I came across an article today on Download Squad that explains the difference in a newbie-friendly manner. Most Linux installations default to either KDE or GNOME. These are both what's known as desktop environments. This is something akin to what Windows is to a PC or what OSX is to a Mac, a full-featured environment that provides everything you need to access everything on your computer. This might seem like 'well, ok duh,' but there are other options. Back in the early days of Linux, you had to put together all the components of a complete system yourself. This involved a window manager.

A window manager does one main thing, and that is to handle windows. That includes the borders and controls that let you control what is visible and how you interact with it. It also includes the menus and desktop icons (if that is how the particular manager does it.) In addition to it, you also needed to have software running to handle your sound, any panels you wanted, screensaver, and anything else you wanted to run. This seems like it might be tedious and complicated, and sometimes it is, but it allows for a COMPLETELY customized Linux experience. You can control every aspect of your system and have it look, act, and work just how you want. And as a side effect of only running the components you need, window managers are much slimmer, quicker, more efficient, and if they crash, they don't take down anything else with them (like that novel you are working on and haven't saved for 25 pages.) A couple of my favorite window managers are Enlightenment and Window Maker. If you have an older PC that seems real sluggish currently, (or you think you can't even use) give one of these a try, you might find out your 233MHz PII can run as well as your 2GHz P4, and can look good doing it.

Tip: if you really are putting it on a 233 (or something slow) go with Window Maker, it is much slimmer than Enlightenment.

Special thanks to Kristin Shoemaker for her (sorry Kristin!) excellent blog post on the topic, check his article for more information on desktop environments and window managers.

Ubuntu Hardy Heron 8.04 announced!

It seems like only months ago I was still using Ubuntu Breezy Badger 5.10, which even then was an incredibly useful, simple, and stable OS. So much so that from the moment I installed it, I forsook my Windows partition entirely and it languished in a state of disuse from then on. I still used the files on it though, so I couldn't delete it entirely yet. Then I decided to move to Dapper Drake 6.06 LTS, and it was then that I moved to a bigger hard drive. I copied everything from both my partitions that I wanted onto my new 80gig, and installed 6.06. Being a long-term-support release, it was remarkably stable and polished, and I never had any problems with it of any sort besides taking some time to figure out how to get stuff I wanted to try running, but that just makes it more fun. :)

I currently run Ubuntu Feisty Fawn 7.04, and it is by far the nicest, quickest, and most stable OS I've ever run, and I wouldn't trade it for anything (though I would and do give it away to as many people as are willing to take it.) These days, all the talk is about Gutsy Gibbon 7.10, and thousands or millions of people are trying out the pre-release versions quite successfully from what I've heard, though I don't really put any OS on my system until its the full release. However, I just read today that the next new version of Ubuntu has been announced as 8.04 Hardy Heron, and will be released in April of 2008! This is great news and Ubuntu is advancing rapidly as the biggest and one of the best distributions in Linux history, and putting a face to Linux that people can identify with and see for its benefits, even when they have never seen any Linux before. The announcement was made by Jono Bacon on August 29 this year on his blog at this address.