Josh Saddler

It's been some days since I did it, but I finally finished up that Compilation Optimization guide. A revised draft has been posted to the bug.

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After reading my previous entry on old reviews, I think I'm going to have to do another review or two. I've always wanted to try out Arch Linux and Zenwalk Linux, and I do have a spare drive available. Actually, I've been considering switching to one or the other on my laptop. Compiling Gentoo on it has just grown too painful; the hardware is just running slower and slower. It started with frying half my RAM and then the memory slot a long time ago, so now I have only 128MB. Since then, somehow the machine has grown even slower. Compiling heats it up to almost 80C, sometimes a little higher.

Arch and Zenwalk caught my attention, since they seem like they'd be a little lighter on resource usage. Binary packages sure sound nice. Strong points: Arch is optimized for i686, has binary packages and makes source compilation fairly easy, though they don't have anything like Gentoo's USE flags. Zenwalk is a rather small download, has Xfce by default, and seems to have reasonable dependency tracking. Downside is that it's optimized for i486; they cater to a lower common denominator (helloooooo, 1989!) ... and it's Slackware-based.

Anyway, I've been exploring the merits of other distros for my poor old laptop, and these two are at the top. While on this journey of distro evaluation, I started writing down all the kinds of things I look for in a distribution. The end result is a surprisingly long, detailed document, as these kinds of things need to be well thought out, since I don't intend to be constantly switching between distros every few months. Maybe I'll post them as an epic miniseries: things you should keep track of when trying to find the distro that fits your needs.

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With the recent creation of the Gentoo Artwork Project, I decided to start trying my hand at theme creation. I've got an almost-finished GDM theme, and I'm trying to port a Metacity theme and a Fluxbox theme to xfwm4, but without much luck. I haven't been able to find a single howto on porting themes, though I did find a guide on creating xfwm4 themes. Specifically, I've been trying to port the arsen Metacity theme to xfwm4, since arsen is the most awesome theme I've ever used. It's a slow, painful process. Metacity uses PNG, xfwm4 uses XPM, etc.

If I ever get anywhere with all this experimentation, I'll give the Artwork folks a ping.

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Now you should go download and listen to an amazing album by Nest. It's been getting great reviews all over the place. It's rather stunning. Turn down the lights and just listen.

When you're finished, you need to get a couple of free mini-EPs by the San Francisco-based quartet karmacoda. Moody, chill, ambient triphop is a good starting point for their sound, though it's only the tip of a very large iceberg. Soaring female vocals over layered, inventive beats and soundscapes. Get 'em here: Display EP and Transitory EP.